By Berry Craig
NKyTribune columnist
James Bennett McCreary was a two-time Kentucky governor.
He evidently wasn’t a two-timer, though he is buried in Richmond Cemetery with his wife and “Polly,” his sometimes salty companion.
“POLLY—McCREARY’S BIRD 1920” is chiseled on her tiny tombstone.
The words seem open to interpretation. But Polly was McCreary’s pet parrot from about 1875 until he died in 1918 at age 80, according to an Associated Press Story published in the Cincinnati Enquirer on Oct. 23, 1957.
The bird would reputedly reply, “go to hell” to “Polly want a cracker?”
A Democrat, McCreary was Bluegrass State chief executive from 1875 to 1879 and from 1911 to 1915.
When he was first elected, the 37-year-old Confederate veteran was Kentucky’s youngest governor. In 1901, that distinction passed to John Crepps Wickliffe Beckham, the lieutenant governor who took office when Gov. William Goebel was assassinated.
McCreary is still the Bluegrass State’s oldest governor. He was 73 when he began his second term.
Born in 1838 near Richmond, the Madison County seat, McCreary was a lawyer before he rode off to the Civil War in Rebel gray. He was a lieutenant colonel under Gen. John Hunt Morgan, the storied Confederate cavalry commander from Lexington.
Before he was governor, McCreary was speaker of the Kentucky House of Representatives. In between his gubernatorial terms, he sat in the U.S. House and Senate.
Polly’s tombstone, flush with the cemetery greensward, is easy to miss. McCreary’s memorial isn’t. He rests for eternity near a two-ton rough-hewn boulder flanked of late by little U.S. and Confederate flags. Both monuments date to 1957.
“TWICE GOVERNOR OF KENTUCKY” and “SOLDIER-STATESMAN-PATRIOT” says a bronze plaque bolted to McCreary’s grave marker, which shadows Polly’s stone.
James B. and his spouse, Sarah Katherine Hughes McCreary, preceded Polly in death.
J.R. Shaw’s local stone yard crafted both grave stones. His handiwork was unveiled on Nov. 16, 1957, in ceremonies that attracted “hundreds” and featured a speech by Gov. Albert Benjamin “Happy” Chandler, according to a United Press International story the Danville Advocate-Messenger published on Nov. 17, 1957.
The Shaw family adopted Polly after Katherine died in 1908. He said, “it was then that McCreary requested Polly be buried in the family plot,” explained the AP story.
Shaw, 71, claimed Polly “was a whiz at talking–‘She could say anything you wanted her to, just like a child.’”
The parrot was given to gabbing without encouragement, Shaw told the AP. “Once, he related, Polly shouted at a passing parade: ‘Hooray for McCreary.’”
Apparently, Polly often rooted for McCreary at parades. The pre-dedication ceremonies procession was “the first parade to honor the statesman in which Polly wasn’t there to say, ‘Hurray for Governor McCreary,” the Advocate-Messenger advised on Nov. 17.
During his second term, Gov. McCreary visited his feathered friend on trips home from Frankfort. “She would stand upon his shoulder and, in deep-throated concern, say: ‘Hello Governor; how are you Governor,’” the AP story said. Yet Shaw confessed that Polly cussed when queried about crackers.
In 1920, Polly suddenly toppled from the little perch inside her cage. Shaw said she succumbed to a heart attack, according to the AP. “It was just like one of the family dying,” he recalled.
Shaw didn’t know when the McCrearys got Polly. “But he said he knew the bird was in their household as early as 1875. He described Polly as ‘a pretty bird that probably came straight from the islands.’”
At age 7, Shaw came with his family from Scotland. They settled in Richmond and he owned the Richmond Granite Co., said the AP story.
Berry Craig of Mayfield is a professor emeritus of history from West Kentucky Community and Technical College in Paducah and the author of five books on Kentucky history, including True Tales of Old-Time Kentucky Politics: Bombast, Bourbon and Burgoo and Kentucky Confederates: Secession, Civil War, and the Jackson Purchase. Reach him at bcraig8960@gmail.com