By Malachi Chavez
Special to NKyTribune
In the early 1870s, many students at Covington’s elementary school on Scott Street knew Lucy Montz as a quiet, calming presence at the chalkboard. They knew she lived as a modest woman, wearing the dark attire of a young widow, and carrying herself with a quiet determination, unlike any woman they had seen before.
What they didn’t see, however, were the textbooks open on her desk long after the last bell had rung, or the small amount from every paycheck that she set aside week after week. Lucy was saving her earnings for a future that, at the time, didn’t and to some extent couldn’t exist for women in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Two decades later, she rewrote history in a male-driven world by stepping into a front parlor overlooking the Ohio River in Warsaw, Kentucky, opening her leather instrument case, with a surely earned sense of accomplishment, and formally becoming Dr. Lucy Dupuy Montz, the first licensed female dentist in Kentucky history.
To understand the grit that drove such determination, we need to examine the series of events that marked her early years in Gallatin County. Lucy Dupuy was born in 1842 near the mouth of Craig’s Creek (Gallatin County). Turmoil came quickly in her life when, in 1849, Lucy’s father packed his gear with grand hopes of striking a claim in the California Gold Rush, just like many thousands of other men of the time who were bitten by the gold bug. After vanishing into the promises of the West, he was never to be heard from again.
At eighteen, Lucy married Frank P. Montz, a steamboat man whose life was tied to the dangerous currents of the Ohio River. But before their life together could truly take root, heartbreak struck in ways that would devastate and hinder any soul. Within two short years of their marriage, Lucy would bury both her infant daughter and her young husband Frank.
Widowed at twenty-one years old in a post-Civil War era that offered few safety nets of security for single women, she would have had every reason to slip into depression’s quiet obscurity.
Instead, she packed her bags for Covington, securing a job as a schoolteacher, and began quietly planning her next act, determined to create a successful life for herself.
By the late 1880s, Montz was crossing the river daily to attend the Cincinnati College of Dental Surgery. She wasn’t merely attending the lectures in an all-male hall—she was outperforming her male peers by leagues. When she graduated on March 4, 1889, her academic record was so exceptional that the faculty took an unprecedented step: they hired Lucy on the spot to begin teaching the next generation of dentists, encouraging other young women to seek further education and opening the door further for female opportunity in the male-dominated workforce.
Her official state license followed in 1891. But her true moment of triumph arrived on June 20, 1893, at the annual meeting of the Kentucky Dental Association. Her application for membership was read aloud to a room full of male practitioners, shifting the atmosphere from curiosity to one of profound respect. The association voted to suspend its standing rules entirely, and elected Dr. Montz into their ranks by a unanimous grand standing ovation. Later in that same year, her name would be inscribed in gold letters upon the halls of the Kentucky Building at the Chicago World’s Fair as the state’s lone female dentist.
Rather than building a lucrative career in Cincinnati or Louisville, “Dr. Lucy” chose to bring her skills back home to the rural riverbank town of Warsaw — helping the poor farmer, the orphan child, the single mother, and the small community where her story first began.
At age fifty-one, Dr. Lucy purchased her family’s original 1832 Federal-style brick home at 301 West High Street in Warsaw. In the front room — where large windows pulled in the soft easterly morning light of the Ohio River — she set up her heavy cast-iron operating chair and foot-treadle drill.
For the next twenty-eight years, generations of Gallatin County residents walked up her brick steps to get teeth pulled, crowns fitted and all other multitude of dental ailments treated with a gentle precision that won over even the most skeptical of her patients. Dr. Lucy Dupuy Montz operated her practice until her retirement in 1921, just months before her passing at age seventy-nine.
Today, Lucy’s High Street home still stands, sturdy and proud within Gallatin County, being listed in the National Register of Historic Places, while her original treadle drill and dentistry hand tools can still be seen, preserved alongside her legacy at the Gallatin County Historical Museum in Warsaw, remaining a silent witness to the local woman who transformed her personal grief and misfortune into a pioneering legacy — one patient at a time.
Malachi Chevez is a young farmer who still lives near the Sparta farm where he grew up. Our readers have read about him as a young boy who was gifted a small pedal tractor by farmowner R.C. Durr. Malachi remembers that kindness still today — and he also has the small tractor. He will become the father of twins this fall. He is also pursuing his abiding interest in education, history, writing, and historical research. This is one example of his writings.
Paul A. Tenkotte, PhD is Editor of the “Our Rich History” weekly series and Professor of History at
Northern Kentucky University (NKU). To browse more than ten years of past columns, click here. Tenkotte also serves as Director of the ORVILLE Project (Ohio River Valley Innovation Library and Learning Engagement). For more information see https://orvillelearning.org/. He can be contacted at tenkottep@nku.edu.
The core biography and professional career milestones of Dr. Lucy Dupuy Montz originate from Dr. Carl R. Bogardus’s archival study, Kentucky’s First Woman Dentist, published in the “Kentucky Dental Journal” (Vol. 36, No. 2, 1984).