6-20-2013 meeting of the Rotary Club of Chickasha
The June 20, 2013 meeting of the Rotary Club of Chickasha opened with a prayer, pledge and song.
Guests included Tanner & Logan Tibbetts.
Prayers concerns: Ann Manchester and Karen Zeiset
Rotary presented a $3000 check to Joyce Belville of the Mobile Meals program and $2000 to John Mosley organizer of the annual Chickasha 4th of July Fireworks Display. The contribution for the fireworks display included a $1,000 donation to Rotary by Waste Connections Inc. that was dedicated specifically for the fireworks display, which will be July 4 in Shannon Springs Park.
Angela Jones was Rotarian of the Day. She introduced USAO history Prof. Dr. James Finck as our guest speaker. Dr. Finck is an expert on the civil war. His topic toda was about Kentucky's role in the civil war. He is the author of the book Divided Loyalties: Kentucky’s Struggle for Armed Neutrality in the Civil War.
“Kentucky was a slave-holding state, deeply immersed in the culture of the South and yet, it had strong financial interests that were dependent on its continued interaction with the Union,” Finck said.
The economic factors that kept Kentucky from secession, Finck says, went well beyond the obvious.
“Though Kentucky was a slave-holding state, its economy benefitted greatly from trading both northward and southward. For most of 1861, it did just that, despite pressure from both sides to commit.”
In time, Kentucky’s luck would ran out and Confederate armies invaded.
“Bordered by the Ohio River on the north and the Mississippi on the west,” Finck says, “Kentucky was too strategically important, particularly for the Confederacy, to be left on the table.”
The meeting ended with recitation of the Rotary 4-Way Test