Mamaw, the politician: One woman’s journey in old-school local Kentucky politics
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A Boys Club
Kentucky’s judge-executives are overwhelmingly male. Meet three women who lead their counties and others who are running for a shot at the office.
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Carolyn P. Horn had her fourth child in March 1969, two months before the May primary for the prized role of Martin County Circuit Court Clerk.
Campaigning wasn’t easy for Horn, with three energetic children and a newborn to take care of. Going from door to door in a county dominated by distinct hollers, a number of rural hamlets, and two small towns – all with the added stresses of coordinating childcare.
One of those children is my father, E.J. Horn. Carolyn is my grandmother, or, as many folks in Eastern Kentucky refer to their parents’ mother, “mamaw” (pronounced “ma’am-aw”).
She is the first politician I knew – I have the VCR tapes of my birth to prove it – and in my biased opinion, she’s the best. That is, she’s taken the best parts of what makes a good politician and refashioned them into what makes a good person.
My mamaw is a lightning rod. When she greets anyone, particularly in Martin County, she greets them loudly and warmly; everyone is their first name, or their full name, which in large part seems to depend on the cadence.
Everyone is also “honey.”
That’s often because she knows them, their daddy, their cousin’s friend, or someone in between, but it can also be because she met them a few minutes prior.
She is kind, assertive and socially aware – a combination I’ve yet to see recreated as strongly in anyone. A shorter lady, and 82 years old, my mamaw still finds a way to bounce when she walks. She’s like Eastern Kentucky’s Energizer Bunny.
She knows exactly when to laugh, and it’s often when people less comfortable with themselves wouldn’t. She knows who to check up on and when – the roster is long – how to bake the best pie and cornbread, and which officials to bug about getting things done in her Inez First Baptist Church or the Martin County Fiscal Court.
The only knock on her that I can think of as I’m typing this story is that her upbeat Appalachian drawl eludes my transcription service, an artificial intelligence-based site that does a fine job typing out most people’s words.
I’m not certain whether these are immutable characteristics – ones that would have shone just as bright had she chosen a different path – or if they developed as a result of 30 years in public service.
If the latter, she almost didn’t become the mamaw I came to know.
Election, 1969
Just outside the Martin County hamlet of Beauty, a couple miles north of another town called Lovely, a crowd of locals and vendors gathered in an elementary school for the first of a few “speakings,” where local candidates paid the event organizer to say their piece in front of others.
One of Horn’s opponents said something he meant, but probably not something he should have said out loud.
“You know what: Mrs. Horn has four little kids at home and she ought to be taking care of them,” he said.
That was the turning point.
“I think that gave me the edge that very first night. Women galore called me and said ‘if we don’t work, we wouldn’t have anything,’” Horn said.
But that’s not to say that only a blunder on another candidate’s behalf brought her an eventual victory – she won by about 200 votes.
She had some assets as well.
For her turn at the “speaking,” and in every public appearance of 1969, Horn wore a black wraparound dress with the words “Carolyn Preece Horn, Circuit Court Clerk” embroidered on both sides. She had it made special in Paintsville.
Though sexism was certainly a factor at the polls, Horn knew the men couldn’t have pulled off a similar sartorial flair – one that voters may not forget when they hit the polls.
“Can you imagine what that did to my opponents when they saw that,” Horn said. “... You’ve gotta come up with gimmicks when you’re in politics because if you don’t you’re just another politician asking for votes.”
The name “Preece” was prominently displayed because it had history in Martin County. Her mother, Mae Preece, held the Circuit Court Clerk role for 15 years thanks in large part to an inside deal. Preece’s brother, a leader at the local bank, traded a job at the bank for his sister’s appointment.
“Her brother, Roscoe Kirk, persuaded a Republican precinct worker to appoint her by giving the precinct worker’s daughter a job – she’d been out of town and they needed their daughter home,” Horn said. “You did a lot of swapping in the old days.”
Horn has always been a Republican, largely because Martin County has always been Republican from as far back to her father’s time in office to 2022. This year 47 Republicans filed to run for office in Martin County; only one Democrat filed.
Martin County is a place where about a dozen prominent last names tend to grace the public park signs, the hillside cemeteries, and the ballot box. Horn, Preece and Kirk happen to be three of them. In fact, her brother-in-law Jack Horn took her stead in 2000 and worked there until the mid-2010s – the position stayed in the family for 60 years.
So Horn had the advantage of her family name. Her mother, an easygoing but “proper” lady whose Sunday dinners attracted everyone on both sides of her family, had run the office for 15 years. Her father’s three terms as county attorney certainly didn’t hurt either – hence the display of her maiden name on her skirt.
Horn also had the benefit of being an aggressive campaigner. She said she dropped literature off or knocked on every front door in Martin County that year, the same year she had her fourth child.
One interaction on the trail, near Tomahawk where she lived at the time, stood out.
“I knocked on this door and this gentleman looked at me and he said ‘I don’t vote for women!’”
He slammed the door shut and she left crying.
“The second time when I got ready to run, I thought about skipping that door but I went right back up to it and knocked. Then he said to me really quick ‘I’m gonna vote for you, you done a darn good job.’ Slam with the door again,” Horn recalled.
In her first run, Horn also took part in what was a time-honored mountain political tradition – trading a good swig of whiskey for a vote.
“I’m ashamed to say that, but it’s the facts,” Horn said, detailing how she paid for but didn’t directly buy half-pints of whiskey. “You’d be parked somewhere away from the actual precinct and you’d have a trunk full of it. They’d walk back to your car with you and the next thing you know they were happy and they went in and voted.”
She said that was just how local politics worked at the time, and that was true of many places. Kentucky had a strict statewide ban on any alcohol sales, even in licensed stores, until polls closed on election day until 2013 – the law was a prohibition era measure that aimed to curb the well-established tradition of buying votes with alcohol.
The day-to-day, then a shot in the dark
Circuit Court Clerks manage records. It was sometimes tedious work, and the clients were most often attorneys, property brokers or regular folks trying to renew their licenses – so, not always the happiest campers.
But Horn ran a welcoming enterprise and tight internal operation. The facetime with voters played a role in securing four more six-year terms after the 1969 win and her strict policy of ensuring that every person checking on a record in her office signed a book with the date and time – no exceptions. Even her mother had not been as “rigid” in collecting fees, Horn said.
That led her to earning a salary higher than that of many of her peers. She collected the proper amount of fees, so the state remunerated her in kind.
“All I can say is that God was watching after me because I needed every penny of that money for those kids.”
Trips to Frankfort were often the big vacations for her and the rest of the family. Getting out of the mountains on the state’s dime through the Administrative of the Courts was not a bad deal, and being in on some big legislative pushes from the Kentucky Association of Circuit Court Clerks was exciting, Horn said.
Aside from one close electoral scare made more difficult by an emergency root canal procedure on election day, it was smooth sailing at Horn’s office.
One nice thing was that none of her work there was particularly partisan.
But running for State Senate was.
And it took a week of “begging” from the Republican Party of Kentucky to consent to running for the post in Martin, Elliot, Morgan, Lawrence and Boyd counties on the condition that she wouldn’t get a primary opponent in the 2000 primary.
“A guy registered from Lawrence County, so I threatened to quit them at that time,” Horn said. “But, of course they kept talking to me.”
So she kept running.
She passed out literature, knocked on doors, attended galas and benefit dinners like a maniac woman, she said.
Her opponent, the well-established Democratic Sen. Walter “Doc” Blevins, had just finished a stint in Senate leadership. Eastern Kentucky was still, with the exception of Martin County, a mostly blue wall of Democratic voters. A majority of the region is still registered Democrat, but in 2000 they were also voting Democrat – now, only three Democratic state legislators hail from the once-bountiful Eastern coalfields.
She didn’t really have much of a shot. But she scared the Democrats, and gave a solid run at joining a historic Republican year – the GOP took the Senate in 2000 after two senators switched parties and it hasn’t looked back since.
“My heart, once I got into it, they were shocked. I didn’t have a ghost of a chance when I registered. Then the Republican Party started to help me when they saw I had my foot in the door a little bit. They didn’t think I had a chance and I knew that from the day I registered, but I thought ‘I have something to teach them.’”
Her campaign literature was relatively normal for a Kentucky Republican at the time.
Defending the Second Amendment, public displays of the Ten Commandments and “bring(ing) prayer back to our schools?” Yes.
Preserving Social Security and Medicare? An emphatic yes.
Standing idly by during the “breakdown of the American family” and the “outrage of partial birth abortion?” No.
Bringing good paying jobs to the region, staving off any tax increases and ensuring that tax dollars go towards improving Eastern Kentucky’s public schools? Of course.
Blevins, despite being contested in each of his six races, had to raise three times as much as he ever did in 2000 against Horn according to Ballotpedia.
Still, Horn lost 19,435 to 14,234. It marked the end of her career in elected office.
She told one story from the campaign trail that summed up the reception to her in the more populous and more industrial union-tied counties like Lawrence and Boyd.
“He says ‘well, honey, you seem like an awful nice person but you ain’t a Democrat.’ I got a lot of that.”
Her one political regret? Not choosing to run for judge-executive in 2000 instead of State Senate, she says.
Horn said that having a family while juggling running for reelection, errands at the office and political considerations across the county was taxing and strained some relationships.
“Once you become a public figure, you belong to the public – you are theirs. If you are a public figure, you can expect that and it takes into your family time… I don’t ever remember not talking to whoever called me. I was their servant because they were nice enough to elect me and let me be able to take care of my family.”
