Lexington History, continued — part of an overnight series built from the original newspapers. A note before reading: this story involves the murder of a child and an attempted lynching. It is also one of the most consequential days in Lexington’s history, and it deserves to be remembered accurately. The 1920 newspaper pages shown are in the public domain.
February 1920
On the morning of February 4, 1920, a 10-year-old girl named Geneva Hardman set out for school from her family’s farm near South Elkhorn in southern Fayette County and never arrived. Her body was found in a field a short distance off the road, hidden behind shocks of fodder. She had been killed with a rock.
Bloodhounds and search parties tracked a suspect through the day, across the county line toward Keene and Dixontown in Jessamine County, where searchers arrested a Black farmhand and World War I veteran who gave his name as Will Lockett. (His legal name, it later emerged, was Petrie Kimbrough.) In custody in Lexington that evening, he confessed. The authorities — with the memory of recent lynchings across Kentucky and the South very much in mind — immediately moved him out of town, first to Versailles and then to the state penitentiary at Frankfort, beyond the reach of the crowds already gathering.
What happened over the next five days made Lexington a national story — not because of the crime, but because of what the state did when ten thousand people came to undo the law.
Thirty minutes
Circuit Judge Charles Kerr set trial for Monday morning, February 9 — five days after the murder. The speed was the point. The plan, agreed among Judge Kerr, Commonwealth’s Attorney John R. Allen, Governor Edwin P. Morrow and the military, was to give the mob nothing to wait for: a swift, certain, legal death sentence, delivered under guard, with the defendant returned to a distant prison before anyone could organize. Governor Morrow sent the Kentucky National Guard under Brigadier General Francis C. Marshall, a Regular Army officer, and gave him plain instructions that the prisoner was to live to reach his sentence…