Records stored in the Hickman County Courthouse tell story of indentured children
By:
Kit-Bacon Gressitt, research, Mary Potter
With post Civil War Reconstruction unpopular in the South, including the Commonwealth of Kentucky, the Legislature came up with a clever idea to answer a labor shortage caused by losing 20% of its unpaid labor force. The answer was reviving and expanding the system of indentured servitude to orphans and poor children. State law created a system (complete with fill-in-the-blank forms) that empowered the County Judge to "bind out orphans, and children whose parents are incapable of bringing them up in moral courses."
