Carl Varble, Sparta, Kentucky

To quote Mr. Varble, exactly: “I have tried to give you a scatch of Sparta has look like, in breaf. My tiping is not to good, but maby you will get ith thought of what Sparta was at one time.”

We couldn’t agree more.

We agree that Mr. Varble has done a super job in interviewing older people, and in remembering, and documenting what they had to say. His love of Sparta and knowledge of Sparta are both evident in his writing. It’s part history, part genealogy, part personal reminiscence, and part gossip column.

On the other hand, his typing, is, indeed, “not to good.” We’ve edited the text pretty heavily, mostly spelling and punctuation. We’ve re-arranged a sentence here and there. If we thought the word could be interpreted in different ways, we’ve used his words exactly, and put our interpretation in brackets. Sometimes, we’ve just put a question mark in brackets, after typing what he had written verbatim.

The text as we found it – on the shelf in the public library in Owenton – consists of a number of different documents, and they seem to have been written at different times and collected into a single whole. There’s a lot of duplication in the various chapters, but ultimately, what there was is what you’ve got here.

We’ve omitted parts of it that we didn’t think pertained to Sparta – a short history of money, and an account of Kentucky before it was settled (mostly quoted from Kentucky historian Winston Coleman), and a newspaper article he copied on Nixon's resignation, for instance.

Enjoy.