POTTENGER’S CREEK
(First Article)
By   L. S. Pence
The Lebanon Enterprise


La Fayette Stiles Pence wrote six informative articles in The Lebanon Enterprise (Kentucky) about “Pottenger’s Creek”. They were printed on the first Friday of every month for the first six months of 1920. They averaged about one and a half typewritten pages of material and were continued each month.

Article one has yet to be found and it can only be assumed that it is the introduction article about the location of “Pottenger’s Creek”, how Capt. Samuel Pottinger came to acquire the land, and had to defend his claim on the land. There were many lawsuits, instituted before the year 1800, involved large tracts of lands on the upper, middle and lower ends of Pottenger’s Creek. (note: see  "Pottinger's Creek from Kentucky Reports Book One, 1800")
 Articles two, three, five and six were discovered in the papers of Samuel Remey Pottinger’s Estate (son of Forrest Pottinger). Article four was tracked down from old newspaper files. The Pottenger/Pottinger family are still looking to locate Article One.

“Lafe”, as he was known, was born April 6, 1865, in Bloomfield, Nelson County, Kentucky and died June 24, 1938, in Bardstown, Nelson County, Kentucky. At the age of two, his mother died and he was reared, as a son, by Minerva Ford Stiles Beall, his aunt, and her husband George Washington Beall. La Fayette attended East Lynn Academy at Buffalo, Kentucky and later at the College of Law at University of Louisville where he graduated in 1889. He became a lawyer and police judge (1902-1913) in Lebanon, Kentucky. He worked at the Bobbitt Hotel in Lebanon for four years before becoming a police judge. He was considered the third historian of the Stiles family. As a young man, he wrote his Stiles genealogy, "The History of the Stiles Family in Kentucky and Missouri", published in 1896.  He usually signed his name Lafe S. Pence or L.S. Pence (it appears both ways in these articles).  It appears he collaborated with Samuel Forrest Pottinger for some of this information, but some of the information presented never appears in any of Forrest’s “Pottinger Papers”.

                                                                                                              ---  Ron Pottinger

                                                                                                                                                                                        


(Thanks to Bill Reynolds for the bio of Lafe Pence and to Ed Danielson, executor of Samuel Remey Pottinger Estate)
 

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