This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on the show,

including your story, send them to Our American Network.org. They're some of our favorites.

And this next story comes to us with the help of John Elfner, a high school history teacher and a regular contributor to our

show. John is always on the hunt for a good story, and recently he asked his uncle Henry,

a Kentucky horse breeder, if he had one. Henry showed John a recent newspaper article about William King

Solomon, a gravedigger who may have saved the town of Lexington during the cholera epidemic of 1833.

Kentucky journalist Sam Terry tells the story of the man they called King Solomon.

In November of 1854, the Reverend William M. Pratt recorded in his diary,

I preached the funeral today of Old King Solomon, 79 years old.

He was born the same year with Henry Clay and had drunk whiskey enough to float a man-of-war. He was once a

person of considerable enterprise and business, but he had been given to drink a great many years,

and yet was inoffensive and of great integrity. Quite a number of citizens attended his funeral,

and he had a good coffin worth $30,

and some 17 carriages processed to the cemetery.

The deceased was William King Solomon, a Virginia native who claimed to have been a boyhood

acquaintance of Harry, as he called Henry Clay, jesting that his own work as a digger of cellars and cisterns

was less elevated than the famous statesman. His loyalty to Clay was unprecedented. When one of

Clay's opponents for re-election offered strong drink to Solomon in exchange for his vote, Solomon took him up on the offer and then proceeded to vote for Clay.

When asked if he had voted as agreed, Solomon replied,

You may have been foolish enough to try to bribe me, but I'm not foolish enough to vote for you.

During Solomon's lowest time of life,

his wife died and his son ran away, sending him into a liquor-filled existence that reduced him to a vagabond, whom Lexingtonians nicknamed King Solomon. By 1833, Solomon's existence, living on the streets, and intoxicated,

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