How a Gravedigger Became a Hero: King Solomon and the 1833 Cholera Epidemic
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 26 August 2025
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, in the summer of 1833, Lexington, Kentucky, was brought to its knees by a cholera outbreak. Entire families were lost in a matter of days, and fear spread faster than the disease itself. When the dead outnumbered the living willing to bury them, one man stepped forward. His name was Solomon. Most people in town dismissed him as a drunk gravedigger. But in the middle of the crisis, he dug without stopping, gave the dead their dignity, and kept the city from collapsing under the weight of its own fear. Kentucky journalist Sam Terry tells the story of King Solomon, the unlikely hero whose redemption came in the middle of one of the deadliest epidemics in American history.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:15.0 | This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on the show, |
| 0:21.3 | including your story. |
| 0:22.4 | Send them to Our American Stories.com. |
| 0:25.2 | They're some of our favorites. |
| 0:27.0 | And this next story comes to us with the help of John Elfner, |
| 0:30.0 | a high school history teacher and a regular contributor to our show. |
| 0:34.1 | Kentucky journalist Sam Terry tells the story of the man they called King Solomon. |
| 0:40.2 | In November of 1854, the Reverend William M. Pratt recorded in his diary, |
| 0:46.5 | I preached the funeral today of Old King Solomon, 79 years old. |
| 0:52.4 | He was born the same year with Henry Clay and had drunk whiskey enough |
| 0:56.6 | to float a man-of-war. He was once a person of considerable enterprise and business, but he had been |
| 1:03.4 | given to drink a great many years, and yet was inoffensive and of great integrity. Quite a number of |
| 1:10.7 | citizens attended his funeral, |
| 1:12.6 | and he had a good coffin worth $30, and some 17 carriages processed to the cemetery. |
| 1:19.6 | The deceased was William King Solomon, a Virginia native who claimed to have been a boyhood |
| 1:26.6 | acquaintance of Harry, as he called Henry Clay, |
| 1:30.2 | jesting that his own work as a digger of cellars and cisterns was less elevated than the famous statesman. |
| 1:38.4 | His loyalty to Clay was unprecedented when one of Clay's opponents for re-election offered strong drink to Solomon in |
| 1:46.8 | exchange for his vote, Solomon took him up on the offer and then proceeded to vote for Clay. When |
| 1:53.6 | asked if he had voted as agreed, Solomon replied, you may have been foolish enough to try to bribe |
| 2:00.3 | me, but I'm not foolish enough to vote for you. |
... |
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