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Chautauqua performance set for Jan. 27

January 19, 2009

Betsy B. Smith of Cynthiana, who portrays Emilie Todd Helm, will present the Kentucky Chautauqua performance 7 p.m. Jan. 27 at a dinner meeting of the Danville-Boyle County Historical Society meeting at Toy Box Deli Catering, 312 W. Main St. The performance is free and open to the public.

The dinner will begin at 6 p.m. Call Dick McGuire at (859) 236-5799 to make reservations for the dinner, which costs $15.

Emilie Todd Helm (1836-1930), half-sister of Mary Todd Lincoln and the wife of Confederate Gen. Benjamin Hardin Helm, had a front-row view of history during the Civil War era. Emilie was 18 years younger than her sister Mary, who married Abraham Lincoln in 1842. In 1856, Emilie married Benjamin Helm, a West Point graduate who had become a lawyer in Elizabethtown.

The Helms and the Lincolns became very close. Despite their different political views - Helm was a Southern Democrat, Lincoln a Republican - the new brothers-in-law were fast friends. In April 1861, with war imminent, Lincoln offered Helm the position of paymaster of the Union Army with the rank of major. Helm rejected the offer. Instead accepting appointment as a Confederate colonel.

Emilie Helm followed her husband south as he rose to the rank of brigadier general in command of the 1st Kentucky Brigade (the famed Orphan Brigade). She was in Alabama in September 1863 when she got word of his death at Chickamauga. Lincoln arranged safe passage for her to Washington. She and Mary, who was mourning the death of her son Willie, comforted each other. But the presence of a southern loyalist in the White House aroused protests, and Helm soon departed for Kentucky.

After the war, she settled in her husband's hometown, Elizabethtown. In the 1880s and '90s, she became a working woman, appointed as Elizabethtown's postmistress by three different presidents. Helm attended many Confederate reunions, where she was hailed as the Mother of the Orphan Brigade.

Smith is a summa cum laude graduate of Georgetown College. In 2007, she joined her husband, Ed "Adolph Rupp" Smith, and son, Ethan "Price Hollowell" Smith, in the Chautauqua program. She currently co-directs the Kentucky Educational Speech and Drama Association, and does freelance writing for an IT company in California.

Kentucky Chautauqua is an exclusive presentation of the Kentucky Humanities Council, Inc. with statewide support from the Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels and funding from the Lexington Fayette Urban County Government, Peoples Bank & Trust Co. of Hazard, Kentucky Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, Brown-Forman Corp., Union College in Barbourville, and Toyota Motor Manufacturing North America Inc.

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