Katherine Pettit Papers

Katherine Pettit was born in 1868 near Lexington, Kentucky, the child of Benjamin Pettit a prosperous farmer. She went to schools in Lexington and Louisville and developed an interest in the social and educational problems of eastern Kentucky. Her work in summer educational programs (1899-1901), conducted in Knott and Perry counties by the Kentucky Federation of Women’s Clubs, led to her developing a strong desire to make a permanent contribution to the area.  

With financing from the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), she and May Stone founded the WCTU Settlement School at Hindman in 1902. Its purpose was to “found, establish, carry on and maintain a school or schools for industrial, intellectual and moral training; to educate the youth of both sexes in habits of sobriety in the mountainous, destitute or needy portions of the State of Kentucky.” The school remained under the sponsorship of the Kentucky WCTU until 1915, when it was formally incorporated as a private, non-profit, non-sectarian, and non-denominational corporation and became known simply as the Hindman Settlement School.

In 1913 Pettit left Hindman for Harlan County where, with Ethel de Long, she established the Pine Mountain Settlement School and served as co-director until retirement in 1930. For the next five years she employed herself in what she termed “free-lance work,” travelling throughout Harlan County urging men to leave welfare and return to farming.  She died in Lexington in 1936 at the age of sixty-eight.