Frances Martin

Photographs ©1996 Malcolm J. Wilson

Frances Martin moved to Cincinnati from Williamsburg, Kentucky, when she was seventeen years old, in 1952. She has lived and worked in the city's Over the Rhine neighborhood for her entire adult life. For the past fifteen years, she's been tending bar and waiting tables at Stenger's Cafe, a neighborhood institution. Her memories of her first impressions of the city:  

"It was strange because I had never been in the city, I had been in the country all my life. Down there you lived a mile or two miles apart from people. You wouldn't be right on top of somebody. And there wasn't nobody living upstairs over you or nobody living under you. It was a lot different. I didn't like it, but we found work here. If I wasn't working here I'd be right down there in the country where my mother is." 

Perceptions of Home: The Urban Appalachian Spirit ©1996 The Urban Appalachian Council (now Urban Appalachian Community Coalition)

Photographs ©1996 Malcolm J. Wilson; Interviews ©1996 Don Corathers

Photographs digitized by the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library. Genealogy & Local History Department.