Pettit, Katherine

Katherine Pettit was born in 1868 near Lexington, Kentucky and was educated at schools in Lexington and Louisville, Kentucky. As an active member of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), she made several summer trips to southeastern Kentucky between 1895 and 1901. In 1902, with WCTU funding, she and May Stone founded what would become Hindman Settlement School in Knott County. Particularly notable was an educational program that emphasized crafts, traditional music, and manual skills as well as standard academic subjects. In 1913 Pettit and Ethel de Long established another settlement school at Pine Mountain, in Harlan County with a similar degree of success as at Hindman. In 1930 Katherine Pettit resigned as co-director of the Pine Mountain school to spend the next five years in "free lance work" that largely focused on efforts to convince Harlan County men to leave welfare and return to farming. She died in Lexington, Kentucky in 1936 at the age of sixty-eight.