08/27/2026
*History Blast*
The “Wide-Awake” Stockman of Green County
Laura Johnson, Green County Public Library
Archibald Nathaniel “Nathan” Bridgewater, born May 26, 1860, in Adair County, Kentucky, was one of many children in the Bridgewater household. His parents were William Page and Elizabeth Bridgewater.
By the time he reached young adulthood, Nathan was working as a farmhand in the Gresham community of Green County, living with his older brother Davy’s family. The work was hard, but it was honest and steady. His mother and younger siblings were also in the household. His father had passed in 1875.
In 1884, Nathan married his first love, Susie F. Spillman. Their marriage lasted barely two years before Susie died in November 1886, leaving Nathan with their newborn daughter, Mattie Elizabeth Bridgewater.
Nathan remarried on December 14, 1887, this time to Mary Elizabeth Bridgewater, a cousin. Together they built a bustling household in Green County.
The 1900 census lists the names of their children: Mattie (age 14), Mary (10), Katie (8 ), Emma (3), and little Nathan Paul (1), with one daughter, Bertha, lost in infancy. There was also a boarder named Herbert Darnell in the home who became Mattie’s husband in 1906.
Nathan was a farmer as well as a livestock man. He had purchased 176 acres of land near Ebenezer Church in 1897 and helped survey the Green County Pike near there in 1907, placing 588 stakes across eleven miles. He shipped hogs, bought cattle, and traveled all over the area with wagonloads of livestock. He purchased another farm for $8,000 in 1919, a considerable sum for the time.
Neighbors called him “wide awake,” meaning sharp, alert, and always ready for business. Nathan Bridgewater didn’t miss opportunities. By the 1920s, Nathan was known throughout Green and Adair counties as an accomplished stock man, a trader who could judge a hog or a heifer with a glance.
On occasion, he was a representative of the loose leaf to***co warehouse and once claimed the distinction of killing the largest hog ever butchered in Greensburg, a 630 pound sow that even the local butcher backed him up on.
Nathan and Mary Elizabeth sold their farm in 1929 to Dr. S. J. Simons and moved to Greensburg.
Nathan worked as long as his body allowed. Into his mid-seventies, he was still in the pens, still trading in livestock. In 1928, he had received some broken ribs, and a hog knocked him down, spraining his wrist in 1930. He sustained a more serious injury in 1931 when he suffered a fractured hip in a fall.
Mary Elizabeth Bridgewater died in 1931, after a long illness. Her obituary described a devoted mother whose only regret was leaving her children. Nathan buried her at Ebenezer Cemetery and carried on, as he always had.
Two years later, at age 73, he married Louellen Walker in a quiet ceremony performed by Rev. Perryman. Friends congratulated them warmly. “It is never too late to enjoy the happiness of companionship,” the paper wrote.
Sadly, Louellen died in 1937 after a battle with cancer. Nathan mourned her, too.
In his final years, Nathan hosted family reunions, welcomed grandchildren and great grandchildren, and remained a familiar figure on the roads around Greensburg. He had lived through three marriages, raised a large family, traded thousands of animals, and built a reputation as one of the county’s most dependable stock men.
On March 31, 1941, at the age of 80, Archibald Nathan Bridgewater died at his home. His obituary described a man of faith who joined the church at Milltown as a young man and later served as an elder at Mt. Gilead. He left behind five children, 32 grandchildren, 17 great grandchildren, and a legacy woven into the farms and communities of Green and Adair counties. He was buried at Ebenezer Cemetery, not far from the land he once bought, surveyed, and worked.
