24/05/2026
Last week I received a call from a couple interested in selling a watch. After the transaction, they asked if I would take a look at a piece of art. I’m not an appraiser, but happily give my opinion of value, so I put my bag down and walked with them to the sitting room. “Have you ever heard of Mattie Lou O’Kelly?” he asked.
Have I ever heard of Mattie Lou O’Kelly? Only a million times. She is a folk artist who has works featured in the Smithsonian and the High. She was born on a small farm in Banks County, and when her father died and it sold, she moved to Maysville. My hometown. My tiny hometown of 2,000 people, if you blink you miss it, no traffic light, a train that runs right through the middle, and that’s just about it. She is a legend there.
Mattie Lou started painting in her fifties and created idyllic scenes that showed farm life at the turn of the twentieth century. She lived briefly in New York and West Palm Beach, but soon left city life to return to Georgia where she could “paint and paint and stay at home.”
The chances of meeting someone from Maysville are basically zero, and the chances of finding a Mattie Lou O’Kelly piece in the wild are even less. So when I asked him how he acquired the piece, he said he bought it from her when they both lived in Maysville, and my heart skipped another beat. He also lived in my hometown.
Not only did he live in my hometown, he was the preacher at the local Baptist church. And the house I grew up in that was built in 1903 - that belonged to Sarah White, the local piano teacher who played at his church. And if that wasn’t enough, he was responsible for starting the first annual Autumn Leaf Festival that still happens the first weekend in October and is only the most magical weekend of the year. There’s a parade and a cake walk and you can buy water ballon yo-yos and funnel cakes and hand-knitted toilet-paper roll covers. And the best part is the community-wide yard sale. And we had one every year.
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