Pennyroyal Area Museum Celebrates Edgar Cayce’s Early Years
The Pennyroyal Area Museum is a general history museum located in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. The mission of the museum is to portray the history of southwestern Kentucky. Since all of us contribute to the story the history museum tells, it is pertinent at this point to introduce a native son, America’s greatest psychic – Edgar Cayce.
Edgar Cayce was born in Christian County, Kentucky on March 18, 1877. It was here during his formative years that he developed his remarkable psychic talents and embarked upon a lifetime of service to God and mankind. Every year in March the Pennyroyal Area Museum celebrates our native son’s birthday and we immerse ourselves in Cayce’s hometown history with the Annual Edgar Cayce Hometown Seminar. Guest speakers for this seminar are focused in one way or another on the balancing of the body, mind, and spirit based on the information from the readings of Edgar Cayce. In the past 18 years participants from all over the world have attended this seminar.
The emphasis of the Hometown Seminar is to feature its most famous local son and to acquaint participants with Cayce’s native home. D.D. Cayce III, the Hopkinsville-Christian County Historian and distant relative to Edgar Cayce, presents a pictorial history of Edgar’s early life in Hopkinsville and Christian County. Participants can also take a hometown tour to see where it all began. A guided bus tour will take you around the county to visit sites such as the Beverly, Kentucky community to see Beverly Academy, where Edgar attended elementary school; Liberty Christian Church, the site of the church that Edgar joined in 1888; the site of Edgar’s boyhood home where he slept on the spelling book; the grounds where Edgar Cayce had a vision that prompted his life’s work and the pond where Thomas Jefferson Cayce, his grandfather, drowned in 1881. Other sites include houses where Edgar once lived, where he gave his first formal reading in 1901, Wesley Ketchum’s office, and Edgar and Gertrude’s gravesites.
Wayne Goolsby, a local educator, adds to the richness of preserving the history of Edgar Cayce. He has written several plays about the life of Edgar Cayce including The Pennyroyal Years: A Reflection upon the Youth of Edgar Cayce; The Gift: a monologue (with a few interruptions) about the life of Edgar Cayce; and Edgar Cayce: the Gift of the Pennyroyal. These plays have been performed at the Pennyroyal Area Museum.
D.D. Cayce III, a cousin to Edgar Cayce and local Edgar Cayce historian, is also affiliated with the Pennyroyal Area Museum. Additionally, the local CVB (Convention & Visitors Bureau) has created a cell-phone tour of Edgar Cayce sites in Hopkinsville. This brochure can be obtained through the Pennyroyal Area Museum or: www.visithopkinsville.com. To be added to the Annual Edgar Cayce Hometown Seminar mailing list please contact: Pennyroyal.Museum@gmail.com or phone 270-887-4270.
