Souvenir Edition, The Williamstown Courier, Williamstown, Ky, May 30, 
1901, reprinted September 19, 1981 by the Grant County KY Historical 
Society.

J. LESLIE GAUGH is a son of J. W. and Elizabeth Gaugh, of Stewartsville,
this county.  The Gaugh family was among the earliest settlers in the
county.  Leslie, as he is more familiarly known, received his education
after completing the common Free School Course, at Prof. C. C. 
Overstreet's High School in Williamstown.  He was married early in life 
and settled on a farm, but soon his family died and he was left to start
life over again.  He decided to make a change in his calling, and 
accordingly took a course in W. R. Smith's Commercial College at 
Lexington, graduating with high honors.  After working some three years 
in banks at Williamstown and Dry Ridge, during which time he won the 
heart and hand of one of Grant County's fairest belles, Miss Ella Dills.
In 1899 he decided to organize a bank at Wilmore, Ky., eighteen miles 
south of Lexington, on the Q. & C. Railway, in the center of the Blue 
Grass region.  The town is a thriving village of about a thousand 
people.  Mr. Gaugh's friends at that place showed their confidence in 
him by subscribing for $8,000 stock in his new bank.  The directors 
showed their appreciation of a Grant County boy at their last meeting 
by employing him for another year at a salary of $1,000.  Wilmore is a 
town of the highest moral type in the South.  There are five churches, 
three good schools, free school, Ashland College (Holiness School), and
Bellevue College.  The Holiness school has about three hundred students,
and an increase of about fifty per year, and is said to be the best 
school of its class in the South.  The Bellevue College was organized 
September, 1900, and is a Presbyterian school and has a bright future 
before it.  There are no saloons or blind tigers in the town.  Mr. 
Gaugh and his good wife are both Methodists, and after locating in 
Wilmore, he was elected assistant superintendent of the Methodist 
Sunday School.

Gaugh Dills
=
Wilmore-Jessamine-KY

http://www.rootsweb.com/~kygenweb/kybiog/grant/gaugh.jl.txt