John Uri Lloyd was a pharmacist, scientist, manufacturer and novelist. His most important contributions were in the field of pharmacy and pharmacognosy. He was in large part responsible for the development and acceptance of an American materia medica. Lloyd in his spare time was also a novelist. His first work of fiction, Etidorpha, was of the Jules Verne genre, a semi-science fiction work incorporating philosophical concepts wedded to unorthodox theories of science. The other major novels of Lloyd were with one exception based upon his experiences growing up in Northern Kentucky. His novels are more valuable as historical sketches of the region than as literary efforts, but are still entertaining.

John Uri Lloyd, born in 1849, and died in 1936, was the most interesting and significant author who has written about Northern Kentucky. Though he was not an author by profession, he could never understand why others did not write about the area, and though he never neglected his chosen profession of pharmacist and student of botanical drugs, he tried to make up the deficiency he observed regarding fictional works concerning the history and characters in our area. Though he was born in New York, and died while on a visit to California, and spent most of his life as a citizen of Cincinnati, he regarded himself as a life-long Kentuckian, and considered rural Boone County where he grew up as home. He did have other Northern Kentucky associations, besides living at Burlington, Petersburg, and Florence in Boone County, the family lived also at Crittenden in Grant County, and he lived in Newport in Campbell County for a number of years after his marriage. He saw also other parts of Kentucky while he was working for his father as a member of his surveying party near the Cumberland River in 1867 and 1868.

Not everything Lloyd wrote about our area was fiction. There are several historical pieces about the Civil War in Northern Kentucky, incidents of which he was an eyewitness. He was also instrumental in preserving historical documents, made photographs, and helped preserve sites of local importance and interest. He was the founder and first president of the Big Bone Lick Association which was instrumental in acquiring the main springs on the land now comprising the park.

His chief writings were in the field of pharmacy with important books and articles, many of which are interesting to those of us interested in such subjects today. But he published a number of short stories, such as his Sam Hill series, some of which have been republished by the Northern Kentucky Historical Society. But of chief interest to us as to his contemporaries, are his novels.

These fall into two groups, the Stringtown series, and Etidorhpa. Stringtown County and Stringtown are the names Lloyd chose to represent his boyhood home. Florence, he said, sounded "too Italian." The chief of these novels, Stringtown on the Pike, and most of the rest of the series are set during the dark and uncertain period of the Civil War.

James K. Duvall was born in Lexington, Kentucky. He graduated from Clay County High School in Manchester, Kentucky, in 1976, and earned his B. A. in Bible and Ancient Languages at the Lexington Baptist College in 1980. He graduated from the Austin Peay State University with a M. A. in History. His thesis, Principia Historia; or, R. G. Collingwood and the Logic of History, was accepted, and the degree granted, in 1988. He has done doctoral work at the Hebrew Union College, in Cincinnati, completing all course work for the degree in Ancient Near Eastern Studies; instead of writing a dissertation he took an M. A. in Bible and Cognate Studies, graduating in 2000. He and his wife, Nicole, and their seven children, live in a cabin on Big Bone Creek, near the Ohio River, in Boone County, Kentucky.