Guv Beshear Mugs with George W. Bush and Elliot Spitzer??

Now that I have your attention, see pic left. It’s a recreation of a 1908 picture with then President Teddy Roosevelt at the start of a Governor’s Conference that brought focus on national infrastructure needs. According to America 2050, the 1908 conference resulted in “a national conservation plan…of energy generation, conservation and restoration projects, and economic development to underdeveloped regions of the U.S. that had not benefited from the wealth of the railroad age, which was mostly accrued in the Northeast and Midwestern United States. Projects like Roosevelt Dam in Phoenix (1911), the Colorado River Compact (1922), and the Hoover Dam (1931) came about because of this effort."

The modern photo, with Gov. Beshear at the far right (or left, depending on your angle and your politics) was restaged as a way to highlight national infrastructure needs in the 21st Century.

It doesn’t appear that the positioning of the 2008 photo follows the same order as the one in 1908, so there’s no way to tell if that’s Governor Augustus E. Willson (yes, Willson with two “L’s”) similarly standing at the end of the older pic.

Willson was one of 7 Republican Governors in Kentucky in the 20th century. Born in Maysville but orphaned at an early age, he was raised in New England where he hobnobbed with the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Although the world has changed greatly over the past 100 years, infrastructure remains a key priority for “undeveloped regions of the U.S.”… like Willson’s birth region, greater Appalachia.

Cross posted at Cyberhillbilly blog