"The real villages"

The cabins are part of Gospel of the Kingdom Campground, for which David Emmons is one of the trustees...

"And I don't know of but one midget we ever had in nearly 95 years that ever came consistently to the campground," he says...

There are such things as "midget villages" -- or, at least, there were...

Robert Bogdan, author of "Freak Show," a 1990 book about the practice of exhibiting people for amusement and profit, believes the villages' origins date to when kings kept little people in their courts as jesters and for show, "like they would keep peacocks or something."

In the United States, midgets -- now known as people with proportionate dwarfism -- were exhibited at amusement parks, such as Coney Island, and in world's fairs and expositions, said Bogdan, a professor at the Center on Human Policy, Law and Disability Studies at Syracuse University...

The villages were featured in at least four fairs: the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exhibition in San Francisco, the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, the 1935 California Pacific Exposition in San Diego and the 1939 New York World's Fair, according to Bogdan and world's fair expert John Findling...

The villages with which Findling is familiar included a number of small, temporary buildings complete with electricity, running water, walkways and playgrounds. They housed around 60 little people for the six months the fairs were in town, said Findling, co-editor of the recently updated "Encyclopedia of World's Fairs and Expositions." By the 1940s, both authors believe, the villages had fallen out of favor. Neither Bogdan nor Findling, the latter a retired history professor at Indiana University Southeast, had ever heard of such a village in Kentucky...

But Emmons had...

"We had lots of small structures, places with beds; they were only about probably 8, maybe 10 foot square, and they were just places that people slept and people assumed that there was so many of them and those were so small that there had to be midgets staying in it," he said during a recent phone call from his home in Doucette, Texas....