The story of Frank S. Milburn’s work, and his connections to Boone County, Kentucky, may have gone unnoticed or been lost to time. It is largely thanks to the work of Matt Becher, a former Boone County Rural / Open Space Planner, and his collaborators or “co-conspirators”, that Milburn’s contributions were uncovered and documented for posterity.
Becher worked for the Boone County Planning Commission from December 2000 to January 2023. As part of his work as a Rural / Open Space Planner, along with his connection to the Boone County Historic Preservation Review Board, Matt dug into an extensive, multi-year project to research Milburn’s life, work, and impact on Boone County and the Northern Kentucky-Cincinnati region. Becher conducted interviews with family members of Milburn, including Milburn’s surviving spouse, accomplished radiation oncologist Dr. Carol Swarts Milburn, among many others. He also combed through historical newspapers, and gathered together numerous other research materials, to reveal Milburn’s activities in Northern Kentucky and Cincinnati.
Letterhead logo design for Milburn Manufacturing Company, Burlington, Ky., ca. 1940s-1950s
Becher had enthusiastic partners in Bridget Striker, then working at Boone County Public Library, and Bob Jonas, his Planning Commission colleague, with whom he collaborated on a Kentucky Historical Society community history grant project. The modest grant awarded in 2005 made it possible to convert Milburn’s original motion picture film to video and digital format.
The motion picture film footage of Milburn, including his Invenosope television pilot, was originally shot in the late 1940s to early 1950s. It can be viewed on the BCPL YouTube channel, below, as “The Films and Photography of Frank S. Milburn.” A typed narrative script that accompanies the pilot’s footage is included in the Milburn papers.
Becher’s diligent work on Milburn culminated in the publication of an impressive and detailed biographical article entitled “Burlington’s Cornfield Edison: Frank S. Milburn”, in the Northern Kentucky Heritage magazine’s 2006 Spring-Summer issue. Becher permitted BCPL to reformat the article to make it more widely available. Readers can access it via the BCPL catalog.
Becher’s research and writing on Milburn appeared in several other places, including the book, Images of America: Burlington, published by Arcadia in 2004, and a lengthy entry in The Encyclopedia of Northern Kentucky, published in 2009.
A final outcome of Becher’s years-long research effort was that he was entrusted, as a staff member of the Boone County Planning Commission, with the accumulated materials from Milburn’s life and work, by Dr. Carol Swarts Milburn. Those materials comprise the Frank S. Milburn Papers, 1908-2014, that are now housed at the Main library’s Archive & History Center. They include printed items such as correspondence, inventions, and photographs, as well as negatives, transparencies, slides, motion picture film reels (3), and a small number of artifacts.
ABOVE: Milburn experiments with Kodachrome color photography, August 1947
BELOW: Unidentified Boone County farmer drives a team of 3 horses to plow the ground, June 1948.
Please stay tuned for a final blog and announcements highlighting Frank S. Milburn’s life, work, and contributions to this region’s unique history!
For more information about Frank S Milburn, check out other blogs in the series:
