Slightly built with freckles and alert brown eyes under gracefully arched, even feminine, eyebrows, Powell was descended from Kentucky pioneers. One of his forbearers had entered the Kentucky territory before Daniel Boone. The men in his family had fought in the Indian wars, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War. John West Powell, his father, a Union army officer and slave owner, was a doctor-turned-planter with 550 acres of sweet Kentucky farmland in McAfee, thirty miles southwest of Lexington. The senior Powell married twice; his second wife was Halsey’s mother, Margaret Halsey Powell. She too was Kentucky pioneer stock. McAfee was a place of gently rolling farms that naturally grew the smooth meadow grass whose flower pods turned blue in late summer. As a boy, Halsey would have stepped out the door of the family’s white-frame farmhouse and seen “bluegrass” pastures enclosed by rough plank fences and fields of tobacco and corn. The nearest neighbors, a half mile away, were the Dunns, the family of his father’s first wife, in their Greek revival plantation house, Lone Pine.
