Ruth Hanly Booe, Bourbon Ball Inventor
Frankfort, Franklin County, Kentucky
Marker Inscription
Ruth Hanly Booe (1891-1973). In 1919, friends Ruth Hanly and Rebecca Gooch left teaching to found Rebecca-Ruth Candy. Operating out of the barroom of the Frankfort Hotel, closed due to Prohibition, the two were successful entrepreneurs before women gained the right to vote. In 1929, Gooch sold her half of the business to widow Booe. Over. Booe is credited as the inventor of the “Bourbon Ball,” a world- famous confection, and the “Mint Kentucky Colonel.” Her business savvy saw the company through a factory fire, the Great Depression, and sugar rationing during World War II. Booe remained active in the business until 1964.
Erected by Kentucky Historical Society
The Story
In 1919, schoolteachers Ruth Hanly and Rebecca Gooch left the classroom to found Rebecca-Ruth Candy, working out of the shuttered barroom of the Frankfort Hotel, which Prohibition had emptied. The two built a thriving business before women could even vote. After buying out her partner in 1929, Ruth Hanly Booe is credited with inventing the world-famous "Bourbon Ball" and the "Mint Kentucky Colonel," steering the company through a factory fire, the Great Depression, and wartime sugar rationing.
Why it matters
Booe's story captures a wave of early-20th-century women entrepreneurs who built enduring businesses on their own terms, while her signature confection turned a Kentucky specialty into a nationally known treat.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Step into Frankfort, Kentucky, in the years around 1919, and you are standing at the meeting point of two great forces reshaping American life. The first was Prohibition, which slammed shut the nation's bars and saloons and left behind a landscape of empty rooms once loud with talk and clinking glasses. The second was the changing place of women, who were on the very edge of winning the vote and were already stepping out of the roles the previous century had assigned them.
Kentucky sat at the center of the first story in a way few states did. Bourbon was woven into the state's identity and economy, and Prohibition hit that identity hard. But the shuttering of one trade can open a doorway for another, and an empty barroom in a hotel is still a room with a counter, a kitchen, and foot traffic passing by.
Into that moment stepped two schoolteachers. Teaching was one of the few respectable professions open to women of the era, and to leave it for the uncertainty of running a business was a genuine leap. That leap is what this marker remembers.
People & events
Ruth Hanly and her friend Rebecca Gooch were teachers who decided, in 1919, that they would rather make candy than grade lessons. They founded Rebecca-Ruth Candy and set up shop in the emptied barroom of the Frankfort Hotel, a space Prohibition had left idle. Two young women running their own company was uncommon enough; doing it before they could even cast a ballot made them pioneers twice over.
In 1929 Gooch sold her half of the business to her partner, and Ruth—by then a widow, Ruth Hanly Booe—carried it forward alone. It was under her hand that the company found its lasting fame. She is credited as the inventor of the "Bourbon Ball," a confection that married Kentucky's most famous product to a piece of candy, along with the "Mint Kentucky Colonel."
What makes her story more than a founding legend is what came after the good idea. Booe steered the company through a factory fire, through the long grind of the Great Depression, and through the sugar rationing of the Second World War, when the very raw material of her trade was restricted. She stayed active in the business until 1964, a working life that stretched across nearly half a century of American upheaval.
Its place in the American story
Booe belonged to a quiet but important wave of early-twentieth-century American women who built durable enterprises on their own terms, often in the years just before and after suffrage. Their names rarely made the national history books, yet collectively they helped redraw the map of who could own, run, and grow a business in the United States.
Her signature creation carries a second kind of significance. Regional specialties become national treasures only when someone figures out how to make and market them, and the Bourbon Ball did exactly that—turning a distinctly Kentucky flavor into a confection known far beyond the state's borders. It is a small, delicious example of how local identity travels.
And her endurance through fire, depression, and wartime scarcity is its own American story: the entrepreneur whose real test is not the clever idea but the decades of stubborn, resourceful survival that follow it.
If you visit
This is a memorial marker in Frankfort, so the visit is less about a grand building and more about standing in the state capital where a small candy company took root and refused to fail. Read the marker slowly and let the dates do their work—1919, before the vote; 1929, the buyout; the fire, the Depression, the war—and you get a whole life measured out in a few lines.
Frankfort itself rewards a wanderer. It is a compact riverside capital with a strong sense of its own history, and this marker fits naturally into a day spent exploring the streets and stories of Kentucky's seat of government.
Most of all, treat the marker as an invitation to taste the history. A Bourbon Ball is a rare piece of the past you can actually put in your mouth, and knowing that a former schoolteacher invented it, then guided her company through decades of hard times, makes the flavor land a little differently.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Ruth Hanly Booe
- · Rebecca Gooch
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