Mar 1, 2015 3 min read

Sure, Mary had a little lamb, but it was Kelly McConnell who won all the ribbons.

“I used to raise merino sheep and showed at the fair every year,” Kelly wrote in an email after seeing herself in the center of last Monday’s Mystery Photo. The picture, she said, was taken at the Washington County Fair in 1979.

“The lady in the tiara is Sonia Lombard Morgan, who was wool queen that year. We remain friends to this day,” wrote Kelly.

“We had one of the biggest merino flocks at the time – 400 sheep,” said Carol McConnell, Kelly’s mother. The farm is between Richeyville and Fredericktown, and Carol taught in Bethlehem-Center School District. “My husband was a towboat captain. He was away all week, and the girls (Kelly and her sister, Kim) and I took care of the farm. When he came home, he was on vacation.” The flock is down to eight or nine sheep, now.

Carol said Kelly was Pennsylvania sheep-shearing champion. “She beat every boy. She’d tuck all that blond hair up under her hat, and when she won she’d take it off and everyone was amazed that it was a girl who won. I was quite proud of her at that time.”

Clair McCracken of Hickory has no doubt who was judging the wool that day. “That’s Tom McIlwain. We graduated together from Penn State in 1958. I was in a lot of classes with him, and he was on the Penn State livestock judging team.”

McCracken and McIlwain were members of an agricultural fraternity in college, and both were close to agriculture throughout their careers. McCracken was manager of Agway in Eighty Four for more than 30 years, and McIlwain was still judging wool as late as 2012, when he participated in the Keystone Livestock Exhibition. A photo of him judging wool appeared on the cover of Mid-Atlantic Country Folks Farm Chronicle in October 2011, after that year’s Keystone show.

We were unable to contact the former wool queen, but her mother, Sally Young, was not sheepish about supplying information.

“My husband Robert and I owned Plum Run Dorsets and Romneys in Canonsburg and my children were active for years in 4-H with market animals, registered sheep and ladies’ and men’s lead,” she wrote in an email. “Over the years the children and the farm were the subject of many articles in the Observer-Reporter. I was surprised and glad to see the Mystery Photo. … We left Pennsylvania in 1995. Sonia is now in Ohio and the rest of the family is in Vermont.”

Look for another Mystery Photo in next Monday’s Observer-Reporter.