Clarence Walker was born on May 29, 1890, in Dyer County, Tennessee. His family moved to Louisville before he was two. He came to faith at age eleven at Ormsby Avenue Baptist Church, and that church shaped him from the ground up. Before he ever preached, he swept its floors as janitor, taught Sunday School, kept the records as clerk, and served as a deacon. Ormsby ordained him in 1909, when he was nineteen. He pastored several rural churches while studying at Georgetown College, then served Mt. Freedom Baptist Church near Wilmore, where he met his wife, Glorenna.

In November 1916 he answered the call of Ashland Avenue Baptist Church in Lexington, a congregation just getting started with 44 members. He stayed fifty years. Under his preaching the membership grew to nearly 3,000. The church built a new sanctuary in 1922 and had to enlarge it twice. In 1923 he became the first preacher to broadcast a sermon by radio from Lexington. In 1927 the church began a daily Vacation Bible School, now thought to be the oldest one in the country still running every year. Ashland Avenue is also believed to be the first church anywhere to send out buses on Sunday mornings to bring children to church. Bro. Walker was in constant demand as an evangelist and preached hundreds of revivals, many of them under a tent.

He believed in the printed page as much as the pulpit. In 1922 he started the Ashland Avenue Baptist, a weekly paper of sermons, Sunday School lessons, and doctrinal articles. At its height more than 100,000 copies went out each week to every state in the country. His press also published books on Baptist distinctives, among them J. M. Carroll's The Trail of Blood, which it made famous. After his younger brother Walter, himself a pastor, died at 37, Bro. Walker wrote a short evangelistic book called Walter Doesn't Live Here Anymore. During the Second World War a copy was given to every American soldier.

Troubled by the drift of Baptist schools toward liberalism, and following the example of his mentor H. Boyce Taylor, he founded a school for preachers in 1950. It became Lexington Baptist College and trained hundreds of pastors before it closed in 1999. Bro. Kazee and Bro. Brong, whose sermons are also preserved here, both taught there. He retired from Ashland Avenue in November 1966 after fifty years. A series of strokes slowed him, and he spent his last months in a nursing home. He died there on August 11, 1968, while his church was holding its Sunday morning service.

Buell Kazee was born on August 29, 1900, in Magoffin County, Kentucky, to parents who both sang. He came to faith at the Mash Fork church and was preaching by seventeen. He studied languages at Georgetown College. Bro. Kazee was also a gifted banjo player and ballad singer, and he made records for a New York label beginning in 1927. Still, he saw music as a pastime and the ministry as his calling.

After a church music post in Oklahoma and a teaching job at Cumberland College, he pastored First Baptist Church of Morehead for 22 years. In 1952 he left Morehead to teach Old Testament at Lexington Baptist College. He later pastored Devondale Baptist Church in Lexington for 12 years. He wrote three religious books and one on the banjo. During the 1960s folk revival he performed again, including at the Newport Folk Festival. He died of a heart attack on August 31, 1976, and is buried in his family's cemetery at Mash Fork.

Rosco Brong was born on March 16, 1908, in Monroe County, Pennsylvania, and moved to Kentucky in 1926. He joined the Baptist church at West Liberty in 1933, was ordained the next year, and served as its pastor for eight years. For nearly two decades he also helped his father run the Licking Valley Courier, a weekly newspaper. He married Virginia Conley of Falcon, Kentucky, in 1930. Bro. Brong earned degrees from Georgetown College and the University of Kentucky, where he studied ancient languages. Over 34 years he pastored churches in five Kentucky counties, ending with Pitman Creek Baptist Church in Pulaski County.

He joined the Lexington Baptist College faculty in 1952, teaching Bible and the biblical languages, and became Dean in 1954. He retired in 1979. For two decades he wrote weekly sermons and Sunday School lessons for the Ashland Avenue Baptist paper, and he published five books between 1962 and 1977. He died of cancer on July 9, 1985.