The Bluegrass and Beyond

A Greek Revival addition in1858 created a new front to Bethlehem Farm’s farmhouse, which dates to the early 1800s. Photos by Tom Eblen

PARIS — When Sandra Renfro White was growing up in Texas as the horse-loving daughter of Kentucky-born parents, she dreamed of owning a Bluegrass horse farm.

“This is my childhood dream,” White said of 50-acre Bethlehem Farm. “I come out in the morning with my coffee and look at my horses. Peace and beauty. It doesn’t get any better than this.”

This land just south of Paris and its 200-year-old mansion have been home to many dreamers.

Jacob Aker, a Revolutionary War veteran, settled here and built a small but elegant story-and-a-half brick home in the Federal style around 1810-20. As his family’s fortunes grew, a grand Greek Revival-style expansion was added in 1858, creating a new front entrance.

White bought Bethlehem Farm in 1995 from Vanessa Dickson, an active historic preservationist who is now a state district court judge. Her research got the farm added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1993 as an example of the high-quality construction common on prosperous farms in antebellum Bourbon County.

The public will get to see the beautifully restored house Oct. 21, when Bethlehem Farm hosts the annual Fall Home Tour fund-raiser for Historic Paris-Bourbon County. The preservation group, among other things, operates the Hopewell Museum in Paris, one of Central Kentucky’s lesser-known gems.

Refreshments will be served during the home tour, and rides will be offered in a wagon pulled by a pair of Belgian draft horses.

The original part of the Jacob Aker house is thought to be an early work by John Giltner, a Bourbon County architect and builder known for his fine Flemish-bond brickwork.

Limestone was dug from a quarry on the farm for the foundation of the house and two outbuildings — an office or slave quarters that has yet to be restored and a springhouse that is now little more than a pile of rocks.

Most of the original house is now used as a kitchen and family dining room. The fireplace was restored for use, and White had craftsmen reproduce black walnut cabinet doors to match original ones still in the kitchen.

Greg Fitzsimons, a Lexington architect who specializes in historic preservation, designed a master suite for White using the foundation footprint of the original house’s breezeway and separate kitchen.

The original house’s back porch was converted into a sunroom, where the old brick wall showcases photographs from the Center for Women in Racing, a non-denominational Christian ministry White started in 2000 to help troubled women who have worked in the horse industry.

Fitzsimons recreated the missing front porch from the 1858 expansion by examining old column outlines on the front wall and other physical evidence. The porch was built by mason Ron Carter of Carter and Witt, and Mike Gresham of Gresham Millwork & Supply, both of Paris. The porch’s octagonal columns echo the newel post of the expansion’s grand staircase, which, like most of the home’s woodwork, is original.

White chose the home’s interior palette of reds, blues, yellows and browns from a late 1700s piece of Italian needlework she acquired that depicts the infant Moses being found on the Nile River. Jonathan Moore of Lexington painted many of the walls using a rich, layered technique called Venetian plaster.

The farm has a cemetery with the graves of Aker and six family members who died between 1841 and 1865. A few yards away are several graves with rough, unmarked headstones, thought to belong to slaves.

“The house is very functional now,” said White, who shares the farm with son Daniel and daughter Susanna, both students at Lexington Christian Academy, as well as 14 horses, four cats, two dogs and a pair of canaries, Placido and Domingo.

As her children near college age and she contemplates the future, White is thinking about another long-held dream: making the Center for Women in Racing a more sustainable organization, with permanent facilities where Thoroughbred race horses can retire and female track workers can seek temporary shelter.

White said she has talked with the board of Bethlehem Farm Inc., her non-profit foundation, about buying much of the land around the house for center facilities.

“Or it may be time for me to retire, and allow someone else the privilege of owning this treasure and taking it to the next phase of historic preservation,” she said. “Either way, my dream has been for me, and many others, a lovely reality.”

If you go

Fall Home Tour, annual fund-raiser for Historic Paris-Bourbon County.

When: 2-5 p.m., Sunday

Where: Bethlehem Farm, 795 Bethlehem Rd., Paris

Admission: $10 for HPBC members, $15 non-members.

More information: (859) 987-7274 or Hopewellmuseum.org

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Ed and Kay Thomas were born and raised in Bourbon County but spent 42 years in Pennsylvania, where he worked for GE/Lockheed Martin. As he was nearing retirement, they got to live in England for a couple of years.

But as Christmas Eve 2004 came to Yorkshire, and the Bourbon County Citizen-Advertiser arrived in the mail, they knew they would be coming home soon. Ewalt’s Crossroads was for sale.

Kay’s great-great-great-grandfather, Henry Ewalt, came to Kentucky from Pennsylvania in 1788. He bought 200 acres northeast of Paris and built a home at what is now the corner of U.S. 27 and Clay Kiser Road in 1792, the year Kentucky became a state.

The beautifully restored home, which includes a trove of antiques that the Thomases have collected over the years, will be open as a fund-raiser for Historic Paris-Bourbon County.

The home has been called Ewalt’s Crossroads since at least the 1840s, and it has never left the family. The Thomases bought the home from Kay’s cousin, Joe Ewalt, who acquired it in the 1990s.

At that time, the house was in bad shape, and Ewalt and his wife, Joanne, did significant restoration. They fixed the foundation and front façade and replaced all of the home’s major systems, among other things. They also built an addition with a family room and a first-floor master bedroom.

“Joe baked the cake; what we are doing is the icing,” Kay said. The couple work on the home constantly, and it shows. “We don’t play golf and we don’t play tennis,” she said. “This is our hobby.”

The Thomases, both 71, had restoration experience, having renovated a circa-1840 house in Chesapeake City, Md., that they used as a weekend getaway. Kay made most of the window treatments for Ewalt’s Crossroads, and Ed has been kept busy with carpentry projects.

The 1792 frame portion of Ewalt’s Crossroads retains much original detail: a fortified rear door, made to protect against the Indian attacks that were a serious threat in the area 218 years ago; horizontal cherry board paneling and walnut woodwork, which has always been painted to keep the house from being dark; and fancy crown molding in the front parlor.

A circa 1815 stone addition to the home has walls 22 inches thick and includes an entry hall/formal dining room and a kitchen, dining and family room, where the Thomases spend much of their time.

In the formal dining room, there is a small stairway leading up to a “travelers’ room,” where weary strangers could be offered lodging. The room locked from the outside, though, to keep any of those strangers from leaving in the middle of the night with the silverware.

Don’t expect to see the travelers’ room on the tour; the Thomases use it for storage. “I don’t think we’ll live long enough to ever get it cleaned up,” Kay said.

There’s nothing stuffy about this historic house, because of both its human scale and the Thomases’ classy and humorous decorating. It is an attractive blend of old and new that makes you feel at home. For example, the kitchen table is a 13-foot-long antique from a Paris upholstery shop, and it’s surrounded by modern, shiny aluminum chairs.

Is that an ancestor’s portrait over the parlor fireplace? No, just a regal 18th-century gentleman whose painting the Thomases bought in England.

“We don’t have a picture of Henry (Ewalt), but I like to think he would have looked like this in his later years,” Kay said. “We do have a picture of his son, Sam. He wasn’t the most handsome guy, let’s just say, so he’s hung in a dark corner of the hallway.”

The Thomases brought many treasures to Ewalt’s Crossroads, but the house is constantly revealing its own.

While having fireplaces restored, the Thomases discovered Civil War newspapers stuffed in chimney spaces. When replacing paneling, Ed found a heap of junk stuffed in an interior wall: old shoes, tools, hickory nuts, peach pits and a wicker torch, all well over a century old. The items are now on display.

The surrounding five acres has yielded many pieces of china and pottery dating to the early 1800s. They are displayed in an antique platter made into a table in front of the parlor fireplace.

“We dig things up in the garden all the time,” Kay said. “When I find that stuff out in the yard, I can’t blame it on anybody else. It was my family!”

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