The Bluegrass and Beyond

Harold Slade, 93, straightens one of many buildings he made from old picture mat board for a scale model of downtown Cynthiana in the late 1800s. Photos by Tom Eblen 

CYNTHIANA — There is a lot of history in this little town, and more of it than you can imagine is stuffed inside a former movie theater and roller skating rink.

The Cynthiana-Harrison County Museum is like a well-organized community attic. A hodgepodge of treasures are displayed alongside relics from everyday life, things that otherwise might have been sold off, thrown away or lost to time and change.

This museum has been a 19-year labor of love for Harold Slade and a group of his neighbors, who have lived a good bit of Harrison County history themselves.

“There’s not many things in the museum older than me,” said Slade, 93, a retired factory worker who never liked history in school but has made it a second career.

The museum opened in 1994. By 2007, it had outgrown its first home and was moved to the long-vacant Rohs Theatre, which also once housed a skating rink. The museum’s collection now fills almost every square foot of the place. Still, the all-volunteer staff always finds room for more.

Cynthiana has had a few brushes with history, including two Civil War battles, both involving Confederate Gen. John Hunt Morgan. Battle-related items include a state historical marker that stood along a roadside until a schoolboy noticed that one of the battles’ date was wrong.

“They made a new one for the highway,” Slade said. “We got this one.”

The museum has artifacts from all aspects of Harrison County history and life. There is the oldest known copy of a Cynthiana newspaper, The Guardian of Liberty from July 14, 1817, and a wicker body basket once used by a local undertaker.

Harrison County schools are represented with dozens of school yearbooks, trophies and class photos. A mannequin wears a uniform from Harrison County High School’s marching band.

On one wall is a framed letter written by statesman Henry Clay. On another, a giant Kentucky map made of buttons. There are lots of old tools, including the stone axes of prehistoric Harrison Countians.

WCYN Radio’s old control board is preserved here, as are spare pipes removed from the Methodist Church organ when it was renovated in 1935.

The museum includes some of Slade’s own history, from his World War II Army uniform to the attendance book he kept as a scoutmaster. Among the Boy Scouts’ names is one Joe B. Hall, the future University of Kentucky basketball coach.

Hall isn’t Cynthiana’s only claim to fame. The museum has the black robe worn by Mac Swinford, an influential federal judge who died in 1975, and an exhibit of Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy dolls. The children’s storybook characters were created by Johnny Gruelle, whose father was born in Cynthiana.

Local business memorabilia includes tobacco artifacts and items from the Webber sausage plant, which started here in 1930. The company was later bought by ConAgra and left town in 1994 after the factory was destroyed by a grease fire.

Harrison County once had more than 30 bourbon distilleries, making whisky under such names as Old Tub and Belle of Harrison. The prize of the museum’s bottle collection used to be an unopened bottle of Old Van Hook from before Prohibition. Then, one day, it disappeared from its display case.

“A few weeks later somebody brought the empty bottle back to us,” said Mary Grable, secretary of the non-profit trust that owns the museum. “We think we know who drunk the whisky.”

Perhaps the museum’s most interesting piece is a huge scale model of the town as it looked in the late 1800s. Dozens of buildings were accurately recreated from bits of colored picture frame mat board by Slade and Neville Haley, who died in 2009.

Each building is an amazing work of intricate detail. The layout includes a model of the long covered bridge that for more than a century crossed the Licking River that runs through Cynthiana.

Donald Hill made the bridge from wood salvaged from the real bridge, which was demolished in 1948 after it was replaced by a new concrete bridge named for Morgan, the Confederate cavalry raider.

“Didn’t make a lot of sense,” said Randall Boyers, 86, a museum volunteer. “The man burns the town and they name a bridge after him.”

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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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Mel Hankla, as Cassius Marcellus Clay, in front of White Hall. Photo by Mark Cornelison

There are only a handful of images of Clay, so Breeding couldn’t do it Ken Burns-style. He certainly didn’t have enough money to hire actors, costume designers and set designers to re-create all of the necessary scenes from Clay’s life.

Then Breeding remembered Kentucky Chautauqua, a Kentucky Humanities Council program in which amateur actors dress up as historic figures and tell their stories.

The result of Breeding’s two-year project isCassius Marcellus Clay: An Audacious American, a fast-paced film that combines still images and monologue performances by 13 actors, including six from Kentucky Chautauqua. Lexington author Betty Boles Ellison wrote the script. The only non-Kentuckian in the production is the main narrator, Peter Thomas, one of television’s most recognizable voices.

“I needed characters, and the Humanities Council had a bunch of them,” Breeding said. “I like this format.”

The documentary will have a gala premiere Sept. 27, complete with Civil War musicians and a 15-minute performance by Kentucky Chautauquan Obadiah Ewing-Roush. He will portray abolitionist John G. Fee, who founded Berea College on 10 acres that Clay gave him.

The documentary was filmed in high-definition video at Clay’s mansion, White Hall, now a state historic site in Madison County. With a budget of about $38,000, from a KET production grant and money raised from eight private sponsors, Breeding and his friends did much of the work themselves. But what they lacked in production resources was more than made up for in story material.

Cassius Marcellus Clay (1810-1903) was a son of Green Clay, Kentucky’s largest owner of land and slaves, and a cousin to statesman Henry Clay. While a student at Yale University, Cassius Clay heard social reformer William Lloyd Garrison preach against slavery and was converted.

Clay returned to Lexington as a fiery emancipationist. He published an anti-slavery newspaper, The True American, that was highly unpopular in slave-holding Lexington. Clay always carried a pistol and knife, which he used against attackers on several occasions. He guarded his newspaper office near Main and Mill streets with a cannon.

Rich, handsome and arrogant, Clay served in the General Assembly and the Mexican War. Although commissioned a major general during the Civil War, he spent most of that time as Abraham Lincoln’s ambassador to Russia. Clay urged Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, and he dreamed of one day becoming president.

Clay was a lover as well as a fighter. He had 10 children during a stormy 45-year marriage to Mary Jane Warfield that ended in divorce, plus an adopted son he apparently conceived during an affair while in Russia. At age 84, Clay married a 15-year-old girl, who also divorced him.

Virginia Carter, executive director of the Humanities Council, said she hopes Breeding’s film will draw more attention to the 20-year-old Kentucky Chautauqua program and its performers, who last year did 507 performances in 102 counties.

Clay is portrayed in Breeding’s documentary by Mel Hankla, a teacher who for 17 years has performed the roles of frontiersmen George Rogers Clark and Simon Kenton for Kentucky Chautauqua.

“I did a lot of reading to get inside Clay’s head,” he said. “It was a lot of fun.”

It is ironic, Hankla said, that when he first decided to develop a Chautauqua character two decades ago, his friend, former Gov. Louie Nunn, urged him to do Cassius Clay. Nunn was an admirer of Clay, and Nunn’s wife, Beulah Nunn, was instrumental in the restoration of White Hall during the 1960s.

“He told me that Cassius Clay’s life ought to be a movie,” Hankla said of Nunn. “He said, ‘This story has it all!’”

If you go

Gala premiere of Cassius Marcellus Clay: An Audacious American

When: 7 p.m. Sept. 27

Where: The Kentucky Theatre, 214 E. Main St., Lexington

Cost: Tickets are free in advance — request them at Michaelbreedingmedia.com — and $10 at the door. Proceeds will benefit White Hall Foundation for restoration and purchase of artifacts. Breeding said he will give DVDs of the film to anyone who attends the premiere wearing period costume.

TV: There will be 14 showings of the film in October on KET. (Go to KET.org for dates and times.)

Watch an excerpt from the film here:

Cassius Marcellus Clay: An Audacious American, Sept. 27, 2012 – The Kentucky Theatre from Michael Breeding MEDIA on Vimeo.

 Nancy O’Malley, a UK archaeologist, led a dig at Fort Boonesborough to learn more about the siege of 1778. She is holding what she thinks is one of the more accurate drawings of the fort. Photo by Tom Eblen

When I read in June that a University of Kentucky archaeologist was doing the first major exploration of Fort Boonesborough in 25 years, I had to know what she found.

Nancy O’Malley wasn’t just looking for 18th century artifacts, although she found some: a hoe, a skillet, buttons, buckles, bullets, hand-wrought nails, forks, bits of English ceramic and a blue glass trade bead.

O’Malley, an expert on Kentucky pioneer settlements who first confirmed Fort Boonesborough’s location in 1987, was trying to figure out exactly how much of the fort still exists. She was specifically searching for evidence of the most famous event that occurred there: a nine-day siege 234 years ago this week in which Daniel Boone and a small group of pioneers repelled an attack by several hundred Native Americans.

“This siege is just completely out of the ordinary in terms of what was happening in Kentucky during the Revolutionary War,” O’Malley said. “On the face of it, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense — some of the things that happened and, more to the point, some of the things that didn’t happen.”

While East Coast colonists were fighting the British for independence, settlers were streaming across the mountains into Kentucky. Shawnees and other northern tribes were alarmed and tried to run them out. The British took advantage of the situation, offering bounties for settlers’ scalps.

Boone, an explorer, hunter and surveyor working for the Transylvania Co., established Boonesborough in 1775. As Native American attacks escalated, the fort became an important shelter.

Shawnees captured Boone in February 1778 while he was with men who had gone to Blue Licks in what is now Nicholas County to make salt. Boone convinced them not to kill him and the 30 salt-makers, but to take them back to their villages as captives. Boone also made vague promises about arranging for Boonesborough’s surrender.

Blackfish, the Shawnee chief, grew fond of Boone and adopted him as a son, giving him the name Shel-tow-ee, which meant “big turtle.” But when Boone heard tribe members plotting to attack Boonesborough, he escaped and returned to warn the settlers and strengthen the fort.

Warriors from five tribes arrived at Boonesborough with a dozen French Canadians working for the British. Boone estimated the force at nearly 450, although O’Malley suspects it was smaller. Still, they greatly outnumbered the approximately 40 men and 95 women and children inside the fort.

After chastising his “son” for running away, Blackfish asked Boone to surrender the fort. During two days of negotiations, the chief promised settlers wouldn’t be harmed if they became captives. Boone made excuses and stalled for time.

“Of course, everybody was lying through their teeth,” O’Malley said. “Once it was clear the settlers were not going to give up, it was pretty much no holds barred.”

For nine days — Sept. 9-17, 1778 — settlers and warriors waged a battle of constant rifle shots. The attackers sent torches and flaming arrows into the fort, but settlers, helped by steady rain, extinguished the flames.

“There was a lot of trash talk going on,” O’Malley said. “And inside the fort there’s all this subterfuge.” Women dressed as men and hats were put on sticks along the stockade fence to make the garrison appear bigger.

“You have this huge force against this very limited number of people who are holed up in a pretty rickety fort,” O’Malley said. “I still don’t understand why the Indians didn’t figure this out.”

The Canadians convinced the warriors to try to dig a tunnel more than 100 feet from the Kentucky River bank into the fort, but, after days of work, the rain-soaked ground collapsed. Why didn’t they just storm the place? That probably would have worked, O’Malley said, “but that wasn’t a typical Indian tactic.”

After losing about 35 warriors while killing only two settlers, including a black slave, the attackers gave up and left. “All of these things could have gone differently,” O’Malley said. “There was a lot of luck involved.”

With a $27,000 grant from the National Park Service’s American Battlefield Protection Program, O’Malley hopes to use historical archaeology to learn more about what happened and where.

She fully excavated a stone foundation and hearth she found in 1987 and now believes was Squire Boone’s gunsmith shop in the center of the fort. Evidence she found, compared with a survivor’s crude map, have led her to conclude that the tribes camp was about where the state park’s miniature golf course is now.

Using ground-penetrating radar, O’Malley hoped to find evidence of the tunnel, but she didn’t. “Unfortunately, with bank erosion, I’m pretty sure this tunnel is downstream,” she said.

The biggest challenge has been figuring out all of the dramatic changes in Boonesborough’s landscape over the past two centuries: later structures, massive silting and erosion, rechanneling of creeks and construction of park facilities.

O’Malley plans to keep looking at physical evidence and historical records to try to clarify the often conflicting accounts of siege survivors, whose memories were colored by the passage of time and other versions they later heard and read.

“There were just so many things about the siege that were very strange, and so many funny stories, that after a while you wonder what to believe,” O’Malley said. “History is a messy business.”

Helm Place on Bowman Mill Road. Photos by Tom Eblen

Do political disagreements make things tense in your family? It could be worse. You could have been Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln.

They were in a tough spot: He was leading the Union through the Civil War. She had 14 brothers and sisters from Lexington; most were Southern sympathizers, and three were killed in Confederate service. Lincoln threatened to jail one of his wife’s sisters when she came to visit, but she still kept smuggling contraband to the South.

Hardest of all was the strain war created between the Lincolns and their favorite Todd relatives: half-sister Emilie Todd Helm and her husband, Benjamin Hardin Helm, a Confederate general.

After Helm was killed in battle, his grieving widow and her three children made tense visits to the White House. Lincoln’s political enemies howled that he was sheltering a traitor. Even the children quarreled: Tad Lincoln said his daddy was the president, but little Katherine Helm insisted the real president was Jefferson Davis.

You know how most of this story ends: The Union prevails; Abraham Lincoln is assassinated; Mary Todd Lincoln struggles with mental illness. But what about her favorite little sister, Emilie, the prettiest of the Todd daughters? The Kentucky Mansions Preservation Foundation will soon be able to tell that story.

Helm Place, the Greek Revival mansion on Bowman Mill Road where Emilie and her children spent the last decades of their lives, has been donated to the foundation to become a museum. There is a lot of renovation and fund-raising ahead, but the mansion already contains enough Lincoln, Helm, Todd and other local artifacts to get off to a great start.

The foundation will celebrate the gift at a dinner and presentation about Helm Place on Sept. 18 at Malone’s Banquets, 3373 Tates Creek Road. Tickets are $38 for members, $42 for others. For reservations, call (859) 233-9999 by Sept. 10.

“This place is a treasure, and we’re excited about the possibilities,” said Gwen Thompson, executive director of the Mary Todd Lincoln House, which also is operated by the foundation.

Mary Genevieve Townsend Murphy, a co-founder and longtime board member of the foundation, left Helm Place to it in trust after her death in 2000 and the death of her husband, Joseph, in April 2011. The foundation took control of the 150-acre property in March and has spent the past few months installing a high-tech security system and live-in caretaker.

Oddly enough, the first white settler on the property was the Todd sisters’ grandfather Levi Todd, who built Todd’s Station fort there in 1779. But because of Indian attacks, Todd abandoned the claim and moved closer to Lexington.

The land later went to Abraham Bowman for his service in the Revolutionary War. In the 1850s, one of Bowman’s descendants built the mansion, originally called Cedar Hall, which sits on a hill at the end of a majestic lawn.

Emilie Todd Helm and her grown children bought the mansion in 1912 — almost exactly a century before the foundation acquired title. Katherine, an accomplished painter, did several family portraits for the house and painted a dining room mural depicting nearby South Elkhorn Creek at sunset. One of her portraits of Mary Todd Lincoln now hangs in the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House.

Emilie Helm remained an unreconstructed Confederate until her death in 1930. When Elodie, her youngest daughter, was getting old, she sold the house in 1946 to William H. Townsend, a Lexington lawyer, author and accomplished Lincoln scholar and collector. His daughter Mary moved in with Elodie, who died in 1953. Mary married Joseph Murphy in 1960.

William Townsend, who died in 1964, amassed an amazing collection of Lincoln and early Kentucky artifacts, many of which remain in the house with the Helm family’s possessions. They include several portraits by Matthew Jouett; a table made by Abraham Lincoln’s father; writer James Lane Allen’s desk and documents signed by Lincoln and Henry Clay.

The foundation’s next step is to conduct a study of the mansion’s possibilities as a museum, decide on a plan and raise the money to make it happen. Thompson said she didn’t know how long it would be before Helm Place could welcome visitors.

“Our big priority since March has been making sure the property is secured and cared for,” she said. “We’re just taking it a step at a time.”

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I first became fascinated with Civil War history as a boy in the 1960s, soon after the centennial celebration.

Many of the books I found in the Lexington Public Library — then located in the Carnegie building in Gratz Park — made that history seem remote. They told of epic battles in Virginia, Tennessee, Maryland and Pennsylvania. They showed pictures of Atlanta, Charleston and Richmond — the one in Virginia, not the one down the road.

I had no idea then how much Civil War history lay just beyond those library walls.

America is now in the midst of a more nuanced commemoration of the Civil War’s sesquicentennial. There is less focus on gallant cavaliers and more reflection on the causes and legacies of that terrible, transformative war.

That makes this the perfect time to take a short history walk through downtown Lexington. There are no forts or battlefields to see. But it would be hard to find another few blocks of American soil so intimately associated with the Civil War’s key political figures, central issue and deep divisions.

Begin your walk in Gratz Park at the James Lane Allen fountain. This is where Transylvania’s main building stood in the 1820s when Jefferson Davis was a student. After a couple of years, Davis transferred to West Point. He later became a U.S. senator from Mississippi and the only president of the Confederate States of America.

Transylvania’s main building burned in 1829. Years later, former student Cassius M. Clay revealed that the mysterious fire was started by his slave, who fell asleep with a candle burning while polishing his master’s shoes. Clay, the son of one of Kentucky’s largest slaveholders, became one of slavery’s most outspoken critics. In the 1840s, he published an abolitionist newspaper, The True American, from an office on Mill Street near the corner of Main.

Walk through Gratz Park to the corner of Market and Second streets. There is the Bodley-Bullock House, an 1814 mansion that served alternately as Union and Confederate headquarters when each army occupied Lexington during the Civil War.

Walk across the park to another 1814 mansion, at the corner of Second and Mill streets. It was the home of Gen. John Hunt Morgan, a cavalry raider known as the “Thunderbolt of the Confederacy.” It is now a museum owned the Blue Grass Trust for Historic Preservation. (Hours and information: BluegrassTrust.org.)

Before proceeding on Second Street, look down Mill Street toward First Presbyterian Church. It surrounds a small brick building that was the law office of Henry Clay, America’s most influential politician of the early 19th century.

Clay negotiated political compromises over the expansion of slavery that delayed the Civil War for nearly four decades. (Learn more about Clay at his Ashland estate: HenryClay.org.)

At the corner of Second and Broadway, you will see a parking lot that was the site of Transylvania University’s renowned medical school, which closed in 1857. The building burned in 1863 while being used as a Union Army hospital.

Look down Second Street and you will see a marker outside the last home of John C. Breckinridge, whose career illustrates how the Civil War divided the city and the nation. This Lexingtonian was the 14th vice president of the United States, then a presidential candidate in 1860. When war came, Breckinridge sided with the South, becoming a Confederate general and secretary of war.

Walk down Broadway toward Short Street. You will see the Opera House, built in 1886. Before the Civil War, this was the site of a business operated by W.A. Pullum, one of the city’s many “negro dealers.” Lexington was one of the South’s biggest slave-trading centers.

Take a right on Short Street, past Saints Peter & Paul School and St. Paul’s Catholic Church, and you will see a marker noting the birthplace of Mary Todd Lincoln, the wife of President Abraham Lincoln. Her grandmother, Eliza Parker, lived next door. Neither house remains.

Lincoln visited his wife’s family in the fall of 1847. The man who would later abolish slavery was then a freshman congressman from Illinois, just beginning to grapple with the issue. That visit to Lexington might have given Lincoln his most close-up look at the South’s “peculiar institution.”

From the Parker house, historian William Townsend wrote, Lincoln easily could have looked past the spiked fence into Pullum’s compound, which had rows of eight-foot-square slave “pens” and a whipping post.

Follow Short Street to Jefferson Street, turn left and cross Main. The Mary Todd Lincoln House museum in a restored home where the future first lady lived from 1832, when she was 13 years old, until she moved to Illinois in 1839. (Hours and information: MTLHouse.org.)

That’s a lot of Civil War history in less than a mile.

The Fountain of Youth, a gift to the city from the estate of the writer James Lane Allen, is on the north end of Gratz Park on the site of the original building of Transylvania University.  Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, studied in that building in the 1820s before transferring to West Point.  Photos by Tom Eblen

A groundskeeper last week prepared for Transylvania University’s graduation. In the foreground is Gratz Park, the former site of Transylvania’s main building, where Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, studied in the 1820s.

The Bodley-Bullock House, built in 1814, served as headquarters for both Union and Confederate armies when control of Lexington changed hands during the Civil War. The house is across Gratz Park from Hopemont, home of Confederate Gen. John Hunt Morgan.

Hopemont, built in 1814, was the home of Confederate Gen. John Hunt Morgan, a notorious cavalry raider.

Hopemont was saved from demolition by the Blue Grass Trust for Historic Preservation in 1855 and is now a museum.

Transylvania University’s Medical Hall stood where this parking lot is now at the corner of Broadway and Second streets. The building was being used as a Union Army hospital during the Civil War when it burned in 1863.

The Lexington Opera House, built in 1886, on Broadway just north of Short Street, stands on the site that in the 1840s was Pullum’s slave jail. Abraham Lincoln’s closest personal exposure to slavery may have been seeing Pullums while visiting his wife’s grandmother, who lived on Short Street adjacent to the jail.

A plaque noting Mary Todd Lincoln’s birthplace stands outside her former home on Short Street. The house in the background replaced an earlier one that was home to her grandmother, Eliza Parker.

The Mary Todd Lincoln House is where Abraham Lincoln’s wife lived from 1832, when she was 13, until 1839, when she moved to Illinois, where she met Lincoln. The house, originally built in 1806 as an inn, is now a museum.

Lexington’s Kinkead House is much more than just another historical home. For nearly a century and a half, its occupants have been on the cutting edge of progress.

The mansion was built in 1847 by Abraham Lincoln’s local lawyer, abolitionist George B. Kinkead. After the Civil War, he realized that former slaves would want to own their own homes, so he bought land for them behind his estate. Kinkeadtown became the heart of what is now the East End neighborhood.

A century later, Kinkead’s descendants shared the dream of residents who thought Lexington’s young people needed more exposure to science and the arts. In 1971, they loaned and later donated the mansion and surrounding 1.5 acres to become the Living Arts and Science Center.

The next chapter of the story begins Wednesday, when the LASC launches a $5 million capital campaign to renovate the Kinkead House and more than double the center’s size and programming capacity with a beautiful contemporary addition.

LASC will add a 65-seat planetarium/auditorium, a digital arts center, a recording studio, a children’s art gallery, more classroom and meeting space, and a guest artist’s studio. There also will be a “teaching kitchen” for uses as varied as teaching neighbors to prepare and preserve food they grow in their gardens and classes in chocolate sculpture. A “magic carpet” walkway, which includes outdoor sculptures, will tie the campus together.

The campaign begins with $300,000 in grants and donations, plus a $1 million matching grant from the W. Paul and Lucille Caudill Little Foundation. The LASC board hopes to raise the rest of the money by summer 2013.

“It’s hard to raise $5 million in this environment without some credible reasons,” said downtown developer Phil Holoubek, who with his wife, Marnie, is leading the campaign. “But this project can be a game-changer. We can better serve the community and improve the neighborhood and downtown.”

The LASC’s mission is to use art and science to inspire children and adults. During the past year, more than 6,000 school children from 21 Kentucky counties took field trips to the center, executive director Heather Lyons said. The LASC offered more than 400 classes and workshops, plus frequent community events.

The expansion already is creating buzz, because the Kinkead House addition promises to be one of Lexington’s most exciting pieces of contemporary architecture. It is the work of Louisville’s De Leon & Primmer Architecture Workshop, which two weeks after receiving the LASC commission last year won a prestigious Design Vanguard Award from Architectural Record magazine.

Architect Ross Primmer said the design is based on extensive conversations with the board, staff and neighbors of the LASC, which faces North Martin Luther King Boulevard between Campsie Place and East Fourth Street.

“It’s like they were hearing everything we were thinking,” said Kathy Plomin, the LASC’s development director.

The 11,000-square-foot addition is really a separate building, tucked along the south side and back of Kinkead House, complementing the scale of the 7,000-square-foot mansion and surrounding homes. An outdoor classroom separates the two buildings, which are connected by a glass walkway. Parking will move away from the front to create a larger lawn.

Primmer said the addition will have walls of dark-green wood siding and clear glass to visually connect with the outside and allow people to see inside. It will meet environmentally friendly LEED Silver standards and minimize energy use.

Steve Kay, an Urban County Council member who lives on Campsie Place, is excited about the LASC’s expansion and the new programming it will make possible. “We’re thrilled that such a good neighbor is investing in the neighborhood,” he said.

The design follows a trend of modern-style additions to classic old buildings. When designed well, these additions both honor the integrity of the historical structure and become a more functional piece of contemporary architecture.

“The goal is to create something that fits with it, but doesn’t mimic it,” Primmer said of the Kinkead House.

“I think it’s just brilliant,” Mayor Jim Gray said of the design. “This project is an example of great urban planning and great architecture that respects the character of the historic neighborhood and lifts it up. This is extremely exciting.”

PARIS — Every house has a story, but few have one as glorious and notorious as The Grange — from its opulent architecture to the dungeon in the cellar.

Owners Phil and Lillie Crowley were living in Lexington in 2003 when a Realtor told them The Grange was for sale. At first, it was beyond their means. But they couldn’t stop thinking about it.

“I walked in here and dropped my jaw; then the next day Phil came to see it and dropped his jaw,” said Lillie Crowley, a former math professor at Bluegrass Community and Technical College.

“I thought it was spectacularly beautiful,” said Phil Crowley, a biologist and ecologist at the University of Kentucky. “And the history was fascinating — it wasn’t all good, but it was fascinating.”

The Crowleys will open The Grange for a public tour Sunday to benefit the preservation group Historic Paris-Bourbon County.

Edward Stone began building the home that he called Oakland in 1800 on land his father received for Revolutionary War service. Construction took nearly 20 years, and Stone spared no expense. One of his professions was builder, and he apparently wanted to advertise his workmanship.

The Grange is considered one of Kentucky’s finest Federal-style homes. The five-bay front façade is flanked by pavilions with elaborate Palladian windows set in gently curved brick. The main floor has 14-foot ceilings and is trimmed with lavish woodwork and mantles. A leaded-glass fanlight and sidelights around the front door illuminate the main hall’s grand staircase.

But Stone was better known for his other profession: slave trader. Even many slave owners of that era looked down on slave traders because of their cruel methods. Few were more infamous than Stone, who might have been the inspiration for Mr. Haley, the unscrupulous slave trader in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s influential 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Stone marched long lines of chained men and women nearly 40 miles to Maysville, where he literally “sold them down the river” to Deep South cotton plantations. He also kept slaves chained to the walls of a dungeon beneath The Grange’s elegant front hall.

Manacles were removed from the walls and bars from a small window just a few years ago, Crowley said as he took me down to see the dungeon. All that remains of the room’s evil past are iron hinge posts for what must have been a heavy door.

Stone’s business eventually caught up with him. On a trip down the Ohio River in 1826, some of the 77 slaves he was taking to New Orleans overpowered and killed him near Owensboro.

Oakland was sold in 1832 to Hugh Brent, who renamed it Brentwood and left doodles on the walls of an upstairs bedroom for the Crowleys to find more than 170 years later, when they removed several layers of wallpaper.

The mansion, renamed The Grange about 1900, would have 11 more owners before the Crowleys bought it and the surrounding 33 acres.

“We’ve really tried to maintain the historic integrity of the architecture and still make the place livable,” Phil Crowley said of the 4,600-square-foot house, which didn’t get indoor plumbing until 1906. “Heating and cooling have been an issue, but our new geothermal system has made a big difference.”

Restoring and furnishing The Grange has become an expensive hobby.

“I needed a new car, and I got this instead,” Lillie Crowley said, pointing to a huge, circa 1800 English mahogany breakfront cabinet they bought for the dining room. A massive antique bed in the guest room came with the house — probably because it was too big to move.

The most challenging project has been remodeling the kitchen. It is in the home’s oldest wing, and contractor Jim Hodsdon found a shriveled shoe while gutting a former sleeping loft there. The shoe probably belonged to Stone.

The Crowleys have collected a pile of artifacts during renovation, from pieces of pottery to the bars from the dungeon window. Thankfully, though, they haven’t encountered any ghosts of people who were once chained below their front hall.

“Talk about a place with a rotten soul,” Phil Crowley said. “It’s hard to wrap your head around.”

If you go

Tour of The Grange

When: 2-5 p.m. Oct. 2.

Where: 1366 Millersburg Rd. (U.S. 68)

Tickets: $15, $10 for Historic Paris-Bourbon County members. No reservations needed.

Learn more: (859) 987-7274

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Maryjean Wall learned a lot about the “Thoroughbred capital of the world” in 35 years as an award-winning racing writer for the Lexington Herald-Leader. But it wasn’t until she retired and finished her doctorate in history at the University of Kentucky that Wall figured out how it came to be.

Kentucky’s domination of Thoroughbred breeding during the past century wasn’t really about the mineral-rich bluegrass and limestone water, although they certainly helped. It resulted from a chain of events during the turbulent decades after the Civil War that Kentuckians cleverly exploited.

Maryjean Wall. Photo by Mark Cornelison

It involved crafting an Old South image for Kentucky at the turn of the last century that appealed to the nation’s richest horsemen — and all but erased African- Americans from the picture. Wall pulls this story together in a new book, How Kentucky Became Southern: A Tale of Outlaws, Horse Thieves, Gamblers, and Breeders (The University Press of Kentucky, $29.95)

I had heard pieces of this fascinating story for years. When Wall was still at the Herald-Leader and I was the managing editor, she would occasionally wander into my office and tell me about her research.

The finished book is a remarkable page-turner that earned glowing cover blurbs from some of the best historians of Kentucky and Thoroughbred racing. The book puts together many pieces of a complicated puzzle, and it is filled with well-documented stories that explain a lot about the evolution of Kentucky society and the horse industry.

Kentucky dominated Thoroughbred breeding in the early 1800s, thanks to its grass and water. But the Civil War devastated Kentucky’s economy; much breeding stock was killed, stolen by raiders or moved out of state for safe-keeping.

Northeast industrialists and Wall Street speculators emerged from the war as the nation’s richest men, and they embraced the “sport of kings.” They began buying the best mares and stallions and installing them on new farms in New York and New Jersey.

Kentucky breeders realized they were losing their grip on the industry and needed to attract that Northeast capital. But there was a problem: Kentucky had a well-deserved reputation for violence and lawlessness that scared away the tycoons who now dominated horse racing.

Kentucky was a Civil War border state that officially remained loyal to the Union. But as industrialization led to more anxiety and racism in American society, the public imagination was captured by “lost cause” nostalgia for an idealized Old South.

Until the 1890s, African-Americans had been some of the most successful jockeys and trainers. Jockey Isaac Murphy became a rich man. But as racism grew, blacks were forced out of all but the most menial horse racing jobs, not just in Kentucky but across the nation.

Wall writes that Kentucky breeders eagerly exploited this Old South myth to rebrand the state. Novelists and newspapermen started depicting a land of white-suited “Kentucky colonels” on columned verandas — a place where the living was easy for wealthy white people and black folks knew their place.

New York’s leading equine journal, Turf, Field and Farm, published by Lexington-born brothers Benjamin and Sanders Bruce, offered Northeast horsemen a steady drumbeat of Bluegrass boosterism.

That led several Northern moguls, including August Belmont and James Ben Ali Haggin, to start breeding farms near Lexington. Many more followed after anti-gambling forces outlawed racing in New York and many other states about 1910.

Modern Kentucky has many legacies from this period, including the large number of absentee farm owners and a professional class of bloodstock agents, trainers, veterinarians and others who have made horses a vital part of the state’s economy.

“I hope readers put this book down with a greater respect for the (horse) industry,” Wall said over lunch last week. Like many, Walls fears for the Thoroughbred industry’s future in Kentucky, but she thinks the solutions are more complex than the long fight over expanded gambling.

“It was never a given that the horse industry would stay here after the Civil War, and that is still relevant today,” Wall said. “The grass was never enough. And it’s still not enough.”

Consider the archaeologist’s challenge: Figure out how people lived and their societies worked centuries ago, based on little more than what remains of their bones, their buildings and a few timeworn artifacts.

And then there is the unknowable: What were their joys, sorrows, hopes and dreams?

“There are so many bigger questions out there,” said Kelli Carmean, an archaeologist, anthropology professor and chair of Eastern Kentucky University’s Department of Anthropology, Sociology and Social Work.

Carmean, 50, wrote a conventional archaeology book, Spider Woman Walks This Land: Traditional Cultural Properties and the Navajo Nation, in 2002 that drew on her research into Native American cultural anthropology.

But she wanted to do more, and she needed another vehicle to do it. So she recently published Creekside: An Archaeolog ical Novel (University of Alabama Press, $27.50)

“The tools of archaeology are really good, but they can’t re-create individual lives,” Carmean said. “So I decided to use fiction to try to imagine some of these things and tell people more about archaeology and why this is important.”

Creekside weaves together two fictional stories, separated by two centuries.

The first story is about Virgil and Estelle Mullins, a young 18th-century couple who leave family in Virginia to cross the mountains and settle in the wilderness of Central Kentucky. Over three generations, the family experiences joys, hardships and tragedies common to people in those times. Before the Civil War, descendants abandon the farmstead for urban life.

The second story is about Meg Harrington, a 21st-century archaeologist who is working with students to excavate that pioneer farmstead. They must work quickly because bulldozers will soon turn it into a subdivision called Creekside.

Carmean faced the usual challenges of writing historical fiction: creating characters with whom readers can identify and rich, interesting plots grounded in historic accuracy. But with a twist.

As chapters go back and forth in time, the reader learns details of the pioneer family’s life that the archaeologist can only speculate about: the violence and accidents that left disfigured bodies in graves; deeply personal stories behind bits of ceramic and jewelry found buried in the soil.

Carmean wanted to explain something about archaeological excavation techniques and artifact analysis. “It’s an effort to bring the public into archaeological thinking and processes,” she said, adding that it bears little resemblance to an Indiana Jones movie.

Although Carmean’s research has focused on Native American cultures, she decided that her first novel should tell the story of white settlers because readers could more easily identify with them. She is working on a second novel about Native Americans who populated Kentucky long before it was “discovered.” That novel’s working title is The Village at Muddy Creek.

Creekside explores the tension between preservation and development. Carmean is passionate about preventing destruction of archaeological sites so they can be studied into the future. The more we know about the past, she said, the better we can understand the present and gain insight for the future.

Preservation is problematic because it often comes down to money. Archaeologists usually have few resources to work with, and ancient and historic sites are usually destroyed to make way for well-financed development.

The academic culture of archaeology, which is focused on data collection rather than storytelling, often hurts archaeologists’ ability to communicate their values. “We’re not providing the general public with what they hunger for,” which is the humanity of our ancestors, Carmean said. “We have the tools, but we just haven’t done it.”

Carmean hopes Creekside will help change that. “You have to write about it in such a way that people will pay attention to it,” she said. “You have to make them want to take a more active role … and educate themselves about the scale of the destruction around us, the destruction that accompanies modern life.

“We lose something with each site destruction,” she said. “The past and vestiges of the past are important because they enrich our communities. They help us understand more about the human condition.”

How did Central Kentucky become the Horse Capital of the World? A clever combination of good geology, good marketing and good luck.

When the first white settlers arrived in the 1770s, they discovered that horses grew strong and fast from drinking the limestone water and munching bluegrass grown in the mineral-rich soil. Race horses became a big business until the Civil War made a mess of things.

By the late 1800s, Northeast industrialists discovered the “sport of kings” and began breeding and racing operations in New York and New Jersey. But savvy Kentuckians lured them here with a clever marketing campaign built around an Old South myth of the mint julep-sipping Kentucky colonel. That story is told in the soon-to-be-published book, How Kentucky Became Southern, by retired Herald-Leader turf writer Maryjean Wall (University Press of Kentucky, $29.95)

This is a big year for horses because of the Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games, Sept. 25 to Oct. 10. The Games will be at the Kentucky Horse Park, which is a great place to learn about our equine heritage.The Lexington Convention and Visitors Bureau has information about horse farm tours. And every April and October, you can see “racing as it was meant to be” at Keeneland Race Course.

But horses are just one part of Central Kentucky’s rich and colorful history waiting to be explored. This has been a popular tourist destination since Native Americans began wandering through about 13,000 years ago. When white surveyors first came here in 1750, Kentucky was a hunting ground for the Shawnee, Iroquois, Cherokee and other tribes.

By the 1770s, Britain’s colonies along the East Coast were getting crowded, and real estate speculators began eyeing land beyond the mountains. Richard Henderson bought much of Kentucky from the Cherokee in one of history’s biggest private land deals. Henderson tried to form his own colony, Transylvania, and hired a frontiersman named Daniel Boone to blaze a trail through the Cumberland Gap.

Boone also built Fort Boonesborough along the Kentucky River, not far from James Harrod’s fort at Harrodsburg, the first permanent settlement west of the Allegheny Mountains. Harrod’s fort has been reconstructed at Old Fort Harrod State Park in Harrodsburg, and a reconstruction of Boone’s fort can be seen at Fort Boonesborough State Park (for information on both, go here).

Authorities were not amused by Henderson’s land grab, and they voided his claim. Kentucky became a Virginia county and then, in 1792, the 15th state.

Land-hungry settlers rushed to Kentucky, in part because of author John Filson, whose 1784 best-seller, The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke, described this region as a “new Eden.” One place still recognizable from Filson’s descriptions is the Kentucky River Palisades, or steep limestone cliffs. You can see them on the one-hour Dixie Belle River Cruise from Shaker Landing.

The Shakers, a religious sect, sought their own Kentucky Eden, founding a utopian community in Mercer County in the early 1800s. The Shakers made elegantly simple furniture, architecture, crafts and music. But they didn’t believe in sex, which is why there are no more Shakers. The restored Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill near Harrodsburg is a great place to visit, stay overnight, eat and shop.

People found that Central Kentucky’s limestone water made good whiskey as well as strong horses. More than 90 percent of the world’s bourbon is still made here, and several distilleries welcome visitors.Buffalo Trace Distillery in Frankfort has tours but isn’t part of the official Bourbon Trail.

Agriculture and trade made Lexington the most prosperous and cultured town in western America in the early 1800s. Young men came from all over to study at Transylvania University, and Lexingtonians proudly called their town the “Athens of the West.”

Loyalties were divided during the Civil War. Lexington was a big slave-owning town, but it also had been home to Henry Clay, who for decades fought harder than anyone else in Congress to preserve the union. Mary Todd, a Lexington girl, might have been married to Abraham Lincoln, but that didn’t stop many of her relatives from fighting for the Confederacy.

Lexington has several historic home museums that offer a glimpse into aristocratic 19th-century life, including Waveland State Historic Site (Parks.ky.gov); the Mary Todd Lincoln House; Ashland, the Henry Clay Estate; and the Hunt-Morgan House.

Downtown and surrounding neighborhoods are filled with history. The Blue Grass Trust for Historic Preservation has mapped a Bicycle Tour of Historic Lexington (drive if you must), and Doris Wilkinson, a University of Kentucky sociology professor, developed an African-American Heritage Trail.

For an overview of local history, visit the Lexington History Museum downtown. A good place to explore Kentucky history is the Thomas D. Clark Center for Kentucky History in Frankfort.

This column is from the LexGo Guide to Central Kentucky. To read other articles from the Guide, click here.

It’s hard to imagine our nation’s early presidents as real people. We know them only as images of stern-faced men in funny clothes, staring back at us from history books, paintings, money – and newspaper ads for President’s Day sales.

But to Horace Holley, they were friends and pen pals. Holley was himself a president, of Transylvania University, from 1818 until a few months before his death in 1827.

I didn’t know much about Holley until recently, when I got an excited call from my older daughter, Mollie, who works in Transylvania’s public relations office.

“I held letters today written by John Adams and James Monroe!” she said.

She had been in Transylvania’s Special Collections department, doing research for a university Web site feature she writes called Transy Trivia. It sounded so interesting, I went over and spent an afternoon looking through Holley’s papers.

The carefully preserved documents reveal what a well-connected man Holley was, and they offer revealing glimpses of some early American presidents and their wives – warts and all.

Holley came to Lexington from Boston, where he knew Adams and his son, John Quincy Adams. His wife, Mary Austin Holley, was a cousin of Stephen F. Austin, a Transy alum for whom Austin, Texas, was later named. Holley was a Unitarian minister and admired educator who helped burnish Lexington’s image as the “Athens of the West.”

There are faded letters from the second president, hard to read except for the end: “… and real affection, your friend and humble servant, John Adams.”

Adams gave Holley a glowing letter of introduction to the third president, Thomas Jefferson. In September, 1824, Holley spent two days visiting Jefferson at his Monticello estate near Charlottesville, Va.

“Mr. Jefferson is a plain looking old gentleman, draped in a blue coat with yellow buttons, a buff jacket, a pair of snuff colored corduroy pantaloons, blue and white cotton stockings and black slippers up at the heels,” Holley wrote to his wife.

“He is grey, tall, square shouldered, takes long steps, and has not now a clear voice. His muscles are not vigorous, but his hand trembles little, and is not observed to tremble at all as he uses at table. He rides on horseback daily in fair weather, but walks out seldom. … He talked easily still, though 82, and preserves the faculties of his mind in vigorous operation. His memory fails of course in regard to names and more recent events, but his judgment is unimpaired.”

Holley wrote a Kentucky friend that Jefferson questioned him closely about Transylvania. At the time, Jefferson was lobbying Virginian officials for support of the new University of Virginia. He argued that if Virginia didn’t invest in a first-class university, the state’s brightest young men would leave for either Transylvania or Harvard. Of the two, Jefferson said, he preferred Transylvania.

That may have been because Jefferson had high expectations for Kentucky’s future. “The time is not distant … when we shall be but a secondary people to them,” Jefferson wrote to Adams in May 1818.

Holley’s papers include several letters from James Monroe. Holley wrote to his wife from Washington in April 1818, describing visits to Monroe’s White House, which only recently had been rebuilt after British troops burned it during the War of 1812.

Holley bragged that Monroe wrote him a letter of introduction to the governor of Virginia: “He voluntarily gave it, and the offer of it took me by surprise.” But he devoted most of the letter to detailed descriptions of what Mrs. Monroe and other ladies were like and were wearing.

“Mrs. Monroe … appeared so much handsomer to me in full dress than she did the evening before in common dress and a cap that was not becoming,” he wrote. “She is … 52 years old, and I never saw a woman of that age appear so young.”

Monroe and Andrew Jackson visited Lexington on July 4, 1819, and heard Holley preach. In 1823, the Holleys went to Nashville, Tenn., where they spent several days at The Hermitage as guests of future President Jackson and his controversial wife, Rachel.

In a letter to his father, Holley described Jackson as “one of the most hospitable men” in Tennessee. “The general gave me many anecdotes of his wars with the Indians. … He is a prompt, practical man with very correct moral feelings.”

Holley added: “Mrs. Jackson is not a woman of cultivation, but has seen a great many people, has fine spirits, entertains well and is benevolent. She is short in her person and quite fat.”

At the end of several such letters, Holley asks that his observations be treated with discretion. Nearly two centuries later, the letters are more enlightening than embarrassing. They show that American icons were people, too.

FRANKFORT — Margaret Robinson Robertson lived in the Old Governor’s Mansion in the early 1840s, when son-in-law Robert Letcher was the governor. Legend has it that her ghost appears whenever evil befalls the house.

The way the place looks now, don’t expect to see her any time soon.

The 211-year-old mansion has just undergone a privately financed $1.5 million face lift so it can take on a new role as the state’s guest house and official entertainment space for the governor.

The magnificent renovation was a statewide, all-volunteer effort involving more than 300 people, including designers, decorators, contractors and donors who each adopted small parts of the mansion.

The renovation will be unveiled later this month with a series of big-ticket events, proceeds from which will benefit the Kentucky Executive Mansions Foundation and Kentucky Equine Humane Center. The home will then be open for $10 public tours Sept. 19 to Oct. 3.

“We wanted the house to be a welcoming spot for people who come to Kentucky,” said David Buchta, state curator and director of the Division of Historic Properties. His office oversaw the renovation with the mansions foundation and Kentucky Historic Properties Advisory Commission.

“It’s a great shrine to Kentucky’s history,” said Steve Collins, chairman of the commission and son of former Gov. Martha Layne Collins.

The home was first occupied in 1798, two years before the White House. For many years, it was the nation’s oldest executive residence.

The mansion housed 33 Kentucky governors until 1914, when the current governor’s mansion was built beside the “new” Capitol. From 1956 to 2002, the old mansion housed 10 lieutenant governors.

Eight U.S. presidents have visited the mansion, from James Monroe to Bill Clinton, as well as such notables as Henry Clay, Aaron Burr and William Jennings Bryan.

“There’s no other house in Kentucky that has been used like this one — that has the stories and history and reputation,” said Collins, a Shelbyville lawyer and funeral director.

The General Assembly put up money to build the governor’s mansion in 1795 after the state’s first governor, Isaac Shelby, convinced lawmakers that a rented log cabin just wouldn’t do. It was completed in 1798.

Although the mansion’s federal-style exterior was rather plain, it was called the Palace when Shelby’s successor, James Garrard, became its first occupant. It was the first home in Frankfort with carpet. A crowd gathered when the city’s first piano was delivered to its parlor.

Two men who helped build the house later lived there: Thomas Metcalfe, a stonemason who helped lay the foundation, was governor from 1828 to 1832; and Letcher, who helped lay the Flemish-bond brick, was governor from 1840 to 1844.

The house hasn’t been occupied since 2002, when then-Lt. Gov. Steve Henry moved out to make way for a renovation. Last year, the idea emerged to turn the home into a state guest house, like Blair House in Washington.

(Francis Preston Blair, by the way, was a Frankfort journalist who moved to the nation’s capital in 1830. Seven years later, he took up residence in the Pennsylvania Avenue house that now bears his name.)

First lady Jane Beshear, former first lady Phyllis George and Meg Jewett, owner of the L.V. Harkness & Co. gift shop in Lexington, led the renovation effort. They and others recruited volunteers and donors from all over.

Longwood Antique Woods of Lexington donated flooring for the downstairs powder room. The wood came from the Lexington barn of 1937 Triple Crown winner War Admiral.

Louisville artist Sandy Kimura donated nine weeks of her time to paint a mural around the main hall in the style of early 19th-century Zuber wallpaper. It incorporates Kentucky scenes, such as Daniel Boone looking across the Cumberland Gap and the gentlemen on the state seal shaking hands, for which Buchta and Collins posed in period wigs.

“I’m going to get it out and wear it to some of the events,” Collins joked.

The house now contains a treasure trove of Kentucky furniture and art. There’s a rare 1815 cherry Sheraton sideboard in the dining room, thought to be the work of a Maysville cabinetmaker. Other items include chairs from Henry Clay’s law office, and modern Appalachian furniture and crafts that furnish a third-floor bedroom.

Other furniture and art has been donated or is on loan from the state, the Kentucky Historical Society, the Speed Museum, the Filson Club, the Art Museum at the University of Kentucky, the Rebecca and Jay Rayburn Collection and several individuals.

Recognizable to many Kentuckians will be four original paintings by Paul Sawyier, whose Kentucky landscapes from a century ago remain popular as prints.

“Every room has something significant,” Buchta said. “Without the generosity of a lot of people, this project wouldn’t have been nearly as successful.”

As a former resident of the mansion, Collins said he is especially appreciative of all of the people who have made it a showplace.

Collins was a student at Georgetown College when his mother was elected lieutenant governor in 1979. He lived in a third-floor bedroom and remembers the mansion as a busy place that was used for many public functions.

Collins said he encountered many people in the mansion, but not the ghost of Margaret Robinson Robertson.

“We never saw her,” he said. “But we felt very safe when we lived here.”

• If you go

  Kentucky Mansion Celebration

  ■ First Ladies’ Luncheon, noon, Sept. 15, $110.

  ■ Brunch in the Garden with Jon Carloftis, 11 a.m. Sept. 16, $110.

  ■ Governor’s Barbecue & Unbridled Spirits, 7 p.m. Sept. 17, $210.

  ■ Preview Gala, 7 p.m. Sept. 18, $300.

  ■ Public tours, Sept. 19-Oct. 3. $10.

  For tickets and more information, go to www.kymansioncelebration.org or call (502) 226-6440.

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As a small crowd looked on, the ceremonial reopening of the Lexington Public Library’s Kentucky Room ended Wednesday with two white- gloved librarians carefully placing in a glass display case a copy of Kentucky’s second-oldest newspaper: the Kentucke Gazette of Aug. 18, 1787.

So where’s a copy of Kentucky’s first newspaper — the Kentucke Gazette of Aug. 11, 1787? That’s a good question.

“I just have to think somebody, somewhere has one in their attic or an old trunk,” said Library director Kathleen Imhoff. “And I hope if somebody ever finds one, they’ll let us know.”

In the late 1700s and early 1800s, Lexington was one of the major cities in what was then the West. Several local newspapers sprang up soon after John Bradford began publishing his then-weekly Gazette.

The library has a substantial collection of old Lexington newspapers, including the most complete archives of the Gazette. Except for that first issue.

One story holds that somebody, many years ago, was looking at the library’s copy of the first Gazette, let it get too close to a coal stove and — poof! But that may just be a story, said Jan Marshall, the library’s assistant manager in charge of the reference department.

No other copies of that first issue of the Gazette, which measured about 8 x 10 inches and probably contained four pages, are known to exist.

The Kentucky Room reopened Wednesday after an extensive renovation made necessary by a water leak that  flooded the library on Feb. 21, 2007. Of course, the room containing the library’s most precious books and manuscripts was the most heavily damaged. But quick, tireless work by the library staff enabled everything to be salvaged — even waterlogged books that had to be sent off to Chicago to be freeze-dried.

All it needs now is a copy of Kentucky’s first newspaper.