The Bluegrass and Beyond

Mayor Jim Gray often talks about Lexington aspiring to be a “great American city.” But two centuries ago, that is exactly what it was. Many visitors hailed Lexington as the most vibrant and cultured city in what was then Western America.

The reality and myths surrounding Lexington’s so-called Athens of the West era are explored in a new book of essays published by the University Press of Kentucky, Bluegrass Renaissance: The History and Culture of Central Kentucky, 1792-1852.

The book is already in stores, but it will be formally launched at a signing party Sunday, Sept. 16, at 4 p.m. at the Hunt Morgan House, 253 Market Street. The event is free and open to the public.

Bluegrass Renaissance grew out of a series of lectures in 2007 organized by the University of Kentucky’s Gaines Center for the Humanities and others. Book editors James Klotter, Kentucky’s state historian, and Daniel Rowland, a UK history professor and former Gaines Center director, compiled essays by 15 historians and writers, including my older daughter, Mollie, and me.

The book begins with essays by Klotter and Stephen Aron that place Lexington in the national context of the time and discuss the city’s quick transition from frontier outpost to cultured metropolis.

Gerald Smith and the late Shearer Davis Bowman write about slavery, the “peculiar institution” that built the region’s wealth and would eventually play a big role in both economic and moral bankruptcy.

Randolph Hollingsworth writes about the role women played in early Kentucky, while Maryjean Wall looks at the origins of the signature horse industry. Mark Wetherington and Matthew Clarke profile several influential characters, while John Thelin explores the role higher education played in development and civic pride.

Nikos Pappas writes about musical culture, and Estill Curtis Pennington explains how outstanding portrait painters helped bring artistic culture to Central Kentucky and left what little visual evidence we have of that era’s key players.

Patrick Snadon writes about how Lexington’s leading citizens embraced early America’s most accomplished architect, Benjamin Latrobe. He was commissioned to design six Lexington buildings. Only one survives: Pope Villa, one of the most avant-garde pieces of architecture built during America’s Federalist period.

Mollie and I wrote about Horace Holley, a minister lured to Lexington from Boston, and his role in transforming Transylvania University into one of early America’s most highly regarded universities. Transylvania played a central role in Kentucky’s early education accomplishments and Lexington’s “Athens of the West” reputation.

The book’s dates are somewhat arbitrary: 1792 is the year Kentucky became a state, while 1852 is when Henry Clay, Lexington’s most famous citizen, died. In reality, Lexington’s heyday didn’t begin until after 1800, and its economic, if not cultural, fortunes started waning around 1815. By the end of the 1830s, Lexington had begun a long slide into mediocrity and provincialism.

Lexington’s early prosperity was the result of rich soil, slave labor and the city’s prime location as a hub for early Westward migration and trade. But the city began to struggle after the invention of steamboats allowed two-way commerce on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, which favored river cities such as Cincinnati and Louisville.

Slavery became a huge economic and social liability for Lexington beginning in the 1840s, limiting economic innovation and sparking increased social and racial strife. By clinging so long to slavery, a huge amount of Lexington’s economic capital was wiped out by the Civil War; racism and violence that followed stifled growth and new ideas.

Lexington had lost its economic edge and pioneer spirit. With a few notable exceptions, such as the creation and growth of the University of Kentucky, the city remained intellectually and economically stagnant for nearly a century.

In a short essay that ends the book, Gray makes the point that the past informs the present, and history provides valuable lessons for those who seek to shape the future.

Mollie and I certainly discovered that while researching and writing our chapter. The spectacular rise and fall of Holley at Transylvania in the 1820s reflected issues and attitudes that have shaped two centuries of Kentucky history.

Holley saw huge potential in Kentucky and its people, but was bedeviled by religious disputes, power struggles and petty politics. He finally gave up and left Kentucky, frustrated by an anti-intellectual governor who saw more political advantage in building roads than investing in education.

This book’s title is something of a misnomer: “renaissance” means “revival.” The Athens of the West era was actually Lexington’s “naissant” period. Achieving renaissance is our challenge, and we would be wise to learn lessons from the past.

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.

Transylvania University and the North Limestone neighborhood sit side by side — and worlds apart.

Kurt Gohde, a Transy art professor, and Kremena Todorova, an English professor, are trying to do something about that. For the past three years, they have taught a class called Community Engagements Through the Arts. It’s not an art class or an English class. The dozen or so students each year have come from a variety of majors.

“The original idea was that at Transy we needed to be better neighbors to our neighbors,” Gohde said. “We don’t have a lot of windows on that side of campus — just a lot of fences.”

Both the university and the neighborhood have been there for two centuries, and both have had good times and bad. The neighborhood, one of Lexington’s most racially and economically diverse, declined in the 1950s and ’60s as residents moved to the suburbs.

But in the past decade, many young people have been attracted to the neighborhood’s rich diversity and affordable stock of old homes worth restoring — from once-elegant brick mansions to Victorian frame shotgun houses.

An active neighborhood association has worked hard to clean up the area while embracing the many poor people who live there. Three new community gardens are being planted on city-owned lots along North Limestone. Once-seedy Al’s Bar at North Limestone and East Sixth Street is now one of Lexington’s coolest places. Duncan Park has a new summer concert stage.

Still, most North Limestone residents are much different culturally and economically from their neighbors at the private liberal-arts college.

“We want the students to gain an awareness of people who are very close to them that they know so little about,” Todorova said. “We want them to learn how they can connect with people who are not like them. It’s not easy.”

The Community Engagements class started meeting at Al’s Bar, moved to a community center last year, and has met this year in a commercial building being restored at North Limestone and Loudon Avenue.

The first year, the class put together a film exploring misconceptions about the neighborhood. Last year, students organized a show of residents’ eclectic collections at Transylvania’s art gallery.

This year, students worked with residents and others to make nearly 50 colorful quilts that are on display at X Furniture, 760 North Limestone, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. through Sunday.

The quilts will be donated to Build A Bed, an organization trying to gather 2,000 volunteers in Frankfort on May 8 and 9 to build 500 twin-size beds and prepare “bedtime bags” with linens and toiletries for Kentucky children who need them. (For more info: www.build-a-bed.org.)

The class held five “quilting bees” this winter with neighborhood residents and other Transy students. The project’s energy was contagious: One student’s family made several quilts, as did Arturo Sandoval’s art students at the University of Kentucky and children at James Lane Allen Elementary School.

“We found that it was a great way to spend time with people and tell stories,” Gohde said. In addition to making quilts, the students interviewed residents about neighborhood history and lore.

Some students come to the class wanting to “help” the neighborhood, but that’s not the point. “We’re looking for ways to connect with and understand the neighborhood,” Todorova said. “If anything, we’re helping ourselves by educating ourselves.”

Resident Archie Turner has faithfully attended each class, as has neighborhood association president Marty Clifford, a candidate for the Urban County Council’s 1st District seat.

“It has been not only a good thing for the community but for the students,” Clifford said. “It has given everyone a different perspective. There are a lot of hidden jewels in this community that have been covered up by some of the negative things in the past.”

Student Austyn Gaffney, a sophomore from Bowling Green, said she will always remember the 98-year-old African-American lady she met who has told her stories about how the neighborhood and Lexington have changed over the decades.

“Without this class, I don’t think I would have been challenged to do that,” she said. “It’s a start toward building better relationships.”

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.

Nathan Vanderhoof, left, and Randall Smith of the Lexington Fire Department attach a giant flag to the front of Old Morrison hall at Transylvania University on Wednesday afternoon in preparation for the annual patriotic concert Friday evening.

The performance by the Lexington Philharmonic and the Lexington Singers is one of my favorite community events of the year. Come early with a picnic supper, a blanket and folding chairs and visit with your neighbors before the music begins. After dark, everyone will wave little flags and sparklers as the orchestra finishes by playing John Philip Sousa’s The Stars and Stripes Forever.

This year’s concert will have an extra twist: It’s the first performance for the Philharmonic’s new music director, Scott Terrell, who is succeeding local legend George Zack. Read Rich Copley’s article about Terrell here.