Democracy's Lawyer: Felix Grundy of the Old Southwest

9. Greenville Springs

9 Greenville Springs There was a great collection of people at the Springs in 1807 and 1808.    —Henry Speed he frontier fostered an entrepreneurial culture of opportunity and risk. Fortunes could be quickly won and quickly lost. Both of Grundy’s parents displayed ambition and drive, and their youngest son inherited a heady dose of the same spirit. Much of the entrepreneurial economy originated in land, either in outright speculation or in the more sober assessment that the continued flow of settlers ensured appreciation. Felix Grundy never lost his interest in making money through real estate, and he invested in land throughout his career, with political activity typically followed by entrepreneurial initiatives. Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, Grundy did not focus on large-scale speculation until late in life; instead he engaged primarily in what would now be called development. Grundy’s real-estate investments began early, as he was establishing his legal practice at age twenty. In addition to purchases for a home and an office , Grundy bought lot 31 in the new town of Springfield and built a house, which he leased in August 1797 for three years at 30 pounds annually. He also bought a lot in Greensburg, in Green County, on April 5, 1798, and recorded a grant of 495 acres on Pleasant Creek in Nelson County. Subsequently, on October 23, 1800, Grundy made one of his first major acquisitions: 1,480 acres on Meadow Creek, in Green County, adjacent to Rodgers Mill, where his fatherin -law lived, for 518 pounds. In three separate transactions he also acquired approximately 540 acres on Buffalo Creek in Nelson County, including 300 acres of a 400-acre tract originally purchased by his father almost twenty years earlier . In acquiring land during his early years of practice, Grundy followed a pattern regularly repeated in the antebellum South, where successful lawyers became the single most influential class.1 76 T Greenville Springs � 77 A much more significant real-estate investment occurred in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, in 1807, shortly after Grundy became chief justice of the court of appeals. Natural springs, long known to the Indians, attracted rich and poor alike for their healing benefits. Grundy had been impressed by the success of a retreat for the Bluegrass gentry some forty miles north of Lexington, purchased and improved by Colonel Thomas Hart, Henry Clay’s entrepreneurial father-in-law. By 1805 the Olympian Springs included cabins, lodges, and a dining room that seated one hundred. The salubrious waters drew some, but most visitors came for social purposes, with the resort given to cards, billiards, and horse racing. When Grundy learned of springs at Harrodsburg, thirtyfive miles southeast of Lexington, he became the driving force behind one of the first real-estate developments west of the Allegheny Mountains, a resort to compete with Olympian Springs.2 The Reverend Jesse Head, of Springfield, served as the broker for this initiative . Head, a Baltimore-born cabinetmaker, migrated to Kentucky in 1796, where he was a close friend of Grundy’s. He became a Methodist minister and succeeded Grundy as chairman of the board of trustees of Springfield. While visiting Harrodsburg in 1806, Head saw his health improve dramatically when he took the iron and saline waters on the 228-acre farm of Captain Lucas Van Arsdal, immediately south of the town. Head soon extolled the potential of the springs to his friend Grundy, living in Bardstown.3 At about the same time, Head unknowingly ensured his place in history. On June 12, 1806, at the farm of the bride’s uncle, some eight miles north of Springfield, Head married twenty-three-year-old Nancy Hanks and twentyeight -year-old Thomas Lincoln, the younger brother of Grundy’s client Mordecai Lincoln. While it is almost certain that the thirty-year-old Grundy knew Thomas Lincoln, we can only speculate as to whether he attended the wedding of Abraham Lincoln’s parents. One year later, on June 12, 1807, Grundy acted on the enthusiastic reports of Jesse Head, purchasing a one-half interest in the Van Arsdal farm, including the springs. According to the agreement between Grundy and Van Arsdal , never recorded and apparently superseding an earlier document signed at Frankfort on May 26, 1807, Grundy was to pay 750 pounds for half of the farm, 600 pounds of which was to be in the form of another good farm in Mercer County. Grundy further agreed that if he had not found such a farm by Christmas...