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V. Nickels, Dimes, and Options
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34 RESTORING SHAKERTOWN 34 CHAPTER V Nickels, Dimes, and Options T he Lexington citizen probably most disturbed by the destruction of the Bradford house and the threatened loss of Hopemont lived not in the downtown Gratz Park neighborhood but several miles away, on the northern fringe of the city. That made no difference—Joseph C. Graves, vice president and operating head of the old-line family clothing firm Graves, Cox and Company, seemed to look on all of Lexington as his neighborhood, and the well-being of your neighborhood was something you worried about. A short, slender man of forty-nine, Joe Graves, though remarkably public-spirited, lacked the glum seriousness with which many doers of good tend to view the world. Widely popular, he enjoyed jokes and witty exchanges, and he never really outgrew his childhood love of pranks. During World War II, Graves had made a unique contribution to morale by writing letters “to his footloose correspondents”—some thirty or forty friends in all branches of the service in all parts of the world—telling them what was going on at home. “They give a marvelous picture of Lexington during the war years, with a light touch,” said Graves’s son, Joe Graves Jr. (Speaking of “the seriousness of the liquor situation,” Graves told his correspondents that “an honest bottle of bourbon is as hard to find as a nice girl in a Limestone Street bar,” and he gave regular reports on his comic vendetta with a moralizing army vice officer, a hapless Captain Witherspoon, who kept a nervous eye on the activities of GIs and WACs either stationed 35 Nickels, Dimes, and Options in the area or in transit.) Graves would type his letter on Sunday and take it to the office the next day to be mimeographed and mailed. After returning home following the war, his footloose friends honored him with a dinner of appreciation. Graves read widely and had a number of aesthetic interests; in particular , he devoted a great deal of time to printing, a hobby he shared with his wife, Lucy. Under the tutelage of Victor Hammer, the Viennese artist and typographer whom he had been instrumental in bringing to Transylvania College (as the school was then known), the Graveses established the Gravesend Press in the basement of their house, where they set type by hand and printed and bound books.The first Gravesend offering, The Mint Julep, a Christmas keepsake published in 1949, made quite a splash and was reprinted a number of times; other Gravesend books drew such patrons as the British Museum, the Houghton Library at Harvard, and the Newberry Library in Chicago. At several different times Graves also taught graphic arts at Transylvania College, and since 1953 he had been president of the Henry Clay Memorial Foundation, the organization that preserved Clay’s residence, Ashland, as a public museum. Even before the demolition of the Bradford house, Graves had dreamed of making some kind of organized effort to preserve Lexington’s landmarks from the wave of postwar destruction assaulting every city in the country. The leveling of the house at Second and Mill streets, almost overnight, and the threat to its neighbor across the way then pulled the trigger. Moving rapidly, Joe and Lucy Graves rounded up a group of concerned friends, including Carolyn Reading (soon to become the wife of Victor Hammer), Lucretia Johnson, Van Deren Coke, Suzanne Hamilton, Edward W. Rannells, and a number of others. As noted earlier, through the hundred years since Ann Pamela Cunningham founded the organization that saved Mount Vernon, women had taken prominent roles in projects to save American material history, and preservationist activities in the Blue Grass in the 1950s and 1960s would conform to this same pattern; in an era in which well-to-do women were generally not involved in the job market, philanthropic activities depended heavily on their knowledge and energy. (The style of the time is shown by their listing in documents and news stories by the names of their husbands; thus “Mrs. Lawrence Brewer” rather [44.223.31.148] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 11:54 GMT) 36 RESTORING SHAKERTOWN than “Juliette Brewer.”) Michael Wallace, the historian who objected to preservation-by-elite, perhaps had not reflected that without the labors of such elites, the coming of preservation would have been delayed by more than a century and might never have happened at all. Who else had the time, the money, and the inclination? The organization...