Restoring Shakertown: The Struggle to Save the Historic Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill

IV. The Past—Preserved, Restored, Remade?

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CHAPTER IV The Past—Preserved, Restored, Remade? O n April 11, 1799, one day before his twenty-second birthday, a promising young Kentucky lawyer named Henry Clay was married to Lucretia Hart, the daughter of Colonel Thomas Hart, a well-to-do pioneer Lexington merchant. The wedding took place at the home of the bride’s family, a substantial two-story brick house of some twelve rooms, which sat at the southwest corner of Second and Mill streets in the young city. After Colonel Hart’s death several years later, his son, Thomas Jr., sold the house to John Bradford, who in 1787, with his brother, Fielding, had established the Kentucky Gazette, the first newspaper to be published west of the Alleghenies. In 1789 John Bradford had also published Thomas Johnson’s Kentucky Miscellany, the first book of a literary nature to come from a Kentucky press. One of the founders of the Lexington Public Library , in 1795, this early-day leading citizen published a number of other notable works in his long career, including a book that later became extremely rare and a coveted item among bibliophiles, Narrative of the Life andTravels of John Robert Shaw, theWell-Digger. Bradford lived in the house until his death in 1830. Sitting diagonally across Second Street from Gratz Park, the “Bradford 25 The Past—Preserved, Restored, Remade? house,” as it was often called, belonged to what became Lexington’s most fashionable neighborhood. In 1848, the house served as the setting for a second wedding of special interest, when a young man who, like Henry Clay, would also rise to national prominence, John Hunt Morgan, was married to Rebecca Gratz Bruce. Still later, Mary Jane Warfield Clay, divorced wife of the combative emancipationist Cassius Marcellus Clay, moved into the Bradford house, accompanied by her daughter Laura, a controversial figure in her own right as one of the leading voices in the national women’s rights movement. By the 1950s the house was possibly the oldest, as well as one of the most storied, of the eighteenth-century houses still standing in Lexington. And then, one day in March 1955, it was gone. No one in the 1950s could summon much surprise at the sight of a property owner demolishing a 1792 house to make way for a parking lot. That was what governments were doing, too, and on a much larger scale, leveling whole neighborhoods and districts for slum clearance or, as it had come to be more euphemistically called, urban renewal. But this time, the destruction of this single house did not pass unnoticed by all Lexingtonians. Concerned residents of the Gratz Park neighborhood, in particular, suddenly wondered what might happen to the house directly across Second Street from the Bradford house. Once the finest of all the elegant residences on Gratz Park, but now divided into apartments and up for sale, this house had been built in 1814 for John Wesley Hunt, possibly the first Kentuckian who could be considered a genuine tycoon, with his extensive mercantile (including the making and marketing of hemp products), banking , and horse-breeding interests; his wife was Francis Scott Key’s cousin. The home’s graceful spiraling staircase led many to attribute the design of Hopemont, as the house was called, to the noted architect Benjamin Latrobe. Later, Hunt’s grandson and namesake, the ubiquitous John Hunt Morgan , had occupied this house, and still later his great-grandson Thomas Hunt Morgan, the eminent geneticist who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1933, had lived there. Something must be done; the house must be saved—otherwise, one day soon, the town might wake up to discover that its past had simply vanished, turned into parking lots. That was the feeling. Perhaps there was something new in the air in 1955, in Lexington and 26 RESTORING SHAKERTOWN in other cities. Just that same year, after seeing the venerable City Market demolished to make way for a parking garage, citizens of Savannah were organizing to stop the razing of a handsome 1821 brick structure, the Isaiah Davenport house. It was not that the developers saw no value in the old house. Quite to the contrary: they planned, after disassembling the building , to sell the bricks while they were proceeding to convert the site into still another parking lot. The people of Savannah had already acquired a good deal of experience in...