Kentucky's Frontier Highway: Historical Landscapes along the Maysville Road

19. Paris toward Blue Licks

191 19 Paris toward Blue Licks Mile 0.0 From the Bourbon County Courthouse Square, the road leads northeast toward Maysville. The Elks/Masonic Lodge/Bourbon Hotel building, built circa 1901–5, stands on the left at the corner of Main and Bank Row. The four-story structure is of brick construction with stone trim in a Romanesque-inspired style. The Elks Lodge, B.P.O.E. no. 373, erected the building and used the upper two floors as club rooms. The Freemasons rented part of the building for several years and then bought it in 1926. The Bourbon Hotel moved here in the 1940s from a former Main Street location. Along Main Street between Third and Second streets, several nineteenthcentury commercial buildings front the road northeastward from the courthouse square. In the nineteenth century’s first decade, the town building pattern in Paris still exhibited the traditional habit of assembling dissimilar land uses and structures— business, industry, and residential—together in awkward ways. Yet the settlement also exhibited features of the newly emerging mercantile town in which superior transport links fostered the growth in local and regional commodity manufacturing, a proliferation of artisans’ workshops—tailors, cobblers, bakers, and blacksmiths, among many others—and specialized retail activity.1 In the block from Third to Second streets, for example, the businesses on the right side included a saddlery, a drugstore, two dry goods stores, and Hughes Tavern; the Indian Queen Tavern stood at the corner of Second and Main. Across the street stood two malodorous tanneries, a mere half block from the courthouse, nuisance industries that were usually banished to the periphery in larger settlements. Beyond Second Street, a saloon, bakery, cabinet shop, residence , blacksmith shop, and hat shop fronted the street on the left.2 Mile 0.1 The railroad bridge here crosses U.S. 68. The highway bridge replaced a covered wood-frame bridge named the Cottontown Bridge for the cotton spinning mills that operated at creekside during the nineteenth century. Early nineteenthcentury industries such as grist- and sawmills depended on waterpower and were perforce located at those points along a stream’s course where falls or rapids provided power potential to turn a mill wheel. Lacking sufficient natural falls along a stream, millers could dam a stream at a point near a road access point, such as this one, and build an extended millrace to bring water from a point well upstream, or use In the first North Main Street block north of the Paris courthouse square, commercial buildings dating from the 1870s to 1890s undergo stabilization and refurbishing. The facades’ formal cornices and window hoods disguise the complex land uses that coexisted here in the nineteenth century—taverns, blacksmith shops, and a bakery, residence, and tannery. Paris toward Blue Licks  193 a different mill-wheel configuration to provide power. When stationary steam engines became available in the trans-Appalachian west, they were readily applied to small industrial operations such as cotton mills. Mile 0.2 After we pass beneath the railroad viaduct, the small stone structure on the left is the old Paris Gas Works building. The Paris Gas Company was organized in 1866 and erected this building, complete with low, arched windows, in the late 1860s. Now painted white, the structure houses a veterinary clinic. Crossing Stoner Creek on the highway bridge, we come to the Paris Milling Company on the right, which operated a flour mill here. The mill buildings still stand and the milldam still spans Stoner Creek. Farmers’ Tobacco Warehouse no. 3 stands adjacent to the mill buildings. Mile 0.3–0.5 Just as the southern gateway into Paris featured a row of burley The Paris Milling Company was the latest and most modern of the mills that occupied this site from 1800. Traditional water-powered wheels turned millstones for eighty years, producing thousands of barrels of wheat flour and cornmeal. The arrival of roller-mill technology ushered milling into the modern era, which foreshadowed the end of small-scale traditional custom mills. Paris Milling Company marketed the “Purity,” “Crystal,” “Bourbon Belle” (for fancy baking), and “Success” brands, all made from Kentucky winter wheat, as well as cornmeal ground from locally grown corn. (Courtesy of the University of Kentucky Library Special Collections) 194  The Maysville Road: A Landscape Biography tobacco auction warehouses, the north entry also hosted a “tobacco row.” Some tobacco warehouses still stand on the left along this...