A Shotgun House and a Lost Census: 305 Harrison Avenue, Mt. Sterling, Kentucky

The loss of the 1890 census, any historian or genealogist will tell you, was devastating. When a fire broke out in the Commerce Building in Washington, DC in 1921, I don’t imagine many people thought about the results of that conflagration, and the destruction of the information gathered in the Eleventh Census. For me, trying to tell the story of a peculiar little house, it means that 20 years of life and life events are simply untraceable. Combining the scarcity of personal information with a structure I’ve only seen from the exterior translates into a lot of guess work. But the shotgun house that Kittie Ryan Reasor Holliday called home for 14 years is worth some guesses and lots of head scratching.

Façade of the house in question.

Harrison Avenue, located in Ward 2 of Mt. Sterling in the 19th century, was a large undeveloped property in 1879, when Beers & Lanagan published an atlas of Montgomery County. As you can see on the superimposed image below, the location of Harrison Avenue was an expansive parcel belonging to a Dr. J. A. Hannah. (One of several doctors in town at the time, he was one with considerable personal property to his name.)

Google imagery of Mt. Sterling, Kentucky, overlaid by the 1879 Atlas.

But Mt. Sterling, long the nexus of several important roads (when the roads were passable, that is), was straining to expand. The Elizabethtown and Big Sandy Railroad finally arrived in the town in 1872, and though the line ended in Mt. Sterling, it doubled the population of the town and created new opportunities for development. When the railroad finally reached Ashland in 1881, granting an eastern connection to merchants, farmers, and industrial concerns, the need for new houses – especially middle-class homes – was made possible by the development of large parcels of land like Dr. Hannah’s.

A section of the 1901 Sanborn Fire Insurance map showing what Harrison Avenue looked like that year. Sanborn maps are color coded – yellow denotes a frame (built from wood) house.

When development began in 1880, Harrison Avenue and Queen Street were laid out in order to maximize profit. The streets were fairly narrow, only 20 feet wide from curb to curb. Lots were also narrow, so that more houses could be constructed – and most of the houses were frame (wood cost less than brick). There is a minimal setback – that is, the houses are placed close to the street.

The predominant house type was a T-plan, a dwelling that in plan (if you were to look down on it from above) looks like the letter “T” set on its side, with the cross bar of the T being a gable fronted wing. (You can read more about this house type at this link.)

A T-plan house, the most common house form on the street. Circa 1991 image from the NRHP files.

In addition to the one-story T-plans that form the majority of the historic dwellings on the street, there are some lovely little asymmetrical cottages that defy categorization, and tall, two-story T-plans with ample porches and machine-made ornamentation to delight they eye.

But that very urban house plan suited for narrow lots, the shotgun house, was not built along Harrison Avenue. Except, it seems, on one of five lots that W.W. Thompson purchased from G.W. McCormick in 1892. Of course, that is assuming the house is indeed a shotgun in plan – from the sidewalk, it looks as though it started off as a single room brick building, with frame additions added over time.

A side view.

Or could it have served as professional or commercial use when the neighborhood was being developed? The single opening on the facade is unusual for a dwelling, and suggests that the brick portion may have originally been – an office? Maybe even a doctor’s office? Perhaps it even began as a brick outbuilding for one of the homes along North Maysville Street, and was later adapted into a dwelling?

I am full of hypotheses.

Scale wise, this brick smokehouse in Washington County, Kentucky, is not far off the dimensions of the brick portion of the Harrison Avenue house.

A shotgun house is a historic house plan rectangular in plan, one-story high, one-room wide, and three to four rooms deep. The facade typically has a door and a window, or a door and two windows. (Double shotguns would have two entry doors.)

A typical plan of a shotgun, drawn by William J. Macintire.

McCormick, the founder of the McCormick Lumber Company, sold the lots for $65 and the trade of some land in Kansas. Seven years later, Thompson, a banker and apparently part-time real estate speculator, sold a house and lot to Mrs. Kittie Reasor for $500.00.

While it’s not uncommon for a woman to be listed on a deed by herself in 1899 – it’s not something I see often. If they are listed on a deed, it is usually with their husband. My curiosity increased. Who was this Kittie Reasor and where did she come from?

The house Kitty Reasor purchased is similar, in plan, to this Lexington, Kentucky house. But this house has a more common fenestration pattern of a window and a door on the facade.

She was born around 1869 as Katherine Ryan, to a father from Limerick, Ireland. In 1880, she lived in Nicholas County, Kentucky, and at some point (here I put considerable detective skills to work ) she met Price Reasor (also later spelled as Razor), who had been born at Howards Mill in Montgomery County in 1868. But since there is no 1890 census…I don’t know where she living, or what she was doing, or if she was married – or where she was living! (Unlike some larger towns, there were no city directories produced for Mt. Sterling.)

But I do know there was a baby.

From the September 6, 1892 edition of the Mt. Sterling Advocate – this and the 1880 census are all I can find of poor Price Reasor.

In the 1900 census, I found Kittie and her little girl. According to the official records, she was Katherine Holliday, with a 10 year old daughter named Ethel Reasor and a husband by the name of William Holliday.

But what happened between the time that Price Reasor departed the earthly world at his mother’s home and 1900? How did Kittie and Ethel live? How did she make a living? (And why couldn’t I find anything indicating Kittie and Price were married?)

A section of the 1908 Sanborn map showing 305 Harrison Avenue.

Compounding my frustration over not knowing what Kittie Ryan was doing in 1890 is the fact that although Harrison Avenue opened up in the 1880s, the section where she lived is not shown on the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps until 1908. That map only shows buildings with letters, indicating an area newly inside the city limits, and the houses had not yet been assigned street numbers.

It was a little house on a small lot. Three rooms, the first of brick, and two rooms built of frame, the rear room having a porch on the side. The middle room is noted as having a tin ceiling. There are no outbuildings to indicate any additional room, for either a privy, or a chicken house, or a garden shed. The front brick room had a chimney, likely with an opening on each side (or a flue for a stove).

A view of the south elevation of the house.

A small house that must have felt even smaller by 1910, when it was home to Kittie, Ethel, Mr. Holliday, and three new children: Elizabeth, Clifford Ryan, and Katherine Holliday (the baby was just 11 months old). Kittie was 40 years old, with a grown daughter and three young children, all living in the small brick and frame house on Harrison Avenue. William Holliday, worked as a laborer in a warehouse.

Ethel worked as a nurse (or was training as one), and according to newspaper accounts I read, spent time visiting family at Spencer (her father’s family, I presume), and other relatives, including her aunt Anna Ryan in Lexington. In 1914, she would marry Leroy Land and live full-time in Lexington.

The 1910 census showing the growing family.

In 1913, the Hollidays sold the house on Harrison Avenue and moved to Winn Street – which was outside of the city limits at the time. Kitty Ryan Reasor Holliday died just seven years later, at the age of 47. “Death claims a good woman” read the headline of her obituary, but extolling her piety does little to reveal her personality.

Her house – of which she was the first owner, I am sure – sold again in 1919, and then remained in the same family until 1966. It has been a rental property since the end of the 20th century, and I imagine there is little original about the interior. So the little house remains shrouded in mystery, as does Kittie Ryan. Sometimes the answers simply cannot be found – although I always enjoy the search.