Adding What You Need: A Vernacular T-plan House in Frankfort, Kentucky

Although I am pretty familiar with downtown Frankfort, there are always interesting historic buildings to spy – or interesting details on buildings some might dismiss as ordinary or plain. Take this two-story frame house for example: a common form in domestic architecture across the Southeast, with different names in different locales. In Kentucky, we call it a T-plan house. And this very average house has a distinctive addition on the south gable end: a small, steep, staircase addition leading to the second story.

The facade and south elevation of the house, showing the staircase addition in foreground.

Splitting a house into apartments is a common practice, and plenty of historic buildings sport an exterior set of steps (or two or three) that provide access to different areas of the dwelling. I like to imagine – for I have no way of knowing – that this diminutive addition enclosed a previous set of exposed, exterior stairs. The enclosure would have been a welcome change for the second floor tenant, providing shelter from the weather, and an end to struggling up the outside steps in the rain with bags of groceries or a squirming toddler.

Façade of the house. The stair addition is at far right.

This house likely dates from the late 19th century. Coverage of the east side of South Frankfort was spotty on the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps until around 1907; that year was the first time that the maps extended coverage of Murray south of Fourth Street.* The 1907 map depicts the two-story house with a basement, a one-story front porch, a rear two-story porch (possibly a sleeping porch), and one frame outbuilding, a wash house.

The porch that is on the house now is most likely from a 1930s renovation. The dwelling retains its wooden, two-over-two double-hung sash windows and at least two interior brick chimneys.

Section of the 1907 Sanborn Fire Insurance map showing the house.

The house appears, since the early 20th century, to have been both a rental and a combination of owner occupied/rental space. In 1910, William A. and Frances  Hamilton and their five children  rented the house. Hamilton was a storekeeper gauger for the Internal Revenue Service.

In 1920, the house was owned by J.A. and Lucy Peters. Mr. Peters was a retired merchant. Renting a  portion of the house (most likely the second story) was the Tilden Lauter (or Lanter) family. Mr. Lauter/Lanter was an engineer at a syrup plant, and shared the house with his wife Myrtle and their eight year old son, Cecil.

Maybe the Peters no longer needed all of the rooms in the house, and in order to provide a bit of additional income in their retirement, decided to make the second story a separate unit?

Though the Peters remained in the house until at least 1924, the Lauter/Lanter family bought a house on East Fourth Street. In the 1930 census, the house had changed hands and was valued at $4,500. The Mooreman family owned and lived in the house: William, his wife Louise, and their adult daughters, Margaret and Hallie. Mr. Mooreman was a night watchman at the lumber mill, and his daughters (listed as boarders, so perhaps the second story was their domain?) were salesladies at Lutkemeier’s Dry Goods Store.

Façade of the house.

It’s not fancy or ornate. But I love the quirk of the little add-on stair to the second story. It’s an expression of how people change buildings to suit their needs, and how wonderfully and easily many historic buildings can be adapted for different uses. The house looks empty right now, so I hope that its next chapter is one that is sensitive to a solid, sensible housing form that has served so many families over the decades.

*The 1896 Sanborn shows the sprawling expanse of the W.A. Gaines and Company Hermitage Distillery, which ran from Second to Fourth Street on the river, but there was no residential construction shown on Murray.