Every historic building has a story to tell
Historic preservation doesn’t have a very long history in our young country, and the modern preservation movement can be traced back to the mid-19th century and the fight to save the home of the first President, George Washington. Mount Vernon isn’t what one would describe as modest and humble. From that point on, preservation tended (read more)
Category: Jefferson County
Tags: #louisvilleky, #louisvillelandmarks, #shotgunhouse, #tinyhouse, #vernaculararchitecure
Sometimes, my day boils down to deciphering the scrawl of an architectural historian from four decades ago and squinting at tiny black and white photographs. The building depicted in these minute images is now nothing but bare earth surrounded by a copse of trees – but if it weren’t for those two pieces of paper (read more)
Category: Bourbon County
Raise your hand if you’ve ever seen the name of a town on a sign and detoured from your route to find that place with the evocative name – yes, both of my hands would be in the air if I weren’t utilizing them to type. How can one not investigate the potential treasures of (read more)
Category: Hopkins County
Tag: #beulahky
Sometimes when you look for one thing – you find something else! While shuffling through years of emails earlier today, I found this photograph of a handsome historic house in Bourbon County, Kentucky. The email was dated 2011, but I can’t claim to know the date of the photograph. It may well be the (read more)
Category: Bourbon County
We witnessed a spectacular sunset on New Year’s Eve, as we rambled on the farm and took advantage of the unseasonably warm weather. The week before, on December 23, wind chills of -25 to -30 degrees below freezing thrust us back into the 19th century, as our pipes froze, and we spent a lot of (read more)
Category: 1901 Farmhouse
Shortly after Christmas 1901, a news article pondered whether Kentucky’s legislators would finally “erect at Frankfort buildings which will be a credit, instead of a disgrace, to Kentucky.” The State Capitol Building was criticized as too small (among other faults), and the Governor’s mansion had been severely damaged by fire in 1899.* Lexington and Louisville (read more)
Category: Franklin County
Tags: #frankfortky, #kentuckycapitol, #kentuckygovernorsmansion
Yesterday was a good day for a drive, and as I meandered through rural Bourbon County, I came upon a building that compelled me to immediately stop. (This happens frequently to me.) As it was at the intersection of two roads, I interpreted it as a former store of a crossroads community. A bit more (read more)
Category: Bourbon County
Tags: #bourboncountyky, #plum, #ruralcrossroads
The New Year in 1923 was still fresh when newspapers across the world began sharing stories and images of the treasures “recovered” from the tomb of King Tutankhamun in Egypt. The mysteries and wonders of the boy pharaoh’s tomb, discovered by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon, filled newspapers, motion picture news-reels, magazines, and the imagination (read more)
Category: Kenton County
Tags: #egyptianrevival, #ludlowky, #ludlowlagoon
I grew up hearing stories about my paternal grandfather, a native of Bath County, Kentucky ,and the weekly trips he made back home to enjoy the “sweet air” of his home county. Years later, on my first county wide survey as an architectural historian, I spent weeks savoring that sweet air as I helped document (read more)
Category: Bath County
Tags: #kentuckyarchitecture, #nationalregisterofhistoricplaces, #sharpsburgky
Described as a “practical and popular three bedroom home,” this 1.5 story house is compact and so familiar looking – I feel as though I have passed it in neighborhoods across the country. But one important element that I would not have realized from the exterior is that this house – if it followed the (read more)
Category: Historic House Plans
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