The Hidden Treasures of the Warren County PVA Property Cards

 

This post serves as a confession. Yes . . . I spy on my neighbors! Before you get excited and envision me hiding in bushes looking through windows; it is nothing like that. Instead I simply like to know who lives in a certain house, how many acres are in their farm, or what a house down a long driveway might look like. One resource that has long-satisfied this inquiry is the website of the Warren County Property Valuation Administrator (PVA). Recently, while looking up some sort of useless knowledge on a cold winter’s night I came across the following message in bold letters at the top of the search screen: “As newly elected PVA of Warren County, Kentucky, I am pleased to announce that I have successfully fulfilled a promise to transition the official PVA website, to a free platform.  Thank you for your support in making this possible.” Several hours later I was still pouring through scanned PVA cards, dating back 50 years,  property by property, on a stretch of road and in a neighborhood I thought I had known intimately for 40 years.

Without going into great depth, the PVA serves as a constitutionally elected officer in the Commonwealth of Kentucky whose duty is to establish taxable values on real property. Although not tasked with tax collection (this duty is held by Kentucky’s elected Sheriffs), the PVA does hold great power by acting as the official assessor in their county of election.

In the days before computers and digital information were widely in use, the PVA and staff kept cards showing many important details of the structures and property under assessment. These cards, much like a library card-catalog, were cataloged by parcel number creating a somewhat onerous restriction on their public availability.

These cards, however, are a treasure trove for the historian and researcher.

With the advent of geographic information systems and rapid document scanning, this world has changed. Although formerly available through subscription, mainly held by real estate agents, title attorneys, and others needing access to this data, the newly elected Warren County PVA has made this information and the wealth of knowledge and history encapsulated in these PVA cards available and open to the public free of charge. (And best of all – unlike some other Kentucky counties, the Warren County PVA didn’t discard their old paper cards – they digitized them too!)

Any example of a resource is best illustrated by a case study. In my case I want to use something very familiar to me. Old Scottsville Road is a 6 1/2 mile road in southeastern Warren County, Kentucky. Once serving as the main road between Bowling Green and Scottsville, Kentucky, it was later granted turnpike status by act of the Kentucky General Assembly in 1866 and 1884 as the Row’s Mill Turnpike and Drake’s Creek and Allen Springs Turnpike, respectively. The bi-way that remains in existence today was the primary route until superseded by the newly realigned Scottsville Road (Hwy. 231) that came into existence in 1938.

Although I travel this road daily and know where many of the now demolished historic homes once existed, I have never seen photos of many of them and only know them by what exists in that location today. What is most striking to me is the consistency of their style.

Much like more densely packed urban neighborhoods, the type of houses that once lined Old Scottsville Road were mostly T-plan cottages. (A T-plan refers to 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.)

A few Easter eggs also revealed themselves; of which I had no clue to their existence. Rather than me blather on, let us take a tour down Old Scottsville Road as revealed through the circa 1960 Warren County PVA cards. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As with any resource, there are limitations to this collection. The PVA cards as digitally available must coincide with current addresses in order to link to the GIS mapped parcels. Also, many of the cards are missing photos indicating a cache of unidentified photos in the PVA archives. As has happened in many rural areas,  larger farms have been subdivided causing many parcels in the place of an historic single parcel. Usually, the PVA card for the historically larger parcel is simply not available digitally.

Finally, the PVA cards only cover the period from circa 1960 forward. Anything demolished prior to that date lacks documentation. It is important to note that the images represented in this archive may in fact be the only photos available of many of these structures.

I applaud the newly elected PVA for making this resource free and publicly available and no doubt this has been many years in the making by staff past and present. I challenge all of Kentucky’s elected PVAs to take this step and look forward to the opportunities this provides historians, local, amateur, and professional.