Loudoun House in Castleton Park, Lexington,Fayette County

Located in Castleton Park, home of the Lexington Art League. Designed by A. J. Davis and built in 1852 for Frances Key Hunt of Lexington, this castellated Neo-Gothic villa is owned by the Lexington Fayette Urban County Government and is leased by LAL. Loudoun House is considered one of the largest and finest examples of Gothic Revival architecture in Kentucky. It reflects the Romantic Movement of the 1850s, which was a reflection of the social lifestyles and opulence of the day. The house follows a design of prominent New York architect Alexander Jackson Davis, who published his catalog of house designs, Rural Residences, in 1838. Davis' collaboration with author and horticulturist A. J. Downing was the foremost influence in disseminating the Gothic Revival style throughout the country. Loudoun was constructed by Lexington builder John McMurtry, who helped popularize the Gothic Revival style in the Bluegrass by constructing more than 200 buildings in this style

F. K. Hunt (1817-1879) was the son of John Wesley Hunt and grew up in the Hunt-Morgan House in Lexington. Named for his mother’s cousin, Francis Scott Key, the young Hunt was educated at Transylvania University in Lexington and the Episcopal Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. It was at Kenyon that Hunt was first introduced to Gothic Revival architecture, for the major academic building there was the earliest piece of collegiate Gothic Revival architecture in the United States. Returning to Lexington, Hunt practiced law and in 1840, married Julia Warfield, whose parents gave the couple 60 acres of suburban land on the Bryan Station Pike adjoining the Warfield estate. This land, called “The Meadows,” was to be the future site of Loudoun. Francis Hunt received the financial resources to build when he inherited more than a million dollars from his father, J. W. Hunt, who died in Lexington in 1849 during a serious cholera epidemic.

Miller- Denny Home Circa 1841

This impressive antebellum Greek Revival home is located in Paint Lick, Garrard County.Built by George Denny on the site of Col. William Miller's Fort Paint Lick built in 1776.

According to the historical marker near old Paint Lick Presbyterian Church and Paint Lick Cemetery, "First settlers found Indian signs painted on trees along creek banks and around the nearby salt lick. They gave settlement the name of Paint Lick." Paint Lick Creek marks the border between Madison and Garrard Counties in Kentucky.


Notice the doric columns that are brick covered with stucco.

Butler-Turpin Home Carroll County

Located in the General Butler State Park in Carrolton. Home built 1859!

In Carrollton the Kentucky River, which begins in Beattyville, meets the Ohio. The Kentucky River is a tributary of the Ohio River, 260 miles (418 km) long,[1] in the U.S. state of Kentucky. The river and its tributaries drain much of the central region of the state, with its upper course passing through the coal-mining regions of the Cumberland Mountains, and its lower course passing through the Bluegrass region in the north central part of the state. Its watershed encompasses about 7,000 square miles (18,000 km2). It supplies drinking water to about one-sixth of the population of the state.

Kentucky bourbon tradition continues as new or planned distilleries crop up around state

While Kentucky is known for its long history of producing bourbon, that tradition continues to grow with new or planned distilleries cropping up in several areas of the state.


Historic Star Terrace, which sat directly above the original Old Pogue Distillery, has been fully renovated and is the base of operations for H.E. Pogue Distillery today. (Photo from Old Pogue)
Among these are the Old Pogue Distillery in Maysville, Alltech’s Lexington Brewing and Distilling Company, Michter’s Distillery in Louisville and The Nth Degree Distilling in Newport. All plan to offer tours for visitors who want to learn more about Kentucky’s most famous consumer product and the country’s only native spirit.

The Old Pogue Distillery, which began operation in April, borrows from a lengthy distilling tradition by the Pogue family in this northern Kentucky town on the Ohio River. Several generations of Pogues were involved in distilling from 1876 until Prohibition in the 1920s. Now the Pogues have opened a small-batch distillery producing bourbon and rye whiskeys in the family’s historic home on West Second Street.

Local historians proudly note that bourbon distilling in Kentucky began in 1790 in Mason County near where the H.E. Pogue Distillery operated later for more than 50 years. The Pogues are offering tours of their new facility by appointment through their website. Twice-daily scheduled tours will begin in the near future.

Meanwhile, it’s been nearly 200 years since there was an operating distillery on Louisville’s “Whiskey Row,” a stretch of downtown’s Main Street that’s been associated with bourbon for more than two centuries. Now Michter’s Distillery plans to open a small production facility in the historic and architecturally significant Fort Nelson Building at 801 W. Main St. The new distillery, directly across the street from the Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory, will offer tours when it’s scheduled to open sometime next year.

Louisville Distilling Company, which is producing a new small-batch bourbon called Angel’s Envy in Bardstown, also hopes to move to a facility on Main Street next year. The company is a family venture involving Lincoln Henderson, retired master distiller at spirits giant Brown-Forman.

The Lexington Brewing and Distilling Company is building a 20,000 square foot plant west of the city’s downtown that will produce a new whiskey named Town Branch Bourbon. Owned by Alltech, the global animal nutrition company based in Nicholasville, the distillery will also produce Pearse Lyons Reserve whiskey and Bluegrass Sundown, an after-dinner bourbon-and-coffee beverage. The new $6 million distillery plans to join the Kentucky Distillers’ Association’s Kentucky Bourbon Trail tour experience this fall. The new building at 401 Cross St. will have glass walls on three sides so the copper stills and fermentation tanks can be seen from outside. The owners hope it will become a prominent tourist attraction near Lexington’s proposed Arena, Arts and Entertainment District. Visit the company’s website.

Plans are also in the works for a new micro-distillery in Newport to be called The Nth Degree. The developers, who broke ground in July, are hoping to become part of the Bourbon Trail when the facility opens next year and are aiming to attract 700 visitors a week for tours.

Other small-batch bourbon producers have been operating for several years in areas away from the well-known bourbon country of Central Kentucky. For example, Corsair Artisan Distillery in Bowling Green and here.

From the Kentucky Department of Travel and Tourism

The Kaintuckeean: Mercer County's Glenworth Farm

The Kaintuckeean: Mercer County's Glenworth Farm: In March, I noticed a classified ad for the absolute auction of a farm in Mercer County. The photo showed a beautiful Greek Revival Mansion....

Glenworth was built in 1848 by Robert Mosby Davis on land deeded to him by his uncle, Robert Mosby He was the namesake of his uncle.

It was given to him for taking care of his uncle in his old age. The land was originally owned by the Robards family. Lewis Robards married and lived here with Rachel Donelson Robards, later Mrs. Andrew Jackson.

Her father Colonel John Donelson was the founder of Nashville, Tennessee. There was a bigamy scandal when Andrew Jackson married Rachel Donaldson Robards before a divorce was finalized and Andrew Jackson was dogged by political gossip throughout his career. The land passed to Robert Mosby through his marriage to Lewis Robards’ sister.

Washington Hall Mason County

Washington Hall in Old Washington was originally built as a hotel in 1820 in an attempt to maintain Washington as the county seat for Mason County. The attempt did not work and the county seat was moved to Maysville, which had grown with the river traffic.

The building was most recently used to house small shops. Each room held a different shop that visitors could get items from before taking them to the front and paying. In the back of the building there was an apartment, where the owner of the building normally lived.

Antebellum Home in Mt Sterling

This elegant Georgian style mansion is located at 209 W. Main Street in Mt. Sterling,KY

Ellis-O'Connell House, 209 West Main Street. Two-story, five-bay brick residence with a gable roof built in 1852. The central passage plan is one room deep with gable-end chimneys. There are brick jack arches over the windows and a deep bracketed cornice and frieze. The recessed central entrance is framed by a simple entablature with brackets, sidelights
with colored glass, and fluted Corinthian half columns. To the rear is a single story brick ell. The front of the property is delineated by a cast-iron fence with a stone base.
Hezekiah Ellis who was a director of the Lexington and Big Sandy Railroad built the house in 1852 and sold it to Mack O'Connell in 1864 after Ellis suffered financial reverses in the panic of 1857. Mack or M.C. O'Connell was a grocer who served five or six consecutive terms on the City Council. He accumulated considerable property in Mt. Sterling. The
house is the birthplace of W.B. O'Connell, clerk of the Kentucky Court of Appeals. Born in 1865, O'Connell established the newspaper Evening Free Lance, famous during the silver campaigns of 1896 and 1897.O'Connell became the Montgomery County Clerk in 1897. The house was sold in 1880 to Mrs. Strauther S. Gaitskill (Maggie Apperson). The Gaitskill family lived here from 1880 to 1936.

General John Bell Hood (CSA) Boyhood Home

Located 3 miles west of Mt Sterling on US 60 in Montgomery County

Biography of General John Bell Hood, CSA

Early Years:

John Bell Hood was born on June 29, 1831, in Owingsville (Bath County), Kentucky, a son of Dr. John and Theodosia French Hood.
Records indicate that the Mt. Sterling, Kentucky home of Dr. John Hood was one of comfort, but not extravagance. Upon the death of her father James French in 1835, Theodosia inherited $700.00 in cash, and apparently used those funds to purchase a home. The two-story brick structure still stands today (May 2001) on US Route 60, three miles west of Mt. Sterling, and is occupied as a personal residence.

In 1841 Dr. Hood began acquiring land that ultimately totaled approximately 600 acres. Although Montgomery County tax records were destroyed by fire, the size of the farm suggests that Dr. Hood would have owned slaves. However, the absence of any evidence of slave quarters on the current home site indicates that the number of slaves was probably not significant.

Although folklore tells of John Bell Hood being a wild youth, there is no record whatsoever of any legal problems. Legend also speaks of his fondness and pursuit of girls. One legend is that of his affair with Anne Mitchell, featured in the October 25, 1948 issue of Life Magazine, "The Ghost of Anne Mitchell." Again however, this may also be less than totally credible since a civil libel lawsuit was filed soon after the story’s publication by a descendent of one of the main characters in the story. Hood’s reputation for being compulsive and rambunctious, as well as his reputation as a "lady’s man", seems to have evolved many years after the Civil War, and has no known verifiable or documented evidence to confirm its accuracy or authenticity.

John Bell and his siblings were left with their mother for approximately eight months each year during the middle and late 1840’s during Dr. Hood’s annual visits to Philadelphia, where he taught medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. During the extended absences of his father, young John Bell would be influenced significantly by his grandfather Luke, the old Indian fighter, and his grandfather James, the Revolutionary War veteran. He would also no doubt be told stories of the war experiences of his great grandfathers, and uncles.

John Bell was urged by his father to take up the study of medicine, and was even offered an opportunity to study in Europe. However, John Bell desired to follow in the soldier’s footsteps of his forefathers, and with the assistance of his uncle, Judge Richard French, he received an appointment to West Point, enrolling on July 1, 1849.

Bell House Circa 1814

Bell House on Maysville Street in Mt Sterling, Montgomery County, Kentucky. Mt Sterling was known as the Crossroads of the American Civil War.