II
At first they built for the tribe, working together like beavers in common cause against nature and their enemies. Home life and domestic architecture began among them with the wooden-fort community, the idea of which was no doubt derived from the frontier defences of Virginia, and modified by the Kentuckians with a view to domestic use. This building habit culminated in the erection of some two hundred rustic castles, the sites of which in some instances have been identified. It was a singularly fit sort of structure, adjusting itself desperately and economically to the necessities of environment. For the time society lapsed into a state which, but for the want of lords and retainers, was feudalism of the rudest kind. There were gates for sally and swift retreat, bastions for defence, and loop-holes in cabin walls for deadly volleys. There were hunting-parties winding forth stealthily without horn or hound, and returning with game that would have graced the great feudal halls. There was siege, too, and suffering, and death enough, God knows, mingled with the lowing of cattle and the clatter of looms. Some morning, even, you might have seen a slight girl trip covertly out to the little cottonpatch [210] in one corner of the enclosure, and, blushing crimson over the snowy cotton-bolls, pick the wherewithal to spin her bridal dress; for in these forts they married also and bore children. Many a Kentucky family must trace its origin through the tribal communities pent up within a stockade, and discover that the family plate consisted then of a tin cup, and, haply, an iron fork.
But, as soon as might be, this compulsory village life broke eagerly asunder into private homes. The common building form was that of the log-house. It is needful to distinguish this from the log-house of the mountaineer, which is found throughout eastern Kentucky to-day. Encompassed by all difficulties, the pioneer yet reared himself a better, more enduring habitation. One of these, still intact after the lapse of more than a century, stands as a singularly interesting type of its kind, and brings us face to face with primitive architecture. "Mulberry Hill," a double house, two and a half stories high, with a central hall, was built in Jefferson County, near Louisville, in 1785, for John Clark, the father of General George Rogers Clark.
The settlers made the mistake of supposing that the country lacked building-stone, so deep under the loam and verdure lay the whole foundation rock; but soon they discovered that their better houses had only to be taken from beneath their feet. The first stone house in the State, and withal the most [211] notable, is "Traveller's Rest," in Lincoln County, built in 1783 by Governor Metcalf, who was then a stone-mason, for Isaac Shelby, the first Governor of Kentucky. To those who know the blue-grass landscape, this type of homestead is familiar enough, with its solidity of foundation, great thickness of walls, enormous, low chimneys, and little windows. The owners were the architects and builders, and with stern, necessitous industry translated their condition into their work, giving it an intensely human element. It harmonized with need, not with feeling; was built by the virtues, and not by the vanities. With no fine balance of proportion, with details few, scant, and crude, the entire effect of the architecture was not unpleasing, so honest was its poverty, so rugged and robust its purpose. It was the gravest of all historic commentaries written in stone. Varied fate has overtaken these old-time structures. Many have been torn down, yielding their well-chosen sites to newer, showier houses. Others became in time the quarters of the slaves. Others still have been hidden away beneath weather-boarding—a veneer of commonplace modernism—as though whitewashed or painted plank were finer than roughhewn gray-stone. But one is glad to discover that in numerous instances they are the preferred homes of those who have taste for the old in native history, and pride in family associations and traditions. On the thinned, open landscape nothing stands out with a more [212] pathetic air of nakedness than one of these stone houses, long since abandoned and fallen into ruin. Under the Kentucky sky houses crumble and die without seeming to grow old, without an aged toning down of colors, without the tender memorials of mosses and lichens, and of the whole race of clinging things. So not until they are quite overthrown does Nature reclaim them, or draw once more to her bosom the walls and chimneys within whose faithful bulwarks, and by whose cavernous, glowing recesses, our great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers danced and made love, married, suffered, and fell asleep.
Neither to the house of logs, therefore, nor to that of stone must we look for the earliest embodiment of positive taste in domestic architecture. This found its first, and, considering the exigencies of the period, its most noteworthy expression in the homestead of brick. No finer specimen survives than that built in 1796, on a plan furnished by Thomas Jefferson to John Brown, who had been his law student, remained always his honored friend, and became one of the founders of the commonwealth. It is a rich landmark, this old manor-place on the bank of the Kentucky River, in Frankfort. The great hall with its pillared archway is wide enough for dancing the Virginia reel. The suites of high, spacious rooms; the carefully carved wood-work of the window-casings and the doors; the tall, [213] quaint mantel-frames; the deep fireplaces with their shining fire-dogs and fenders of brass, brought laboriously enough on pack-mules from Philadelphia; the brass locks and keys; the portraits on the walls—all these bespeak the early implantation in Kentucky of a taste for sumptuous life and entertainment. The house is like a far-descending echo of colonial Old Virginia.
Famous in its day—for it is already beneath the sod—and built not of wood, nor of stone, nor of brick, but in part of all, was "Chaumière," the home of David Meade during the closing years of the last, and the early years of the present, century. The owner, a Virginian who had been much in England, brought back with him notions of the baronial style of country-seat, and in Jessamine County, some ten miles from Lexington, built a home that lingers in the mind like some picture of the imagination. It was a villa-like place, a cluster of rustic cottages, with a great park laid out in the style of Old World landscape-gardening. There were artificial rivers spanned by bridges, and lakes with islands crowned by temples. There were terraces and retired alcoves, and winding ways cut through flowering thickets. A fortune was spent on the grounds; a retinue of servants was employed in nurturing their beauty. The dining-room, wainscoted with walnut and relieved by deep window-seats, was rich with the family service of silver and glass; on the walls [214] of other rooms hung family portraits by Thomas Hudson and Sir Joshua Reynolds. Two days in the week were appointed for formal receptions. There Jackson and Monroe and Taylor were entertained; there Aaron Burr was held for a time under arrest; there the old school showed itself in buckles and knee-breeches, and rode abroad in a yellow chariot with outriders in blue cloth and silver buttons.
Near Lexington may be found a further notable example of early architecture in the Todd homestead, the oldest house in the region, built by the brother of John Todd, who was Governor of Kentucky Territory, including Illinois. It is a strong, spacious brick structure reared on a high foundation of stone, with a large, square hall and square rooms in suites, connected by double doors. To the last century also belongs the low, irregular pile that became the Wickliffe, and later the Preston, house in Lexington—a striking example of the taste then prevalent for plain, or even commonplace, exteriors, if combined with interiors that touched the imagination with the suggestion of something stately and noble and courtly.
These are a few types of homes erected in the last century. The wonder is not that such places exist, but that they should have been found in Kentucky at such a time. For society had begun as the purest of democracies. Only a little while ago the people had been shut up within a stockade. [215] Stress of peril and hardship had levelled the elements of population to more than a democracy: it had knit them together as one endangered human brotherhood. Hence the sudden, fierce flaring up of sympathy with the French Revolution; hence the deep re-echoing war-cry of Jacobin emissaries. But scarcely had the wave of primitive conquest flowed over the land, and wealth followed in its peaceful wake, before life fell apart into the extremes of social caste. The memories of former position, the influences of old domestic habits were powerful still; so that, before a generation passed, Kentucky society gave proof of the continuity of its development from Virginia. The region of the James River, so rich in antique homesteads, began to renew itself in the region of the blue-grass. On a new and larger canvas began to be painted the picture of shaded lawns, wide portals, broad staircases, great halls, drawing-rooms, and dining-rooms, wainscoting, carved wood-work, and waxed hard-wood floors. In came a few yellow chariots, morocco-lined and drawn by four horses. In came the powder, the wigs, and the queues, the ruffled shirts, the knee-breeches, the glittering buckles, the high-heeled slippers, and the frosty brocades. Over the Alleghanies, in slow-moving wagons, came the massive mahogany furniture, the sunny brasswork, the tall silver candlesticks, the nervous-looking, thin legged little pianos. In came old manners and old speech and [216] old prides: the very Past gathered together its household gods and made an exodus into the Future.
Without due regard to these essential facts the social system of the State must ever remain poorly understood. Hitherto they have been but little considered. To the popular imagination the most familiar type of the early Kentuckian is that of the fighter, the hunter, the rude, heroic pioneer and his no less heroic wife: people who left all things behind them and set their faces westward, prepared to be new creatures if such they could become. But on the dim historic background are the stiff figures of another type, people who were equally bent on being old-fashioned creatures if such they could remain. Thus, during the final years of the last century and the first quarter of the present one, Kentucky life was richly overlaid with ancestral models. Closely studied, the elements of population by the close of this period somewhat resembled a landed gentry, a robust yeomanry, a white tenantry, and a black peasantry. It was only by degrees—by the dying out of the fine old types of men and women, by longer absence from the old environment and closer contact with the new—that society lost its inherited and acquired its native characteristics, or became less Virginian and more Kentuckian. Gradually, also, the white tenantry waned and the black peasantry waxed. The aristocratic spirit, in becoming more Kentuckian, unbent somewhat its pride, and the democratic, [217] in becoming more Kentuckian, took on a pride of its own; so that when social life culminated with the first half-century, there had been produced over the Blue-grass Region, by the intermingling of the two, that widely diffused and peculiar type which may be described as an aristocratic democracy, or a democratic aristocracy, according to one's choosing of a phrase. The beginnings of Kentucky life represented not simply a slow development from the rudest pioneer conditions, but also a direct and immediate implantation of the best of long-established social forms. And in nowise did the latter embody itself more persuasively and lastingly than in the building of costly homes.