There are seven brick yards which employ sixty hands, and make annually two million five hundred thousand bricks; and there are fifty bricklayers, and as many attendants, who have built between thirty and forty good brick houses each of the last three years. The Presbyterian society is now finishing a church which will cost eight thousand dollars.
Manufactures are progressing in several parts of the state.
In Madison county there has lately been established a manufactury on a large scale for spinning hemp and flax. It is wrought by water, and is calculated to keep in motion twelve hundred spindles, each of which will spin per day, half a pound of thread of fineness to make from six to ten hundred linen, or {166} four pounds per spindle suitable for cotton baling. One hundred and sixty spindles are now at work, which have spun a quantity of thread of superiour quality.
Having been informed that Mr. Prentice, from New England, who is keeper of the county gaol, had collected much local information respecting Lexington, with an intention of publishing an account of its settlement, progress and present state, I called on him, and he very politely communicated to me every thing I interrogated him on: as his book however will be given to the publick on some future day, I will not anticipate it; but will merely mention one circumstance as a proof how much luxury has progressed here. Last year there were in Lexington thirty-nine two wheel carriages, such as gigs and one horse chaises, valued at 5764 dollars, and twenty-one four wheel ones, coaches, chariots, &c. valued at 8900 dollars; since when four elegant ones have been added to the number. This may convey some idea of the taste for shew and expense which pervades this country. There are now here, fifteen hundred good and valuable horses, and seven hundred milk cows.
The police of Lexington seems to be well regulated: as one proof of which there is an established nightly watch.
The copper coinage of the United States is of no use in Kentucky—the smallest circulating coin being a silver sixteenth of a dollar.
There are four billiard tables in Lexington, and cards are a good deal played at taverns, where it is more customary to meet for that purpose than at private houses.
There is a coffee house here, where is a reading room for the benefit of subscribers and strangers, in which are forty-two files of different newspapers from various parts of the United States. It is supported {167} by subscribers, who pay six dollars each annually, and of which there are now sixty. In the same house is a billiard table, and chess and back-gammon tables, and the guests may be accommodated with wine, porter, beer, spirituous liquors, cordials and confectionary. It is kept by a Mr. Terasse, formerly of the island of St. Bartholomew. He had been unfortunate in mercantile business in the West Indies, and coming to this country, and failing in the recovery of some property he had shipped to New York, he had no other resource left to gain a provision for his family, but the teaching of the French language and dancing, in Lexington. The trustees of Transylvania college (or university, as the Lexington people proudly call it) employed him in the former, but had it not been for the latter, he might have starved. And here it may not be impertinent to remark, that in most parts of the United States, teachers of dancing, meet with more encouragement than professors of any species of literary science.—Disgusted at length with the little encouragement he received, he bethought himself of his present business, in which he has become useful to the town and seems to be reaping a plentiful harvest from his ingenuity. He has opened a little publick garden behind his house, which he calls Vauxhall. It has a most luxuriant grape arbour, and two or three summer houses, formed also of grape vines, all of which are illuminated with variegated lamps, every Wednesday evening, when the musick of two or three decent performers sometimes excites parties to dance on a small boarded platform in the middle of the arbour. It is becoming a place of fashionable resort.
FOOTNOTES:
[126] For the early history of Transylvania University, one of the oldest and most celebrated educational institutions in the West, as well as for sketches of its early professors, see Peter, Transylvania University (Filson Club Publications, No. 11; Louisville, 1896).—Ed.