[127] For a sketch of Lexington and its first two newspapers, see Michaux’s Travels, vol. iii of this series, p. 37, note 28, and F. A. Michaux’s Travels, p. 100, note 40.—Ed.
{168} CHAPTER XXVII
Road to Frankfort—Leesburgh—Mulatto innkeeper—Interchange of musical entertainment—Frankfort—Breakfast under air fans—Sand fit for glass—Marble—Publick buildings—Eccentrick character of the keeper of the penitentiary—Return—Coles’s bad inn—Abuses in the post-office department.
We left Lexington after dinner, and taking the left hand road of two equally used to Frankfort, we travelled twelve miles through a very rich, but not a generally settled country.
After crossing the Town branch, Wolfe’s fork, Steele’s run, and the South branch of Elkhorn river, to which the three former are auxiliaries, and on all of which are several mills, we arrived at a hamlet of three or four houses called Leesburgh, twelve miles from Lexington.[128] One of the houses had been the seat of the late Col. Lee, and is still owned by his widow, who rents it to a mulatto man named Daly, who has converted it into an excellent inn. With the house, Daly occupies as much cultivated land as nearly supplies his well frequented stables with hay, corn and oats. There is also a good kitchen garden in which are vast quantities of culinary sweet herbs, besides useful vegetables, and he has good stabling and other out offices—for all which he pays only forty pounds Virginia currency, or one hundred and thirty-six dollars and two thirds, per annum. We experienced the benefit of his spacious icehouse, in the fine butter we had at supper, where every thing was good, particularly the coffee, which was almost a la Française. Daly having a good violin, on which he plays by ear with some taste, he entertained us with musick while we supped, in return for which, we played for him afterwards some duets, by the aid {169} of another violin, borrowed of young Mr. Lee, who resides in the neighbourhood with his mother.
My good bed did not lull me to repose, partly from the strength of our host’s coffee, and partly from a stomachick affection through indigestion.
After a sleepless night, the freshness of the morning air revived me, and we proceeded towards Frankfort, amusing ourselves by the way with talking over the vanity and egotism of Mr. Daly, who had entertained us with many little anecdotes, connected with some of the first and most celebrated characters in the United States, in which he was always a principal actor. His vanity however had met with a sad check, soon after our alighting at his house, from the abuse of a female negro slave from a neighbouring plantation, who he drove away with a cowskin, and she in return lavished on him the most opprobrious epithets, among which he seemed to be most hurt by her calling him “an Indian looking and a black son of a b—.”
A fine road, through a more level country than we had came through last evening, brought us in two hours, eleven miles, to the hill above Frankfort, which from thence was seen to advantage, with Kentucky river flowing past it, through a deep and narrow valley, confined by steep and rather stony hills, which afford a variety, after the fine plains, luxuriant forests and rich farms, within twenty miles in every direction of Lexington.
We descended the hill, into the capital of Kentucky, and stopped at Weiseger’s, the sign of the Golden Eagle, where we sat down to a sumptuous breakfast, with two green silk air fans kept in motion over our heads, by a little negro girl with a string from the ceiling, in a room seventy-two feet long.[129]
After breakfast I accompanied Mr. A—— to examine a shallow stratum of sand, on the bank of the river, near a mineral spring about half a mile below {170} the town, and he got a negro who was fishing, to wade to an island opposite, and bring some from thence, which had probably accumulated there by floods.—He pronounced both kinds proper for the manufacture of glass, which was what he had in view, but it did [not] seem as if a sufficient quantity could be procured for an extensive manufactury.