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.
III
With the opening of the present century, that taste had gone on developing. A specimen of early architecture in the style of the old English mansion is to be found in "Locust Grove," a massive and enduring structure—not in the Blue-grass Region, it is true, but several miles from Louisville—built in 1800 for Colonel Croghan, brother-in-law of Gen. George Rogers Clark; and still another remains in "Spring Hill," in Woodford County, the home of Nathaniel Hart, who had been a boy in the fort at [218] Boonesborough. Until recently a further representative, though remodelled in later times, survived in the Thompson place at "Shawnee Springs," in Mercer County.
Consider briefly the import of such country homes as these—"Traveller's Rest," "Chaumière," "Spring Hill," and "Shawnee Springs." Built remotely here and there, away from the villages or before villages were formed, in a country not yet traversed by limestone highways or even by lanes, they, and such as they, were the beacon-lights, many-windowed and kind, of Kentucky entertainment. "Traveller's Rest" was on the great line of emigration from Abingdon through Cumberland Gap. Its roof-tree was a boon of universal shelter, its very name a perpetual invitation to all the weary. Long after the country became thickly peopled it, and such places as it, remained the rallying-points of social festivity in their several counties, or drew their guests from remoter regions. They brought in the era of hospitalities, which by-and-by spread through the towns and over the land. If one is ever to study this trait as it flowered to perfection in Kentucky life, one must look for it in the society of some fifty years ago. Then horses were kept in the stables, servants were kept in the halls. Guests came uninvited, unannounced; tables were regularly set for surprises. "Put a plate," said an old Kentuckian of the time with a large family connection—"always put a plate for the [219] last one of them down to the youngest grandchild." What a Kentuckian would have thought of being asked to come on the thirteenth of the month and to leave on the twentieth, it is difficult to imagine. The wedding-presents of brides were not only jewels and silver and gold, but a round of balls. The people were laughed at for their too impetuous civilities. In whatever quarter of the globe they should happen to meet for the hour a pleasing stranger, they would say in parting, "And when you come to Kentucky, be certain to come to my house."
Yet it is needful to discriminate, in speaking of Kentucky hospitality. Universally gracious towards the stranger, and quick to receive him for his individual worth, within the State hospitality ran in circles, and the people turned a piercing eye on one another's social positions. If in no other material aspect did they embody the history of descent so sturdily as in the building of homes, in no other trait of home life did they reflect this more clearly than in family pride. Hardly a little town but had its classes that never mingled; scarce a rural neighborhood but insisted on the sanctity of its salt-cellar and the gloss of its mahogany. The spirit of caste was somewhat Persian in its gravity. Now the Alleghanies were its background, and the heroic beginnings of Kentucky life supplied its warrant; now it overleaped the Alleghanies, and allied itself to the memories of deeds and names in older States. [220] But if some professed to look down, none professed to look up. Deference to an upper class, if deference existed, was secret and resentful, not open and servile. The history of great political contests in the State is largely the victory and defeat of social types. Herein lies a difficulty: you touch any point of Kentucky life, and instantly about it cluster antagonisms and contradictions. The false is true; the true is false. Society was aristocratic; it was democratic; it was neither; it was both. There was intense family pride, and no family pride. The ancestral sentiment was weak, and it was strong. To-day you will discover the increasing vogue of an heraldica Kentuckiensis, and to-day an absolute disregard of a distinguished past. One tells but partial truths.