Ashland | |
Location | 120 Sycamore Road Lexington, Kentucky |
---|---|
Coordinates | 38°1′43″N84°28′48″W / 38.02861°N 84.48000°W |
Built | 1811 |
Architect | Benjamin H. Latrobe; Thomas Lewinski |
Architectural style | Italianate |
NRHP reference No. | 66000357 [1] |
Significant dates | |
Added to NRHP | October 15, 1966 |
Designated NHL | December 19, 1960 |
Ashland is the name of the plantation of the 19th-century Kentucky statesman Henry Clay, [2] located in Lexington, Kentucky, in the central Bluegrass region of the state. The buildings were built by enslaved African Americans, and enslaved people grew and harvested hemp, farmed livestock, and cooked and cleaned for the Clays.
Ashland is a registered National Historic Landmark. [2] The Ashland Stakes, a Thoroughbred horse race at Keeneland Race Course that has run annually since the race course first opened in 1936, was named for the historically important estate.
Henry Clay came to Lexington, Kentucky from Virginia in 1797. In 1804, he began buying land for the plantation outside the city's limits. He eventually became a major planter who enslaved 60 people and owned over 600 acres (240 ha).
Among the people enslaved by the Clays were Aaron Dupuy and Charlotte Dupuy as well as their children Charles and Mary Ann Dupuy. Clay took them with him to Washington D.C. when his congressional term began in 1810, and they were held there for nearly two decades. [3] In 1829, 28 years before the more famous Dred Scott challenge, Charlotte Dupuy sued Henry Clay for her freedom and that of her two children in Washington D.C. circuit court. [3] She was ordered to stay in Washington while the court case proceeded, and lived there for 18 months, working for Martin Van Buren, the next Secretary of State. Clay took her husband Aaron Dupuy and her children Charles and Mary Ann Dupuy with him when he returned to Ashland. The court ruled against Dupuy, and when she refused to return voluntarily to Kentucky, Clay had her arrested. Clay had Dupuy renditioned to New Orleans and had her held by his daughter and son-in-law, where she was enslaved for another decade. Finally, in 1840, Clay freed Charlotte and her daughter Mary Ann Dupuy, and in 1844, he freed her son Charles Dupuy. [4]
Using the profits of his forced-labor farming, Henry Clay used enslaved people to build his Federal style house in around 1806 (see Federal architecture). He had two wings added between 1811 and 1814, designed for him by Benjamin Latrobe. Inferior building materials, particularly a porous type of brick, resulted in an unstable structure. The building was likely damaged in the New Madrid earthquake and aftershocks of 1811–12. Clay's many repairs could never completely stabilize the house. [5]
Clay divided the Ashland estate among three sons. After his father's death, son James Brown Clay owned and occupied Ashland and a surrounding tract of about 325 acres (132 ha). James Clay had the house razed in 1854, and rebuilding was completed by 1857. [5] Local architect Thomas Lewinski designed the new structure, which used features of the original house: the footprint and foundation, floorplan, and massing, but Lewinski modernized the house stylistically. With many Italianate features, the resulting mansion is a mix of Federal architecture and Italianate details. Inside, James Clay employed Greek Revival features and decorated the home lavishly (see:Victorian decorative arts) with imported furnishings purchased in New York City. James Clay rebuilt the house and his family lived there until his death in 1864. [2] His widow Susan Jacob Clay sold the estate in 1866.
Kentucky University purchased Ashland and used it as part of its campus. [2] University founder and regent John Bryan Bowman occupied the mansion. [2] The Agricultural and Mechanical College (Kentucky A & M) sat on Clay's former farm. During the Kentucky University period, Regent John Bowman used part of the mansion to house and display the University Natural History Museum.
Kentucky University split into what became Transylvania University and the University of Kentucky, and sold Ashland in 1882. [2]
Henry Clay's granddaughter Anne Clay McDowell and her husband Henry Clay McDowell purchased the estate (consisting of about 325 acres (132 ha) and outbuildings) and moved in with their children in 1883. They remodeled and modernized the house, updating it with gas lighting (later, electricity), indoor plumbing, and telephone service. Their eldest daughter Nannette McDowell Bullock continued to occupy Ashland until her death in 1948. She founded the Henry Clay Memorial Foundation, which purchased and preserved Ashland. The historic house museum opened to the public in 1950. [2]
It is unclear whether Henry Clay named the plantation or retained a prior name, but he was referring to his estate as "Ashland" by 1809. The name derives from the ash forest that stood at the site. Clay and his family lived at Ashland from approximately 1806 until his death in 1852 (his widow Lucretia Clay moved out in 1854). His political career led Clay to spend most of the years between 1810 and 1829 in Washington, D.C.
Several cities, the city of Ashland, Kentucky, in Boyd County, the city of Ashland, Missouri, in Boone County, the city of Ashland, Oregon, the town of Ashland, Virginia and the city of Ashland, Wisconsin, in Ashland County, were named in honor of the estate. The borough of Ashland, Pennsylvania, in Schuylkill County, an anthracite coal mining town, was named in honor of the estate as well.
Henry Clay Sr. was an American attorney and statesman who represented Kentucky in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. He was the seventh House speaker as well as the ninth secretary of state. He unsuccessfully ran for president in the 1824, 1832, and 1844 elections. He helped found both the National Republican Party and the Whig Party. For his role in defusing sectional crises, he earned the appellation of the "Great Compromiser" and was part of the "Great Triumvirate" of Congressmen alongside fellow Whig Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun.
Henry Clay Jr. was an American politician and soldier from Kentucky, the third son of US Senator and Representative Henry Clay and Lucretia Hart Clay. He was elected to the Kentucky House of Representatives in 1835 and served one term. A graduate of West Point, he served in the Mexican–American War and was killed in 1847 at the Battle of Buena Vista.
Ashland Park is a historic early 20th century neighborhood in Lexington, Kentucky, United States. It was named after Ashland, the estate of Kentucky statesman Henry Clay which is located in the eastern portion of the neighborhood. The 600-acre (2.4 km2) development was designed by the famous landscape architecture firm the Olmsted Brothers of Massachusetts. The neighborhood belongs to the National Register of Historic Places.
Waveland State Historic Site, also known as the Joseph Bryan House, in Lexington, Kentucky is the site of a Greek Revival home and 10 acres now maintained and operated as part of the Kentucky state park system. It was the home of the Joseph Bryan family, their descendants and the people they enslaved in the nineteenth century. Bryan's father William had befriended Daniel Boone and they migrated west through the Cumberland Gap.
In 1824, in appreciation of the enormous service rendered to this country by the Marquis de Lafayette during the Revolutionary War, Congress voted to grant him a full township in the Florida Territory. This tract was called the Lafayette Land Grant and encompassed over 23,000 acres. While the Marquis never came to visit his property, he designated an agent to sell parcels of it on his behalf. The 2,400 acres upon which Goodwood Plantation was sited was purchased by Hardy Croom from the Lafayette Grant in 1834.
James Brown Clay was an American politician and diplomat who served as a member of the United States House of Representatives for Kentucky's 8th congressional district from 1857 to 1859.
Madeline (Madge) McDowell Breckinridge was an American leader of the women's suffrage movement in Kentucky. She married Desha Breckinridge, editor of the Lexington Herald, which advocated women's rights, and she lived to see the women of Kentucky vote for the first time in the presidential election of 1920. She also initiated progressive reforms for compulsory school attendance and child labor. She founded many civic organizations, notably the Kentucky Association for the Prevention and Treatment of Tuberculosis, an affliction from which she had personally suffered. She led efforts to implement model schools for children and adults, parks and recreation facilities, and manual training programs.
John Morrison Clay was a Kentucky thoroughbred breeder, a son of statesman Henry Clay, and a husband of Josephine Russell Clay and the brother of Henry Clay, Jr. and James Brown Clay. He was also called John M. Clay.
Ward Hall is a Greek Revival antebellum plantation mansion located in Georgetown, Kentucky. The main house covers 12,000 square feet (1,100 m2), with 27-foot (8.2 m) high Corinthian fluted columns.
Thomas Clay McDowell was an American businessman, Thoroughbred racehorse owner/breeder, and trainer. He was a great-grandson of Henry Clay.
Charlotte Dupuy, also called Lottie, was an enslaved African-American woman who filed a freedom suit in 1829 against her enslaver, Henry Clay, who was then Secretary of State. The case went to court 17 years before Dred Scott filed his more famous legal challenge to slavery. Then living in Washington, D.C., Dupuy sued for her freedom and that of her two children, based on a promise by her previous enslaver. The case was one of the many freedom suits filed by enslaved people in the decades before the American Civil War.
Ashland Plantation, also known as the Belle Helene or Ashland-Belle Helene Plantation, is a historic building, built in 1841, that was a plantation estate and home of Duncan Farrar Kenner. Located in Darrow, Louisiana, in Ascension Parish. The manor house is an example of antebellum Greek Revival architecture.
London Ferrill, also spelled Ferrell, was a former enslaved man and carpenter from Virginia who became the second preacher of the First African Baptist Church in Lexington, Kentucky, serving from 1823 to 1854. During his 31 years of service, Ferrill attracted and baptized many new members in the growing region; by 1850 the church had 1,820 members and was the largest of any congregation in the state, black or white.
Thomas Lewinski was an architect in Kentucky, United States. Born in England, he immigrated to the United States. For his work at Allenhurst and elsewhere, Lewinski was known in his day as one of the leading architects of the Greek Revival style. He designed many architecturally significant buildings that survive and are listed on the United States National Register of Historic Places.
Harry Dorsey Gough was a prominent 18th-century merchant, planter, and patron of the fledgling Methodist Church in Baltimore, Maryland, in the early United States.
Mary Wilma Massey Hargreaves, a scholar of U.S. agricultural history, was the first woman at the University of Kentucky to reach the rank of full professor in the Department of History. Her areas of research included the agricultural history of the Northern Great Plains, dry land agriculture and land utilization. She was a Brookings Institution scholar, editor of the Henry Clay Papers and served in leadership roles in the Organization of American Historians, the Southern Historical Association; in 1975 was elected president of the Agricultural History Society. She also served as a local and state officer in the American Association of University Women.
Mary Jane Warfield Clay was an American socialite, suffragist, abolitionist, and political activist. An early leader in the suffrage movement in Kentucky, she began by forming a suffrage club at her home in 1879. Her experience and success as a farm manager included her acute business sense in the middle of the American Civil War, like selling supplies from her farm to both Union and Confederate forces when they each occupied the Commonwealth. Her most active work in the suffrage movement was to encourage and support her daughters who would become the most well known Kentucky suffragists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
1 Clay's first purchase was a 125-acre (51 ha) tract. Contract at Ashland, The Henry Clay Estate. 2 Clay put a notice in a local paper asking for the return of a lost horse and listed his home as Ashland.