Wicked Lexington, Kentucky

By Fiona Young-Brown

Filled with tales of infamous duels, cheating congressmen, and much more, Wicked Lexington, Kentucky offers the first collection the city's rowdy and ruckus history .

Despite its illustrious beginnings as the "Athens of the west," Lexington has always had a darker side lurking just beneath its glossy sheen. It didn't take long for the first intellectual hub west of the Alleghenies to quickly morph into a city with the same scandalous inclinations as neighboring Louisville and Cincinnati. From Belle Brezing's infamous brothel of the late 1800s, frequented by some of the city's most prominent businessmen, and once pardoned by the governor, to historic sports scandals of the 1900s, local author Fiona Young-Brown tracks Lexington's penchant for misdeeds from founding to modern times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Feb 8, 2011
• ISBN: 9781625841087

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INTRODUCTION

The people of Lexington have long prided themselves on their city, and for good reason. They are fortunate to live in the heart of horse country, in a college town that has produced major statesmen, a First Lady, Civil War heroes, Nobel Prize winners, artists and many more notable residents. As one drives through the gently rolling fields of the horse farms, past the historic houses of a genteel past and into the downtown area, one cannot help but sense a certain amount of southern charm. But does something else lie beneath that proper exterior? Something wicked perhaps?

For the first half of the nineteenth century, Lexington was a city ahead of its time, a leader in the fledgling push for westward expansion. In 1779, a party of twenty-five men built a fort at Town Branch, what is now the corner of Main Street and Mill Street. Twelve men and one woman remained in the fort, a small affair of four cabins. At night, they could hear local Indians outside. The following year, despite a brutal winter that left food scarce and many animals dead, Fayette County came into being, and the pioneers and founding fathers of Kentucky’s commonwealth trickled into the new wilderness. Among the first settlers of the town were Levi Todd, whose granddaughter, Mary, would one day become First Lady of America, and Colonel Robert Patterson, who would later head north to be one of the founders of Cincinnati. Growth of the fledgling city was slow at first—Indians, climate and the difficulty of clearing the land were all contributing factors. Merchants began to open shop in 1784, and settlers established farms in the outlying areas. Hemp and tobacco were grown, and whiskey was distilled.

The fort at Town Branch in 1792—the beginnings of Lexington. Courtesy of Lexington History Museum.

Perhaps there was already a hint of wickedness as far back as 1780—that is when the first jail was built. Within ten years, the need for a holding place had outgrown the small wooden hut, and a stone building replaced it. This, in turn, was replaced by a larger jail in 1819. The earliest crimes were what one might expect of any frontier town: gambling and brawling—although the brawling would not resemble any drunken fight we might happen upon today. Kentucky wrestling incorporated the use of knives and a range of techniques designed to maim the opponent: eye gouging, ear biting and testicle wrenching! Foreign visitors to the region were horrified by the level of everyday violence they encountered. Life on the frontier was rough, and the people who settled it displayed a degree of toughness that shocked a more genteel world.

One only has to recall the story of the town’s first schoolmaster as an example of the ruggedness required in those early days. John McKinney began teaching lessons to the pioneer children in 1783 in a small log schoolhouse. One morning, a wildcat leapt through the schoolhouse door and onto the unsuspecting teacher. With its fangs dug into his ribs, McKinney found that no help was coming and so did what anyone would do in such a situation—he proceeded to strangle the cat to death and then removed the fangs from his bleeding torso. (Although, one could argue that a tougher man might not have canceled school for the day). This was a land where even the teachers had to be ready for anything. But in time, as Lexington expanded, the frontier moved toward the horizon. The city took on that veneer of polite society, and brawling evolved into the more gentlemanly art of dueling.

Churches formed, as did a newspaper in 1787. Although the Town Branch often flooded, spilling over its banks into the center of the town, the residents looked past such inconveniences and forged ahead. Then, in 1793, Transylvania Seminary decided to relocate permanently to Lexington. A few years later, it adopted university status. The presence of what would be one of the finest universities in the nation in the nineteenth century was a boon to Lexington and helped put it on the path to being an educational and cultural capital. With the later establishment of medical and law schools at Transylvania, Lexington went from being a small fort with thirteen occupants to the Athens of the West, a booming center of expansion with seven thousand residents by 1833.

Lexington quickly established itself as a center of commerce. Wool factories and paper mills were constructed on what is now Manchester Street. Traders set up shop. The town prospered. Yet things did not always progress smoothly. James Prentiss, who came to Lexington in 1805 from New England to establish the paper mills, fled the town in disgrace in 1817, guilty of fraud and facing financial ruin. A Yale-educated Bostonite by the name of J.B. Borland found life in Kentucky too depressing, and in 1815 he slit his throat and jumped to his death. Such events were part of life anywhere, and Lexington was no exception. Entrepreneurs such as John Wesley Hunt helped the city to grow, both economically and politically. A number of prominent families contributed to the development of banks, business and more. Many of these names are noted around Lexington today: Hunt, Gratz, Breckinridge and Clay.

By the 1830s, Lexington not only had a university, it also had a railroad, fire stations, hotels and a state-of-the-art mental institution, one of only two in the nation. An orphanage was opened after the cholera epidemic of 1833, and the first city school was opened in 1834, offering education to the poor.

The Phoenix Hotel was the site for duels, fistfights and other colorful events in Lexington’s history. It was an army headquarters during the Civil War. Courtesy of Lexington History Museum.

Agriculture thrived in the areas around Lexington. In addition to hemp, tobacco and corn, livestock was profitable. The city’s wealthier residents built large mansions outside the town limits. Lexington was booming, but change was not far off.

Some of the very first pioneers into Kentucky were slaves. Daniel Boone’s party that was attacked by Shawnees in 1775 included them, and settlers who came from Virginia brought their property, including slaves, with them when they crossed the Cumberland Gap. By the time of the Civil War, roughly one-third of the city’s population was black. Lexington had become a hub for slave trading, the second-largest market in the South after New Orleans. Any black person found walking the streets alone without proper papers was liable to find himself hurled into a slave jail, to be sold down the river. There was also a strong antislavery faction within Fayette County, of which Cassius Clay was a vocal, and on occasion violent, supporter.

When war broke out in 1861, Kentuckians were torn. Although proslavery for the most part, they were also largely pro-Union, hence their status as a border state. Some historians have suggested that as the war dragged on, many in the state leaned more toward the South. It is worth noting that Kentucky was one of two states to vote for General McClellan rather than Abraham Lincoln in the 1864 election. Kentuckians were nothing if not independent, and they began to question state versus federal rights. Lexington was in the middle of the divide. Families were split. While Union forces occupied buildings on one side of Gratz Park, Confederates occupied those on the other side.

At war’s end, Kentucky refused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment ending slavery. In doing so, it became the one border state to plant itself firmly in the South, a move that caused it to experience many problems during Reconstruction—resistance to giving legal rights to freed blacks and economic difficulties associated with the end of slavery.

Notwithstanding these obstacles, Lexington managed to thrive, and as it did, the city worked hard to create an image that was both sophisticated and cultured but still very much Kentuckian. Contrary to popular belief, and despite the city’s best efforts to maintain its genteel image, Lexington’s history has not been as clean as many would have liked. Barely one hundred years ago, Lexington was considered one of the most wicked towns in the nation. The Athens of the West was denounced as a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah. At the time, the blame was directed firmly toward a group of working women. Local directories show an inordinately large number of seamstresses and dressmakers, even for a city of under forty thousand. But suspicious few of these ladies spent their time huddled over a lamp with a needle in hand. Their evening activities were of a more profitable (and less moral) persuasion. Levels of vice and prostitution were such that in 1900, New York magistrate Duehl referred to Lexington as a city of extreme wickedness. Incidentally, if you are wondering why so many chose to give their profession as seamstress, it was one of the few legitimate ways a single woman could support herself.

If you are thinking that an evening’s entertainment at a typical Lexington brothel was below the cream of society, think again. As we shall see, one Lexington madam in particular made a great fortune and achieved national renown through her bordello, which attracted some of the foremost political and business figures of the region. So deep did her connections run that, in spite of being the most indicted person in the city’s history, she spent not one night in jail. She has become something of a popular novelty over the decades, celebrated each year with (appropriately enough) a bed race through the heart of the city, dedicated in her honor.

Yet for all of the focus on vice and sins of the flesh as an explanation for Lexington’s wicked past, politics, race and business all played equal parts. Many times, the fine gentlemen of the Bluegrass were anything but.

Wicked Lexington will explore the colorful, the scandalous and the lurid stories of this city’s past—a time when political opponents fought duels in the streets, lynch mobs tried to fight their way past troops so that they could administer their own form of justice and illegal booze and women flowed freely.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to wicked Lexington.

Chapter 1

DASTARDLY DUELS

The people of Kentucky have a long legacy of violence. Ever since Daniel Boone followed in the footsteps of Dr. Thomas Walker, leading pioneers across the Cumberland Gap into what would become the commonwealth of Kentucky, the people who populated the state possessed a warrior mentality. They saw violence on a daily basis as they struggled to survive in the wilderness. In time, those violent