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, 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 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 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. 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.
Of domestic architecture in a brief and general way something has been
said. The prevailing influence was Virginian, but in Lexington and
elsewhere may be observed evidences of French ideas in the glasswork
and designs of doors and windows, in rooms grouped around a central
hall with arching niches and alcoves; for models made their way from
New Orleans as well as from the East. Out in the country, however, at
such places as those already mentioned, and in homes nearer town, as
at Ashland, a purely English taste was sometimes shown for woodland
parks with deer, and, what was more peculiarly Kentuckian, elk and
buffalo. This taste, once so conspicuous, has never become extinct,
and certainly the landscape is receptive enough to all such stately
purposes. At "Spring Hill" and elsewhere, to-day, one may stroll
through woods that have kept a touch of their native wildness. There
was the English love of lawns, too, with a low matted green turf
and wide-spreading shade-trees above--elm and maple, locust and
poplar--the English fondness for a home half hidden with evergreens
and creepers and shrubbery, to be approached by a leafy avenue, a
secluded gate-way, and a gravelled drive; for highways hardly admit to
the heart of rural life in Kentucky, and way-side homes, to be dusted
and gazed at by every passer-by, would little accord with the spirit
of the people. This feeling of family seclusion and completeness also
portrayed itself very tenderly in the custom of family graveyards,
which were in time to be replaced by the democratic cemetery; and no
one has ever lingered around those quiet spots of aged and drooping
cedars, fast-fading violets, and perennial myrtle, without being made
to feel that they grew out of the better heart and fostered the finer
senses.
Another evidence of culture among the first generations of Kentuckians
is to be seen in the private collections of portraits, among which one
wanders now with a sort of stricken feeling that the higher life of
Kentucky in this regard never went beyond its early promise. Look into
the meagre history of native art, and you will discover that nearly all
the best work belongs to this early time. It was possible then that a
Kentuckian could give up law and turn to painting. Almost in the
wilderness Jouett created rich, luminous, startling canvases. Artists
came from older States to sojourn and to work, and were invited or
summoned from abroad. Painting was taught in Lexington in 1800. Well for
Jouett, perhaps, that he lived when he did; better for Hart, perhaps,
that he was not born later: they might have run for Congress. One is
prone to recur time and again to this period, when the ideals of
Kentucky life were still wavering or unformed, and when there was the
greatest receptivity to outside impressions. Thinking of social life as
it was developed, say in and around Lexington--of artists coming and
going, of the statesmen, the lecturers, the lawyers, of the dignity and
the energy of character, of the intellectual dinners--one is inclined to
liken the local civilization to a truncated cone, to a thing that should
have towered to a symmetric apex, but somehow has never risen very high
above a sturdy base.
But to speak broadly of home life after it became more typically
Kentuckian, and after architecture began to reflect with greater
uniformity the character of the people. And here one can find material
comfort, if not æsthetic delight; for it is the whole picture of human
life in the Blue-grass Region that pleases. Ride east and west, or
north and south, along highway or by-way, and the picture is the same.
One almost asks for relief from the monotony of a merely well-to-do
existence, almost sighs for the extremes of squalor and splendor, that
nowhere may be seen, and that would seem so out of place if anywhere
confronted. On, and on, and on you go, seeing only the repetition of
field and meadow, wood and lawn, a winding stream, an artificial pond, a
sunny vineyard, a blooming orchard, a stone-wall, a hedge-row, a tobacco
barn, a warehouse, a race-track, cattle under the trees, sheep on the
slopes, swine in the pools, and, half hidden by evergreens and
shrubbery, the homelike, unpretentious houses that crown very simply and
naturally the entire picture of material prosperity. They strike you as
built not for their own sakes. Few will offer anything that lays hold
upon the memory, unless it be perhaps a front portico with Doric, Ionic,
or Corinthian columns; for the typical Kentuckian likes to go into his
house through a classic entrance, no matter what inharmonious things may
be beyond; and after supper on summer evenings nothing fills him with
serener comfort than to tilt his chair back against a classic support,
as he smokes a pipe and argues on the immortality of a pedigree.
On the whole, one feels that nature has long waited for a more exquisite
sense in domestic architecture; that the immeasurable possibilities of
delightful landscape have gone unrecognized or wasted. Too often there
is in form and outline no harmony with the spirit of the scenery, and
there is dissonance of color--color which makes the first and strongest
impression. The realm of taste is prevailingly the realm of the want of
taste, or of its meretricious and commonplace violations. Many of the
houses have a sort of featureless, cold, insipid ugliness, and interior
and exterior decorations are apt to go for nothing or for something
worse. You repeat that nature awaits more art, since she made the land
so kind to beauty; for no transformation of a rude, ungenial landscape
is needed. The earth does not require to be trimmed and combed and
perfumed. The airy vistas and delicate slopes are ready-made, the
parklike woodlands invite, the tender, clinging children of the summer,
the deep, echoless repose of the whole land, all ask that art be laid on
every undulation and stored in every nook. And there are days with such
Arcadian colors in air and cloud and sky--days with such panoramas of
calm, sweet pastoral groups and harmonies below, such rippling and
flashing of waters through green underlights and golden interspaces,
that the shy, coy spirit of beauty seems to be wandering half sadly
abroad and shunning all the haunts of man.
But little agricultural towns are not art-centres. Of itself rural life
does not develop æsthetic perceptions, and the last, most difficult
thing to bring into the house is this shy, elusive spirit of beauty.
The Kentucky woman has perhaps been corrupted in childhood by tasteless
surroundings. Her lovable mission, the creation of a multitude of small,
lovely objects, is undertaken feebly and blindly. She may not know how
to create beauty, may not know what beauty is. The temperament of her
lord, too, is practical: a man of substance and stomach, sound at heart,
and with an abiding sense of his own responsibility and importance,
honestly insisting on sweet butter and new-laid eggs, home-made bread
and home-grown mutton, but little revelling in the delicacies of
sensibility, and with no more eye for crimson poppies or blue
corn-flowers in his house than amid his grain. Many a Kentucky woman
would make her home beautiful if her husband would allow her to do it.
Amid a rural people, also, no class of citizens is more influential than
the clergy, who go about as the shepherds of the right; and without
doubt in Kentucky, as elsewhere, ministerial ideals have wrought their
effects on taste in architecture. Perhaps it is well to state that this
is said broadly, and particularly of the past. The Kentucky preachers
during earlier times were a fiery, zealous, and austere set, proclaiming
that this world was not a home, but wilderness of sin, and exhorting
their people to live under the awful shadow of Eternity. Beauty in every
material form was a peril, the seductive garment of the devil. Wellnigh
all that made for æsthetic culture was put down, and, like frost on
venturesome flowers, sermons fell on beauty in dress, entertainment,
equipage, houses, church architecture, music, the drama, the
opera--everything. The meek young spirit was led to the creek or pond,
and perhaps the ice was broken for her baptism. If, as she sat in the
pew, any vision of her chaste loveliness reached the pulpit, back came
the warning that she would some day turn into a withered hag, and must
inevitably be "eaten of worms." What wonder if the sense of beauty pined
or went astray, and found itself completely avenged in the building of
such churches? And yet there is nothing that even religion more surely
demands than the fostering of the sense of beauty within us, and through
this also we work towards the civilization of the future.
IV
Many rural homes have been built since the war, but the old type of
country life has vanished. On the whole, there has been a strong
movement of population towards the towns, rapidly augmenting their
size. Elements of showiness and freshness have been added to their
once unobtrusive architecture. And, in particular, that art movement
and sudden quickening of the love of beauty which swept over this
country a few years since has had its influence here. But for the most
part the newer homes are like the newer homes in other American
cities, and the style of interior appointment and decoration has few
native characteristics. As a rule the people love the country life
less than of yore, since an altered social system has deprived it of
much leisure, and has added hardships. The Kentuckian does not regard
it as part of his mission in life to feed fodder to stock; and
servants are hard to get, the colored ladies and gentlemen having
developed a taste for urban society.
What is to be the future of the Blue-grass Region? When population
becomes denser and the pressure is felt in every neighborhood, who will
possess it? One seems to see in certain tendencies of American life the
probable answer to this question. The small farmer will be bought out,
and will disappear. Estates will grow fewer and larger. The whole land
will pass into the hands of the rich, being too precious for the poor to
own. Already here and there one notes the disposition to create vast
domains by the slow swallowing up of contiguous small ones. Consider in
this connection the taste already shown by the rich American in certain
parts of the United States to found a country-place in the style of an
English lord. Consider, too, that the landscape is much like the
loveliest of rural England; that the trees, the grass, the sculpture of
the scenery are such as make the perfect beauty of a park; that the fox,
the bob-white, the thoroughbred, and the deer are indigenous.
Apparently, therefore, one can foresee the distant time when this will
become the region of splendid homes and estates that will nourish a
taste for out-door sports and offer an escape from the too-wearying
cities. On the other hand, a powerful and ever-growing interest is that
of the horse, racer or trotter. He brings into the State his increasing
capital, his types of men. Year after year he buys farms, and lays out
tracks, and builds stables, and edits journals, and turns agriculture
into grazing. In time the Blue-grass Region may become the Yorkshire of
America.
But let the future have its own. The country will become theirs who
deserve it, whether they build palaces or barns. One only hopes that
when the old homesteads have been torn down or have fallen into ruins,
the tradition may still run that they, too, had their day and deserved
their page of history.
THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP ON HORSEBACK
I
Fresh fields lay before us that summer of 1885. We had left the rich,
rolling plains of the Blue-grass Region in central Kentucky and set
our faces towards the great Appalachian uplift on the south-eastern
border of the State. There Cumberland Gap, that high-swung gate-way
through the mountain, abides as a landmark of what Nature can do when
she wishes to give an opportunity to the human race in its migrations
and discoveries, without surrendering control of its liberty and its
fate. It can never be too clearly understood by those who are wont to
speak of "the Kentuckians" that this State has within its boundaries
two entirely distinct elements of population--elements distinct in
England before they came hither, distinct during more than a century
of residence here, and distinct now in all that goes to constitute a
separate community--occupations, manners and customs, dress, views of
life, civilization. It is but a short distance from the blue-grass
country to the eastern mountains; but in traversing it you detach
yourself from all that you have ever experienced, and take up the
history of English-speaking men and women at the point it had reached
a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago.
Leaving Lexington, then, which is in the midst of the blue-grass
plateau, we were come to Burnside, where begin the navigable waters of
the Cumberland River, and the foot-hills of the Cumberland Mountains.
Burnside is not merely a station, but a mountain watering-place. The
water is mostly in the bed of the river. We had come hither to get
horses and saddle-bags, but to no purpose. The hotel was a sort of
transition point between the civilization we had left and the primitive
society we were to enter. On the veranda were some distinctly modern and
conventional red chairs; but a green and yellow gourd-vine, carefully
trained so as to shut out the landscape, was a genuine bit of local
color. Under the fine beeches in the yard was swung a hammock, but it
was made of boards braced between ropes, and was covered with a
weather-stained piece of tarpaulin. There were electric bells in the
house that did not electrify; and near the front entrance three barrels
of Irish potatoes, with the tops off, spoke for themselves in the
absence of the bill of fare. After supper, the cook, a tall, blue-eyed,
white fellow, walked into my room without explanation, and carried away
his guitar, showing that he had been wont to set his sighs to music in
that quarter of the premises. The moon hung in that part of the
heavens, and no doubt ogled him into many a midnight frenzy. Sitting
under a beech-tree in the morning, I had watched a child from some city,
dressed in white and wearing a blue ribbon around her goldenish hair,
amuse herself by rolling old barrels (potato barrels probably, and she
may have had a motive) down the hill-side and seeing them dashed to
pieces on the railway track below. By-and-by some of the staves of one
fell in, the child tumbled in also, and they all rolled over together.
Upon the whole, it was an odd overlapping of two worlds. When the
railway was first opened through this region a young man established a
fruit store at one of the stations, and as part of his stock laid in a
bunch of bananas. One day a mountaineer entered. Arrangements generally
struck him with surprise, but everything else was soon forgotten in an
adhesive contemplation of that mighty aggregation of fruit. Finally he
turned away with this comment: "Damn me if them ain't the damnedest
beans _I_ ever seen!"
[Illustration: OLD FERRY AT POINT BURNSIDE.]
The scenery around Burnside is beautiful, and the climate bracing. In
the valleys was formerly a fine growth of walnut, but the principal
timbers now are oak, ash, and sycamore, with yellow pine. I heard of a
wonderful walnut tree formerly standing, by hiring vehicles to go and
see which the owner of a livery-stable made three hundred and fifty
dollars. Six hundred were offered for it on the spot. The hills are
filled with the mountain limestone--that Kentucky oolite of which the
new Cotton Exchange in New York is built. Here was Burnside's depot of
supplies during the war, and here passed the great road--made in part a
corduroy road at his order--from Somerset, Kentucky, to Jacksborough,
over which countless stores were taken from central Kentucky and regions
farther north into Tennessee. Supplies were brought up the river in
small steamboats or overland in wagons, and when the road grew
impassable, pack-mules were used. Sad sights there were in those sad
days: the carcasses of animals at short intervals from here to
Knoxville, and now and then a mule sunk up to his body in mire, and
abandoned, with his pack on, to die. Here were batteries planted and
rifle-pits dug, the vestiges of which yet remain; but where the forest
timbers were then cut down a vigorous new growth has long been
reclaiming the earth to native wildness, and altogether the aspect of
the place is peaceful and serene. Doves were flying in and out of the
cornfields on the hill-sides; there were green stretches in the valleys
where cattle were grazing; and these, together with a single limestone
road that wound upward over a distant ridge, recalled the richer scenes
of the blue-grass lands.
Assured that we should find horses and saddlebags at Cumberland Falls,
we left Burnside in the afternoon, and were soon set down at a station
some fifteen miles farther along, where a hack conveyed us to another
of those mountain watering-places that are being opened up in various
parts of eastern Kentucky for the enjoyment of a people that has never
cared to frequent in large numbers the Atlantic seaboard.
[Illustration: "DAMN ME IF THEM AIN'T THE DAMNEDEST BEANS I EVER SEEN!"]