Old Washington
The red-brown brick façade of Washington Hall was warm to the touch when I stopped by on a recent walking tour of this historic district in Maysville. It had spent the morning facing east into the hot July Kentucky sun, just as it has every summer for 200 years.
If I hadn’t finished an iced 20-ounce Kenton (an espresso drink named for frontiersman and “Father of Mason County” Simon Kenton) from the Parc Café moments earlier, I would have stopped inside for one of the lattes advertised on a placard by the entrance. An art supply shop and other ventures are also now located inside this building — one of the most historic in Maysville.
County seat
Washington Hall first opened as a hotel, back when this historic district was the county seat of Mason County. Those who supported keeping the county seat in Washington (called “Old Washington” today) built the hotel to improve the town’s capacity for court business, but higher-ups at the state level had their eyes on moving the county seat to Maysville. That move would eventually happen in 1848.
Would Old Washington look the same today if it had stayed the county seat? I think that it would look much different. There would probably be a modern justice center, as there is in downtown Maysville. And perhaps not all the 18th- and 19th-century buildings that have been preserved along Old Main Street – including several log cabins — could have withstood the growth.
That would be a shame, since each of the historic buildings has a story to tell. None, however, has inspired a story like the building that stands at 2124 Old Main Street. That building is the circa-1807 Marshall Key House, now home to the Harriet Beecher Stowe Slavery to Freedom Museum.
This is the place that, one day in 1833, a young Harriet Beecher got the idea for a narrative that would expose the horror of slavery and shake the nation’s conscience.
Slavery
To understand the importance of the Marshall Key House, we must look back at America’s 400-year-plus history of racial injustice that includes slavery.
The history of slavery in the United Slaves – chattel slavery, specifically – dates back to at least the early 1600s, when ships filled with enslaved Africans arrived in the British colonies in America. For at least 250 years, entire generations of families were legally bought and sold as personal property in the colonies and then the United States* until U.S. ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865.
“Word picture of slavery”
When Harriet Beecher came to Washington that day in 1833 to visit the Key family, she witnessed a slave auction on the courthouse lawn one block from the Key home. The horrific sight of human beings being sold like property stuck in her memory and reportedly lead her years later to write what she called a “word picture of slavery.” That word picture was Harriet Beecher Stowe‘s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).
Today both the Marshall Key House/Harriet Beecher Stowe Slavery to Freedom Museum and the old courthouse lawn exist as historic sites on a guided walking tour of Old Washington. The museum is closed for repairs, but I walked freely around the structure to eye the architecture and take photos. Guided tours of the museum property and Old Washington can be requested by contacting the Maysville-Mason County Convention and Visitors Bureau.
The Underground Railroad
The story that launched Stowe’s pivotal novel is one of thousands, with many of those stories found in Mason County. The county’s location on the Ohio River made it an important stop along the Underground Railroad that moved tens of thousands of people to freedom. The Underground Railroad operated until around 1863, when freedom fighters merged operations with the Union fight against the Confederacy.
One stop along the Underground Railroad in Maysville was the Bierbower Home located at 8 W. 4th Street. Today, it is the home of the National Underground Railroad Museum.
The National Underground Railroad Museum houses artifacts chronicling abolition and slavery and is, in fact, an artifact itself — it was operated as a safe house by Johnathon and Lucetta Bierbower to hide enslaved people seeking freedom across the river.
The museum is currently closed due to COVID-19 (like many other places around the country), but it should be on your list of places to visit when it reopens in 2021.
The fight against racial injustice in America continues today in various forms including the Black Lives Matter movement, which at least one civil rights activist and lawyer has called “unprecedented” in its diversity. The killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor are two pivotal events that have galvanized the movement in some unlikely places, urging America once again toward change.
*Most northern U.S. states had abolished slavery by the early 1800s. However, many former enslaved persons in the North were kept as “apprentices for life” and indentured servants post-abolition.
An architectural tour . . .
My stop earlier in the day in downtown Maysville at the Parc Café (located in the renovated J.C. Everett Building at E. 2nd Street) gave me a chance to see more of the city’s imaginative architecture. Buildings that I stopped to photograph ran the gamut from quirky to opulent, each with a story to tell.
My thanks to the Maysville-Mason County Convention and Visitors Bureau for the information used in the descriptions below:
Cigar Store, 210 Market Street, circa 1897. Only nine feet across, this four-story building is the smallest building downtown. It began as a cigar shop and underwent several iterations, including serving as a popular eatery with Maysville teens in the 1950s through the 1970s.
Ringgold Lodge, 221 Market Street, circa 1880. This Italian Renaissance building with gorgeous gold ornamentation on the façade was once the home to the IOOF (Independent Order of Odd Fellows) Ringgold Lodge and Merz Brothers’ department store. The building was purchased in late 2015 and has been undergoing renovation.
Maysville Event Center (Old Montgomery Ward Building), 24 E. 2nd Street, 1928. Stunning art deco façade and building that features Montgomery Ward’s “The Spirit of Progress” statue at center of the façade arch.
Russell Theatre, 9 E. 3rd Street, 1930. Modeled after the Roxy in New York City, the Russell Theatre is an atmospheric theatre with Spanish-style ornamentation. It was the location of the premiere of the 1953 film “The Stars are Singing” starring Rosemary Clooney, who was born in Maysville in 1928. The theatre is being restored but is open for business.
Still curious? Contact the Maysville-Mason County Convention and Visitors Bureau located in the historic Cox Building at 2 East Third Street.
Featured image: Washington Hall, circa 1820.
