Beverly Mills Vincent House, Brownsville, Kentucky

 

Two years ago, after an exhausting day battling bush honeysuckle, ticks, and the heat, my friend Eric and I roamed about Edmonson County, Kentucky, looking for interesting historic buildings. We found plenty, but the most interesting was the former home of U.S. Representative Beverly Mills Vincent (1890-1980). The early 20th century house is lovely, but it’s the link between my random stop in Brownsville and a Gardens to Gables reader that make it special.

Let me go back a few years, to my first summer in our new (old) house. There was so much that needed fixing and doing inside our 1901 house. I had a full-time job, a two year old, a commute, and an old house and overgrown farm. At night, I sat on the porch and worried that I’d made a dreadful mistake by uprooting my family and moving back to a rural area. Overwhelmed and stressed, I directed my attention outside. The garden – or the gardens I was trying to create – became my solace.

The yard around the house had been woefully neglected during the long decades the farm and house were rented out. There were none of the shrubs I expected to find around an old homeplace – spirea, lilacs, and Rose of Sharon bushes.  So I wrote a blog post about my desire to procure some Rose of Sharon seedlings. This was action – I could exercise some control over the tumult of my life and find plants!

A Gardens to Gables reader, Anne Ferguson, responded to my blog post and offered to bring some seedlings to Lexington that very week. We met, I planted the seedlings, and slowly – I was able to manage the chaos that had left me feeling unmoored (adding a new baby to the mix probably doesn’t count as decreasing stress, but it was a highly successful distraction!). I’ve never forgotten Anne’s kindness and every summer, I am reminded of her generosity when the arching branches of these shrubs hang heavy with blooms.

Four years later, when I shared the photograph of the house in Brownsville on the Gardens to Gables Facebook page, Anne immediately commented – not only did she recognize the house, but Beverly Mills Vincent was her uncle!

It’s a small, small world. You never know what sort of story will unfurl when you stop to take a picture.

Beverly Mills Vincent was born in Brownsville, Kentucky, in 1890, one of ten sons born to Gillis and Calvernia Willis Vincent.*After graduating from what is now Western Kentucky University and the University of Kentucky College of Law, Vincent hung out his shingle in his hometown. He served as Edmonson County Judge from 1916 to 1918, and then World War I intervened.

Private Vincent was in the Seventy-Second Field Artillery from August 27, 1918 to January 9, 1919. Upon the end of the Great War, he returned to Kentucky and served as the state’s Assistant Attorney General from 1919 to 1920.

Vincent ran for the state senate in 1929, where he remained until 1933. Three years later, he was elected as Attorney General but only filled one year of his term before being appointed by Governor A.B. “Happy” Chandler to fill a vacancy in the U.S. Senate caused by the death of U.S. Representative Glover H. Cary. He was reelected for three additional terms, and then  – perhaps tired of politics – returned to Brownsville.

He practiced law again, often taking on cases for local people in return for payment in eggs, chickens, or vegetables. In the 1950 census, his occupation is listed as farmer. 

In the late 1930s, Vincent had a stylish new house built on a hill overlooking Washington Street in Brownsville. Like so many vernacular dwellings of the time, it does not fit neatly into a stylistic category. The stone house has a gambrel roof (like the Dutch Colonial Revival style), arched openings and a wonderful triple arched front porch (calling to mind the influence of the Tudor Revival style), and 8/8 double-hung sash windows that would be at home in a Colonial Revival style house.

A wing on the south side of the house served as Vincent’s office, while a screened-in porch is on the north side of the house. In the 1940 census, the house was valued at $7,000, at a time when the median house value in the United States was below $3,000.

Brownsville was a pretty small town in 1940 – around 450 residents. When Vincent moved home for good after his stint in Washington, DC, he was a big fish in a small pond – but a beloved member of the community. In a 1935 newspaper article, Vincent was described as “outspoken, blunt and likeable…[an] individualist and strong character.”

I knew none of this during my momentary stop on the street below this house in May 2022 – after all, I take LOTS of pictures of historic buildings. It’s only after the traveling and the picture taking that I am able to pause (sometimes) and consider the images I captured and the stories they may hold. This house, to my delight, held a story with a slim connective thread to me.

 

 

 

*Vincent and his brothers “achieved prominence in business, the professions, and as public officials.” In 1935, they incorporated as the “Ten Brothers Corporation” to promote mutual aid and assistance of the family. The corporation functioned to make investments in timberland and real estate for the collective benefit of the brothers. (Death notice of Gillis Vincent, The Courier-Journal, February 24, 1948, page 1)