Every historic building has a story to tell
I’ve been in my share of abandoned buildings. Some are so far gone, piled with debris and trash, that it is hard even for me to see a glimmer of the past, before the sliding, sad decline. Yet other vacant buildings are merely fixed in time, and their individual elements speak to speak so clearly (read more)
Categories: Abandoned houses, Casey County
As longtime followers of this blog might know, I am an architectural historian, with a day job, a family, a farm, and I maintain this blog in my free time. My career allows me to combine three of my greatest passions: being outside (and gardening!), writing, and old buildings. I’m not interested in being a (read more)
Categories: Abandoned houses, Abandoned Kentucky, Warren County
Tags: #abandonedhouse, #kentuckyarchitecture, #warrencountyky
The daffodils, yellow and bright against a gray February day, signaled to me to slow down. Then I saw the house, half hidden by trees, a small, frame, central passage dwelling on a stone foundation, with a brick chimney at either gable end. The weatherboard was still mostly white on the one-story house, but the (read more)
Categories: Abandoned houses, Abandoned Kentucky, Warren County
Tags: #abandonedhouse, daffodils, old homesite
One of the most rewarding aspects of my profession (and there are many) is the mandate to explore. Back roads, dirt roads, fording creeks, and braving masses of honeysuckle, poison ivy, and bindweed, can result in unexpected treasures. Many years ago, I spent a hot summer documenting historic resources in Bath County, Kentucky – a (read more)
Back before the Covid-19 Pandemic, daycare centers closing, and work from home, we commuted five days a week. A ritual developed of noting landmarks along our route, and no rural landmark was more popular (or sad), than what my toddler coined as “the Falling-Down house.” Sewell Shop, a crossroads community on US 60 near the (read more)
As I type this, a cacophony of sound mills about me – the rain striking the windows, thunder off in the distance, a screaming baby, the sound of the sump pump working to keep our cellar dry(ish) – and I am thinking about old houses, open to the elements and crumpling more into the ground (read more)
Categories: Abandoned houses, Fleming County
When I was in elementary school, I sometimes rode the school bus home, a long and circuitous route that took me across the county line, and past a landscape of farms and old houses. The images of those buildings and the feelings they engendered linger with me still. When I posted a photograph of this (read more)
Categories: Abandoned houses, Bath County
Tags: #abandonedhouse, #abandonedkentucky, #bethelky, #kentuckyfarmhouse, Farmhouse
Woodford County is famed across Kentucky for its scenic landscapes, and its rural roads treasured by cyclists. Several months ago, I got a message from a Gardens to Gables reader about a curious historic house spotted by a bicyclist enjoying the area. The photograph prompted my curiosity as well – two door houses are a (read more)
Categories: Abandoned houses, Woodford County
Historic digitized newspapers are one of the great positives of the Internet age, and capable of diverting my attention for hours upon end. I’ve often chuckled over the name of a long-vanished Kentucky newspaper, The Spout Spring Times, which made its debut on January 18, 1896. To my delight, I found myself in that same (read more)
I just spent some quality time on the floor with my toddler, drawing pictures of houses with (this is a very important fact) washable crayons. My drafting skills are not the finest, but I executed two renderings of a fairly one-dimensional dwelling, each house with a central door flanked by a window on either side (read more)
Categories: Abandoned houses, Warren County
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