Forest Grove, Bourbon County, Kentucky

 

Sometimes when you look for one thing – you find something else! While shuffling through years of emails earlier today, I found this photograph of a handsome historic house in Bourbon County, Kentucky. The email was dated 2011, but I can’t claim to know the date of the photograph. It may well be the original survey photo, in which case it dates from the late 1970s and the photographer was William Gus Johnson.

Forest Grove, located on the Paris-Cynthiana Road, was built after the Civil War in the wildly popular Italianate style.* The house was built for Dr. Noah S. Moore, who was doing very well indeed for himself to have this house – an elaborate brick house channeling ideas of Italian villas – constructed. The symmetry, the graceful arched porches, and the combination of brackets and quoins (and those are not stone – the brick is simply painted) combine to make the dwelling an arresting sight on the rural landscape.

I have not done any looking into this property, save for checking my trusty “Green Book” to confirm its name.  (One of my resolutions for 2023 is to share more via blog posts, and that means short posts without hours of research. So you get to see the picture and share in my musing, but I don’t dig for the answers.) The house looks slightly dejected in this photograph, and I hope that the intervening decades have been kinder to it – if it stands at all?

 

 

*Picturesque names were all the rage in the 19th century. Looking at an 1861 map, the names are lyrical, often wooded in nature, and likely self-aggrandizing. There’s Sunny Side, New Forest, Woodbrook, Pleasant Home, Rose Lawn, Mount Alpine…you get the idea.