Harrodsburg’s First Tourist Home: Three Elms on East Lexington Street

The  two-story Isaac Hipple House is a restrained  study of the Greek Revival style in Kentucky. Pilasters separate the bays on the facade of the brick dwelling, and a one-story porch extends across the entry door and two windows, hiding much of the first story. (The original porch was centered on the house, extending out from the front door.) Compared to some interpretations of the style, this dwelling is downright staid. But some elements of the building’s story are anything but sedate and sober. Seduction, violence, and even a stint as the first tourist home in Harrodsburg (a fun chapter, but one about which I know virtually nothing) are but a few of the tales associated with the house.

While the house was built in the mid-1840s for Isaac Hipple, the second owner was Mary Garnett Thompson, about whom many tongues wagged in the late 19th century. Her former husband, prominent attorney Philip B. Thompson, Jr.,  (known as “Little Phil” to distinguish him from his father of the same name) shot and killed Water H. Davis at the Burgin train station in 1883.

Davis was believed to be Mary’s lover, and purportedly plied her with alcohol and then seduced her during a trip to Cincinnati. Thompson was acquitted of the crime because he was “upholding the honor of his household.”* Friends and family of the slain man, a well-known businessman, and married father of three, protested that Mrs. Thompson had a known problem with alcohol, and David had come across her in a state of inebriation in downtown Cincinnati. But the deck was stacked against any other story than that of “southern honor.”

The use of “former” suggests that perhaps the Thompsons obtained a divorce after this episode of supposed seduction and pistol shots? I really have a shocking lack of knowledge about this 19th century scandal.

During various projects in Harrodsburg (full disclosure: it is my mother’s hometown, and deemed by her to be “God’s Country”), I’ve accumulated piles of clippings and research. One is from either an early phone book or city directory, advertising the house as a tourist home. (I neglected to label this electronic image – shame on me!)

I’d love to know more about the house’s time as a tourist home. In the early 20th century, operations that may have originally been genteel boarding houses or just a home owner that “let” rooms transformed (in verbiage, at least) into tourist homes. Many widows rented out rooms to supplement their incomes. More and more Americans owned cars, and the rising middle class had more leisure time – travel for pleasure was increasing, and yet places to stay were sometimes few and far between.

In the 1940 census, Miss Burke Henderson owned and lived in this house, and had one lodger, Richard Selleck, a chiropractor. She and her sister, Eva, had lived together previously, according the 1930 census. It appears that “Three Elms” was the Henderson family home from at least 1920 through 1940. By 1950, Miss Henderson was a lodger herself on Beaumont Avenue.

I have to wonder how much tourist business Miss Henderson and the Three Elms hosted – and how many other homeowners tried their hand at this version of renting rooms? On trips to Harrodsburg during my childhood, my sisters and I were always amazed by the number of places our great-grandmother lived around town. She, too, was a lodger after being widowed, and I once declared that, “Granny must have lived everywhere!”

 

 

 

* The Thompson family had a close association not only with the practice of the law, but also with firearms and violence. Thompson, Jr., his twin brother John, and their father, Philip Thompson Sr., were wounded during a shoot out at a Harrodsburg, KY, courthouse in 1873. Thompson Jr’s aunt, Maria T. Daviess, contributed much more positively to the community with her columns in the local paper that would later be compiled into the 1924 book , the History of Mercer and Boyle Counties, Ky.