Thomas Family Houses, Lexington, Kentucky

You miss so much viewing the world from a car. I’ve driven down North Limestone Street in Lexington hundreds of times – but what you glimpse through the windows of a car is different, in a hundred small ways, from what you observe while on foot. And it was on foot, trudging through a January snow, that I first noticed the  small frame shotgun house and its brick T-plan neighbor.

The shotgun house sits further back from North Limestone than the other houses, a puzzling characteristic that made me stop and consider my surroundings. The tidy little house with its Italianate brackets backs up to the campus of Transylvania University, and all I needed to do was stop and turn my head to the left (south) to see how very much parts of the neighborhood have changed in the last 30-40 years.

While I stood and puzzled that winter day, my musings were worlds away from the real story behind the two houses. I contemplated the additions, the location of the buildings on their lots, and how much they were selling for (a small “for sale” sign beckoned from one window). But these two small houses are also survivors of a once prosperous (though small) historic African American neighborhood from the post-Civil War period, contained within a larger white (and wealthy) neighborhood.

When Alfred Thomas was born, around 1825, it was likely that both of his parents  – and he, upon his birth – were enslaved.  I don’t know where Thomas spent his early years, but by 1870, official records document him as a minister, and the owner of a  house – the shotgun house – which was valued at $1,200.

Thomas lived in this house with his wife, Emmeline, sons John and Charles, and daughter Lizzie. He was the pastor of the Colored Baptist Church in Athens, Kentucky. The church organized after the Civil War, and in 1882, had a “large and flourishing congregation.”*

The mystery of the deep setback of the shotgun house was easily explained once I went map hunting- another frame building once stood in front of it!

The two story, front gable oriented building appears to have been three bays wide, with a storefront on the ground floor (a large display window to either side of a central door), and living space on the second.

I don’t know when this building was torn down – sometime after the above photograph was taken in 1980.  On the 1907 Sanborn map, the building is labeled as a “cobbler’s” shop (a shoemaker).

Alfred’s eldest son, John B. Thomas, inherited the shotgun and the store building around 1903. It may have been around that time that the lovely brick T-plan house on the north side of the shotgun house was built – possibly at the time of his marriage to Ella (or Luella) Mukes.

While the one-story, two bay wide house is indeed handsome, with its large, three-part segmentally arched window on the facade, and a lunette window above it, it’s the rear portion of the brick building that is the most fascinating. It’s hard to see the two story frame section, but it may well have been the original dwelling on the parcel, and the brick cottage built later in front of it.

John Thomas worked as a shoemaker, and Ella was a dressmaker. In 1912, they were living (the city directories are more confusing than elucidating, as both the shotgun and T-plan houses are listed for John and Ella as their main residence) here, along with John’s widowed mother. Three years later, Ella joined her mother-in-law in widowhood. John died in 1915, and was buried in African Cemetery  No. 2, leaving behind his wife and two daughters: Jessie and Almeda.

I know that there is far more behind these two houses than the little bit I was unable to uncover – and I am thrilled that this bit of history and vernacular architecture has managed to remain standing in an environment that favors demolition and new construction (or parking lots).

Once we’re  no longer in a pandemic, and I can access local deed books, I hope to add more to the story of the Thomas family, and the historic buildings they left behind.

 

 

*Robert Peter, MD and William Henry Perrin, History of Fayette County, Kentucky, 1882.