Kennard and King Houses, Lexington, Fayette, Kentucky

KENNARD and KING HOUSES

225-27 S. Limestone St., Lexington, Fayette County, Kentucky
Built  1844

There's no question as to the year these two adjoining houses—one now stuccoed—were built.

Whittington King and John Kennard purchased 101½ feet here on "Mulberry St." from Joel Higgins, on which Higgins held a mortgage recorded February 28, 1844. It said that King and Kennard "agree to cause to be erected during the present year upon said premises two brick houses and other convenient buildings."

Throughout the near century of their existence, one—the King house—has remained in the same family, while the other has changed hands several times, known variously as the "McKee" house and Judge Allen's home.

The King house, by the way, has a Kentucky Coffee Tree in the back yard. The pioneers used the beans to make a substitute for coffee, but present day Kentuckians had lost sight of the fact until a Boston lecturer came to Lexington recently to get a picture of a "coffee-bean tree," with its pods to illustrate a lecture on Kentucky. Local citizens said they had never heard of such a tree, but inquiry at the University of Kentucky brought the immediate response that there was one "in down-town Lexington"—and here it was.

The Kennard house was sold in March, 1850, to settle a suit, the purchasers being Joel Higgins and Hiram Shaw.

Susan S. Carter bought the house the next month from Higgins (and wife, Ann L.) and Shaw (and wife, Nancy).

In 1853 Susan S. Carter sold the property to Jane W. McKee, who had it for ten years.

Harvey C. Graves and wife, Martha R., of Scott County, purchased the house January 2, 1863, and conveyed it to Isadora Berkley and her husband, John W. Berkley, "for love and affection, she being her daughter."

Judge Thos. N. Allen traded another property for the house early in 1884, and is remembered as its occupant by those whose memory goes back a half century.

Source: Old Houses of Lexington, C. Frank Dunn, typescript, n.d., copy located in the Kentucky Room, Lexington (Kentucky) Public Library.

Transcribed by pb, July 2006