Harrison County Sites Listed on the Register of National Historic Places

LISTED!

There are 25 places in Harrison County which have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1974, when the Harrison County Courthouse was listed.  The last was the Handy House on November 25, 2005.

That's more than forty years of work at identifying and in helping to preserve sites that are deserving of the recognition and protection!

The next time you are driving around Harrison County, see how many of the following sites you can see:

1.  Harrison County Courthouse (100 Main St., Cynthiana) ~ Listed December 6, 1974
2. Monticello (aka Thomas Jefferson Megibben House; Monticello Heights, Cynthiana (The house was severely damaged by a fire in July, 1985; its ruins, except for the carriage house, were demolished.)) ~ Listed December 31, 1974 
3. Poplar Hill (aka John William Kimbrough House; 901 Millersburg Pike (East of Cynthiana on KY 32) Cynthiana) ~ Listed November 7, 1976
4.  Stony Castle (West of Berry on Lafferty Pike, Berry) ~ Listed December 12, 1978
5.  Episcopal Church of the Advent (122 North Walnut St., Cynthiana) ~ Listed December 22, 1978
6.  Kimbrough-Hehr House (U.S. 62, Broadwell) ~ Listed  April 20, 1979
7.  William T. Lafferty House (548 East Pike St., Cynthiana) ~ Listed April 10, 1980
8.  Cynthiana Commercial District (Pike St. from Church to Main Sts., and Main St. from Bridge to Pleasant Sts., Cynthiana) ~ Listed October 19, 1982
9.  Wesley Roberts House (113-115 North Main St., Cynthiana) ~ Listed November 10, 1982
10.  Joel Fraizer House (Off KY 982, Cynthiana) ~ Listed June 23, 1983
11. Haviland House, aka Stone House on Haviland Lane (Off U.S. 62, Cynthiana) ~ Listed June 23, 1983
12. John Hinkson House (Off U.S. 27, Shawhan) ~ Listed June 23, 1983
13. John Lair House (Old Lair Rd., Shawhan) ~ Listed June 23, 1983
14. John McKee House (Cook Rd., Shawhan) ~ Listed June 23, 1983
15. Samuel McMillan House (Off U.S. 62, Shawhan) ~ Listed June 23, 1983
16. Joseph Shawhan House (Off U.S. 27, Shawhan) ~ Listed June 23, 1983
17. Smith House (Off Lair Rd., Shawhan) ~ Listed June 23, 1983
18. Stone House of Indian Creek (Off U.S. 62, Cynthiana) ~ Listed June 23, 1983
19. John Williams House (Off KY 32/36, Shawhan) ~ Listed June 23, 1983
20. Archaeological Site No. 15HR4 (Address Restricted, Lair) ~ Listed February 20, 1986
21. Spur Gasoline Station, aka Jay's Cars Office (201 E. Bridge St., Cynthiana) ~ Listed April 27, 1987
22. Coleman-Desha Plantation (aka the Duffy House, the Oaks, and the Newkirk House; 1416 U.S. 62 E (Oddville Pike), 1 mile northeast of Cynthiana) ~ Listed February 26, 1993.
23. Confederate Monument in Cynthiana (Located in Battle Grove Cemetery, 531 East Pike Street (0.75 mi. E of jct. of S. Elmarch Ave. & Pike St.), Cynthiana) ~ Listed July 17, 1997
24. Second Battle of Cynthiana Battlefield (1 mi. N of Cynthiana, E of KY 36) ~ Listed September 6, 2002
25. Handy Farm (aka Ridgeway; U.S. 62, Cynthiana) ~ Listed November 25, 2005 (Visit Friends of Ridgeway Historic Community Center on Facebook for the most up-to-date information)

To find out more about these and other sites in Harrison County visit

https://npgallery.nps.gov/nrhp

or let your fingers do the walking over to

www.HarrisonCountyKy.US

and look for the link to "History on the Hoof."

Do you think there is a site, a home, a building, or some other structure or something to be added to this list?  Then maybe you should contact the Harrison County Historical Society for more information.  It is a bit of work to get listed, but then the results are nothing less than HISTORIC!

The Harrison County Courthouse was added to the list in 1974.

Kentucky Rebel Town, a new book by William A. Penn

YOU NEED TO ADD THIS TO YOUR LIBRARY

If you somehow missed the news, William A. (aka Bill) Penn, editor of the Harrison Heritage News, with a little help from the University of Kentucky Press, has published a fine history of Civil War times in Harrison County.  It is entitled Kentucky Rebel Town - The Civil War Battles of Cynthiana & Harrison County.

One might call it a revision of the author's earlier Civil War history, Rattling Spurs and Broad-Brimmed Hats: The Civil War and Harrison County, Kentucky (Battle Grove Press, 1995).  Yet, it really is a body of work that stands on its own when one considers how much more work has been done in recovering the details of lost history using research techniques and records not readily available in what might be considered the pre-internet era of the 1980s and '90s.

The volume should fill all your desires to know what is knowable about Cynthiana and Harrison County in the 1850s, '60s, and postbellum era..  There are 278 pages of great reading for the history buff with about an additional hundred pages of citations, including the index. Copies are available directly from Bill (who is also proprietor of the Midway Museum Store in Midway, Ky.), from the University of Kentucky Press, and if you are in or can make it to Cynthiana, they have been offered recently at the Cynthiana-Harrison County Museum for $47.70, of which $10 will be donated to the museum.

Bill's book should be of interest to genealogists as well. Did you know the difference between how a regular person reads a book and how a genealogist reads a book?  Your average bookworm will start at page one, while the genealogist will go to the back of the book first ... not to find out how the story ends, but to see if his relations ever got listed in the index before even bothering to read the text!

So, for a genealogist, quite a few books end up being pretty short reads, but Kentucky Rebel Town has just over twenty pages of index, with lots of names for genealogists to search for.

Rebel General John Hunt Morgan thought that Cynthiana was worth coming back to for a second "visit," and, luckily for us, Bill came back, too, to put his pen to work in giving old history a new look.

Philip

The Harrison Heritage News for December (Vol. 17, No. 12) is on its way!

BREAKING OLD NEWS!

I just received my copy of the next and last issue of the Harrison Heritage News for 2016.  Yours should be arriving in your real and virtual mailboxes pretty soon.

This month's issue features a vintage Christmas postcard on the cover, with news of the society, a note from society president Don Wagoner, a list of upcoming events and presentations at future meetings thru June, 2017, details of a new addition to the Harrison County Historical Society's archive of past newsletters, and a genealogy query about McCarthys and Prices.

A fun presentation written by Mary Grable about a Star Trek exhibit at the Cynthiana-Harrison County Museum, as well as photos of exhibits brought in for evaluations at the Harrison County Historical Society's Antiques Road Show last month fill a couple more pages.

This month's newsletter also includes the by-laws of the historical society and it is requested that you vote your approval or disapproval of them.  Read carefully ... and VOTE!  We all know how important it is to VOTE ... because sometimes dreams come true when you VOTE!  Sometimes they don't!  So VOTE!

Your December newsletter will look something like the following image ... only a lot bigger ... and, if delivered via USPS, in an envelope!  ;-)

JOIN OR RENEW ... OR GIFT ... A SOCIETY MEMBERSHIP

So ends another interesting year at the Harrison County Historical Society.  Next year who knows what will happen?

Well, it will be easy for you to find out. Lastly, but not leastly, this month's issue of the Harrison Heritage News includes the annual membership application form.  Dues are very reasonable and it is recommended that you send them in NOW so that you don't miss a single issue.  The average Harrison Heritage News consists of eight-to-ten pages of REALLY GOOD STUFF about the history of Cynthiana and all that ever occurred ... well, maybe not EVERYTHING, but A WHOLE LOT about which people ever talked or wrote about ... and which is still FIT TO PRINT.

If you become a member of the Harrison County Historical Society for only a nominal fee ($10 annually for a PDF in your emailbox, $12 annually for one delivered by the United States Postal Service) you will find out about what has already happened in the county ... and about what happening at historical society meetings and events.

And with each issue running and average of eight-to-ten pages of original texts (which is all that can be stuffed into an envelope and mailed for the price of a Forever stamp), by the end of the next year you will have the almost the equivalent of a book to place on your shelves.  What other local historical society offers a virtual book's worth of value for the price of a membership alone? (A rhetorical question, to be sure, but if you know of one, let us know at the society; it will be sure to make us jealous ... and we work even harder to make our little newsletter better.  ;-)

If you don't believe me, just check out the archive of past newsletters which has been available at www.HarrisonCountyKy.US for some time now.

When you are ready, hopefully sooner than later, get a copy of the membership application, print it out, fill it in and send it along with a check or money order to ...

Harrison County Historical Society
P.O. Box 411
Cynthiana, KY 41031

... and the future will be all history!

That's all for this year!  Take care of yourselves.  Have a Merry Christmas and may good fortune and blessings follow you into the New Year!

Philip Naff

The Online Archive of Harrison Heritage News Newsletters Has Doubled!

That's right.  Doubled!

And now almost all of them are in PDF format, or soon will be.

An index of all issues up to the end of 2014 is provided in the opening window.  Just look up the subject matter in which you are interested, find the corresponding issue number, and then click on that number in the table to the left of the index.

And Voila!  Your issue will appear.

Sorry, but we can't take you to the exact page where your desired subject appears in print, but each issue is short enough that a quick skim should be enough for you to be able to find what you are looking for.

To begin a new search, just hit the "back" button on your keyboard or click on the link to the index which appears at the bottom of every screen while you are looking at issues of the Harrison Heritage News.

While reading through the archive of past issues, we at the Harrison County Historical Society hope that you may find it worth your while (and a few bucks, too) to sign up and become a member of the society.  You can get current issues in the mail or online (A link will be emailed to you each month).

To begin your journey through history as a member of the society, just click on the link (Join Today!), print the form and fill it out, and then mail it to the address at the bottom of the application.

And after that, the rest will just be history!

Full-Page Images of the 1896 Cynthiana Democrat and 1905 Log Cabin Added.

If you haven't seen them before in their full glory, now you can.  The purchase of a bigger scanner means bigger things can be added to the website.  One can now view a total of 66 full-page images of both the 1896 Special Edition of the Cynthiana Democrat and the 1905 Souvenir Supplement of the Log Cabin combined at www.HarrisonCountyKy.US.  Just go to the home page and click on the links to see what people once read over a hundred years ago and which you can still read today.

What Kept People Busy in 1850?

In the effort to fill in the blanks of a genealogy, one part of the record is largely overlooked, the documentation of what kept people busy from day to day. What did people do? How did they make a living? Where or to whom did one go to get a horse shod or a cabinet made?  The answers to those questions with regard to the 1850s have been around for a while, thanks to the efforts of two men named Thomson and Bassett.  Read the article, "What Kept People Busy in 1850?"

Harrison Heritage News (April 2014)

The latest edition of the Harrison Heritage News was mailed a couple of weeks ago.  What, you don't have one?  Well, you've got to be a member of the Harrison County Historical Society to get one!  It is too late to have joined yesterday, but today and tomorrow are viable options, which brings me to the subject of the feature article for this month's issue, the title of which, "Before It is Too Late Too Soon", is very apropos to the message expressed so far.

The article is about Berry, Kentucky in the 1910s, a time before World Wars and Depressions when Harrison County's second largest community (after Cynthiana) basked in what seemed to be an aura of boundless energy and enthusiasm.  Work could be hard, but people still had time to have fun, and if you grew up there in the early decades of the 20th century, you might not want to trade that time of your life for anything else or any other place in the world.

A budding interest in genealogy combined with the opportunity to travel in the 1990s allowed me to capture such sentiments as expressed by my great-aunt, Martha Elizabeth (Elmore) Byerley (1906-1998) nearly eight decades later.  She spent her preteen years living life, having fun, and, yes, going to school at Berry.  The stories she told are short and entertaining and . . . maybe best of all . . . she took albums full of pictures to illustrate the "good ol' days," some which have been reproduced on the front page of this issue of the Harrison Heritage News.

So, don't you wait to until it is too late too soon to get your copy of the April 2014 issue of the Harrison Heritage News today!  Visit www.HarrisonCountyKy.US/Historical-Society for membership information.

~

     “How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon. December is here before it’s June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?”—Dr. Seuss

We've Moved . . .

Welcome to The County Line, a companion blog to www.HarrisonCountyKy.US.  Announcements concerning the site, recent additions, new databases, new articles, and maybe a little original content not found at the site, will be posted here in the future.

One can keep up with this blog or follow the posting of updates on Twitter at Twitter.com/harrisoncokyus.

I have been busy updating the site, tweaking it a little, proofing the links, and will be adding even more in the near future.  One of those improvements has been to move the site to a new Internet Service Provider (ISP).

For several years now the site has been hosted by a free ISP account I have had with Comcast.net.  The address for the home page looked something like this:

http://home.comcast.net/~harrisoncountykyus/

. . . and the portion above served as the prefix to all of the other pages at the site.

While just typing in "www.HarrisonCountyKy.US" would get you to the home page of the site in a process known as domain forwarding, many of the pages would show the full address, and that address is also what would appear in searches using Google, Bing, Yahoo! and other sites.

So, if you have bookmarked or favorited any pages at HarrisonCountyKy.US, you can either edit them individually in your browser, deleting the prefix described above, or go to the same page using the links provided on the new home page and then bookmarking the page again.

The home page at the new ISP will have a new background and layout, so you will know that you are at the new site of the old site.

And don't forget to delete your old bookmarks, or you will be going nowhere, when we want you to be coming back to . . .

www.HarrisonCountyKy.US

P.S.  I am a newbie to blogging and to Twitter, so please bear with me if any extraneous posts or errors should appear on these pages.  Happy Hunting!