Lexington History

At first light on Oct. 18, 1862, John Hunt Morgan’s 1,800 horsemen hit a Union cavalry camp on the grounds of Ashland — the Henry Clay estate, a mile from the courthouse in Morgan’s own hometown. The fight lasted about as long as breakfast; the argument over his statue lasted a century. The finale…

Lexington’s most famous madam ran the “most orderly of disorderly houses” on Megowan Street, was pardoned by a governor, bankrolled by a Philadelphia millionaire, and shuttered by the War Department in 1917 — then spent 23 reclusive years in the fading mansion. Between the wink and the scrapbook at UK lies the documented story,…

In April 1897 — six years before the Wright brothers — tens of thousands of Americans saw a cigar-shaped airship with colored lights crossing the night sky, and Kentucky papers from Paducah to Hopkinsville carried the sightings. Lexington’s Daily Leader covered the wave with Bluegrass skepticism: a Muncie hoax of balloons and lanterns, a…

Aaron Burr slept there. Henry Clay toasted there. It burned in 1820, burned again on a race-week night in 1879 while pickpockets worked the crowd — and rose every time, metal phoenix on the parapet, until a developer’s never-built skyscraper did what fire never could. The story of Main and Limestone, from the original…

On a frozen January morning in 1886, fire burst from the grocery beneath Lexington’s opera house while the water sat frozen in the mains. Eighteen months later the city opened the Oscar Cobb jewel box on North Broadway that still hosts 85,000 people a year — after surviving a second brush with death in…

Five days after the murder of 10-year-old Geneva Hardman, ten thousand people surged at the Fayette County courthouse to lynch the confessed killer mid-trial. The troops on the steps fired. Six died, Lexington spent two weeks under martial law — and the nation called it a turning point against lynching. A century later, the…

In two months of 1833, cholera killed about one of every thirteen people in Lexington. The Kentucky Gazette kept a diary of the disaster — the named and half-named dead, the mercury-and-bleeding cures, the farmers driving free firewood into a dying town — and a much-mocked vagrant named William “King” Solomon picked up a…

In late August 2000, four Herald-Leader reporters published a four-month investigation into Lexington’s substandard rental housing. Within a week, the code-enforcement director was gone, his interim replacement lasted 72 hours, and inspectors’ own rentals were under review. A Lexington History deep read of the series, its fallout, and why its catch-22 still defines low-income…