Bibb-Burnley House
Frankfort, Franklin County, Kentucky
Marker Inscription
Bibb-Burnley House. Site of first house lived in on street, 1786, by John Instone, who came here from England to build boats for Gen. Wilkinson. Wapping Street named by Instone for one of that name in London. John B. Bibb, Lt., War of 1812, represented Logan Co. in Ky. House, 1827-28, Senate, 1830-34. Bought property and built present house, 1845. He developed Bibb variety of lettuce here.
Erected by Kentucky Historical Society
The Story
In 1786 the English boatbuilder John Instone settled on this Frankfort street—naming it Wapping Street for a district of London—to build river vessels for General James Wilkinson's Ohio Valley trade. Decades later John B. Bibb, a War of 1812 veteran and state legislator, built the present house in 1845 and cultivated the tender, sweet Bibb lettuce that still bears his name.
Why it matters
It ties Kentucky's frontier river commerce to a homegrown horticultural creation that spread to American tables nationwide.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The story here begins on the Kentucky frontier of the 1780s, in the years just after the Revolution, when the Ohio Valley was filling with settlers and the rivers were the highways that made everything possible. Before roads and rails, a town's fortunes floated: goods, people, and ambitions all moved by water, and the men who could build the boats were as valuable as the men who steered them.
Into that world came an English boatbuilder, drawn across an ocean by the promise of work on a river frontier hungry for craft that could carry trade downstream. That an English tradesman would settle on a Kentucky street in 1786 tells you how quickly this edge of the young country was pulling in skills from far away.
Decades later the same street would witness a different kind of American story — not river commerce but quiet cultivation, the patient work of a man improving a plant in his own garden. The marker holds both eras on one plot of ground.
People & events
The marker names John Instone as the first to live on the street, arriving in 1786 from England to build boats for General James Wilkinson, a leading figure in the Ohio Valley trade of that era. Instone left his own small stamp on the map: he named the street Wapping, after a district of London he knew, carrying a piece of the old riverside city to the banks of a Kentucky waterway.
Generations later the property passed into the hands of John B. Bibb. The marker records him as a lieutenant in the War of 1812 and, in the decades after, a man in public life — representing his county in the Kentucky House in the late 1820s and serving in the state Senate in the early 1830s. In 1845 he built the house that stands as the marker's namesake.
And it was here, the marker tells us, that Bibb developed the variety of lettuce that still carries his name. It is a wonderfully domestic kind of fame — not won on a battlefield or in a legislative chamber, but in a home garden, coaxing from the soil a tender, sweet head of lettuce that would outlast every other thing on his résumé.
Its place in the American story
This one address quietly links two of the great themes of early America. The first is the river economy that built the interior of the country — the boats, the trade, and the men like Instone whose hands made westward commerce move. Before the age of rails, this was the circulatory system of a growing nation, and a boatbuilder's arrival was the arrival of the future.
The second is homegrown ingenuity of the humblest and most enduring kind. A lettuce developed in a single Kentucky garden became a name recognized on menus and in seed catalogs far beyond the state. American innovation is often told through inventors and industrialists, but it also runs through gardeners and tinkerers whose small refinements quietly spread across the country's tables.
That a London street name, a frontier river trade, and a variety of lettuce all meet on one plot is a reminder that national history is assembled from intensely local pieces. The big story is made of addresses like this one.
If you visit
Look first at the street sign. Wapping Street is the oldest artifact in this story — a name carried from London to Kentucky more than two centuries ago and still in daily use, which is a small marvel worth pausing over.
The marker sits in Frankfort's historic core, an easy addition to a walking tour of the old capital. Read it and enjoy the whiplash of scale: from ocean-crossing boatbuilders and a general's river trade to a man perfecting a salad green in his backyard, all on the same ground beneath your feet.
It is a perfect "only in a small historic city" stop — the kind of marker that makes a road trip memorable precisely because it is unexpected. Next time you see Bibb lettuce on a menu, you will know a place where its story runs, and that is exactly the sort of souvenir a marker like this gives you.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · John Instone
- · John B. Bibb
- · James Wilkinson
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Morehead House
Frankfort, KY
Built in 1810 by land-office registrar Mark Hardin, this Frankfort house sheltered a remarkable run of prominent Kentuckians across the 19th century, including bank president John Harvie and Governor Charles S. Morehead, who lived here in the years before the Civil War. After 1874 it passed to merchant and railroad builder Lawrence Tobin, whose family kept it for nearly nine decades. Its walls trace the rise of Kentucky's political and commercial elite.
The Fair Grounds, 1853–1873
Louisville, KY
For two decades beginning in 1853, this 38-acre tract on the eastern edge of Louisville hosted National Agricultural and Kentucky state fairs, drawing crowds by rail to a stadium seating 10,000 and a sprawl of exhibition halls. Crescent Avenue served as the grand promenade into the grounds. During the Civil War the fairgrounds were pressed into service, first by the Kentucky State Guard and then by Union troops, before the land was subdivided into lots and sold off by 1875.
Col. Frederick Geiger & Early Butchertown
Louisville, KY
A Revolutionary War veteran from Maryland, Frederick Geiger settled in the Louisville area in the 1790s and grew into a prominent landowner, ferry operator, and mill owner along Beargrass Creek. He raised a company of Kentucky Mounted Riflemen for the 1811 campaign against Native forces, was wounded at Tippecanoe, and served as a colonel in the War of 1812. The neighborhood he helped shape, Butchertown, became a bustling pork-packing district supplying the Ohio River steamboat trade.
Louisville's Steamboat Era
Louisville, KY
When the steamboat New Orleans reached Louisville in the autumn of 1811, it opened a new age on the western rivers, and the city — perched at the Falls of the Ohio — quickly became a steamboat hub with six lines and hundreds of boats built nearby. Its wharf teemed with traffic through the Civil War and welcomed a remarkable procession of Americans, including eight presidents and writers from Washington Irving and Charles Dickens to Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville.