Morehead House
Frankfort, Franklin County, Kentucky
Marker Inscription
Morehead House. Built by Mark Hardin, Registrar, Ky. Land Office, in 1810. Before Civil War, home of six prominent Kentuckians; among whom were John Harvie, Pres., Bank of Ky., and, for 13 years, Charles S. Morehead, Governor (1855-59). Lawrence Tobin acquired it in 1874 and it was held by heirs to 1961. He built railroad, Lexington to Louisville, and was local merchant 48 years.
Erected by Kentucky Historical Society
The Story
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.
Why it matters
Homes like this one anchor the story of how a young state's leaders built its government, banks, and railroads within a single generation.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Charles S. Morehead
- · Mark Hardin
- · John Harvie
- · Lawrence Tobin
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Bibb-Burnley House
Frankfort, KY
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.
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.