Bowling Green's History Trail
Tara and other historical wonders of Warren County

“We refer to Smiths Grove as a Mayberry-like community because it’s got one police officer,” says Gary P. West, executive director of the Bowling Green Area Convention and Visitors Bureau. “Everybody knows each other and everybody knows what everybody’s doing!”

That given, I never expected to also find Tara in the same locale. But in tiny Smiths Grove, Mayberry definitely meets Gone With the Wind.

“You can’t miss it,” Velma Crist said of her Victorian House Bed and Breakfast when I’d called to reserve a room. And she was right. Just after I bumped over the town’s railroad tracks right at sunset on a cool December day, the 5,000-square-foot, 1875-era red brick home loomed large, smack in the middle of the town’s much-visited antiques district.

With 12-foot ceilings, four themed bedrooms, and wonderfully-overdone Victorian decor, this hostelry welcomed me with hospitality that would’ve made Miss Scarlett proud, despite the fact that I chose to retire in “the Melanie” and not in the “Miss Scarlett,” Crist’s special honeymoon suite. Filled with both antiques and reproductions, the house is rife with movie stills – Rhett and Scarlett, Melanie, Ashley and Mammy – flowered wallpaper, chintz upholstery, hardwood floors, 75-year-old carpeting, and more swags and ruffles than Sherman had soldiers.

After one of the soundest night’s sleep I can remember, and fortified with Velma’s hash brown casserole, I hit the history trail next day in nearby Bowling Green.

If you’re looking to find out more about the roots of this Commonwealth and perhaps about your own, the Kentucky Museum, in the middle of the hilly campus of Western Kentucky University (WKU), is one terrific place to start.

“The Kentucky Museum is a fascinating place to come because the history of the state, starting back in the early-to mid-1800s, is all right here,” explains Earlene Chelf, coordinator of marketing and special events for Western Kentucky University’s University Libraries and the Kentucky Museum.

Among its approximately 80,000 artifacts – nearly all donated by people from the area, or by folks with Kentucky connections – are a gorgeous 1930 Chevrolet Universal Sedan, mementos of WKU’s own ’50s chart-topping pop group the Hilltoppers, the original stove of hometown boy Duncan Hines, a quilt made up entirely of former Congressman Bill Natcher’s ties, and wonderfully feathery costumes once owned by Pauline Webster, who ran a famous house of prostitution in Bowling Green for some 25 years.

More than 4,000 Kentuckians provided financial support to start construction of the Kentucky Building in 1931. Though the Depression slowed work, the Kentucky Museum opened in 1939 as a state-supported institution, created by WKU’s first president, Dr. Henry Hardin Cherry, “to preserve Kentucky’s history and heritage.” In 1976, the Commonwealth allotted $3.1 million to remodel and expand the facility, more than doubling its size to 80,000 square feet.

Today, the Kentucky Building houses the Robert Penn Warren Library, which boasts the Guthrie, Kentucky-born Pulitzer Prize winner’s private book collection, his desk and chair, a cabinet in which he kept first editions, and exhibits of his photos and medals. All were presented to WKU by Eleanor Clark, Warren’s widow, so that scholars might have access to these items.

“Only about a tenth of what we have is out on display,”says Chelf. “When we put an exhibit together, we can draw on all those areas to help tell our story. It’s a great resource, one that many facilities don’t have. We’re very proud of that.”

Part of the facility’s appeal is its user-friendliness. Visitors are encouraged to bring in their own found treasures to match to prehistoric arrowheads on display to discover their era of origin. And costumed interpreters make frontier life come alive on May through October weekends in the Felts Log House, the real McCoy built in Logan County in the 1830s, moved to the WKU property in 1980 and filled with reproduction furniture, housewares and clothes.

Having grown up in a Western Kentucky town about the size of Bowling Green, I found an exhibit called “Main Street: Mirror of Change Expressing Kentucky,” that has been kept up by popular request, especially intriguing. With 1930-era black-and-white photographs of Bowling Green’s downtown court square blown up to near life-size, its heavy old cars and brick facades could’ve been my own hometown.

“You could be in any square in any community in these old photos,” says Chelf. “You don’t know where you are because these towns all look alike.”

I then headed across town to another of Bowling Green’s historic treasures, one that’s on the Civil War Discovery Trail.

Though the city served a short time as Kentucky’s Confederate capital, the loyalties of its residents, like those of the Commonwealth, were divided. In the late 1850s, Union colonel Atwood Gaines Hobson and his wife Julia Van Meter began building a handsome Italianate home on a hilltop two miles from town. Although occupying Southern troops used the basement for munitions storage, they honored the colonel’s request to his Confederate friend General Simon Bolivar Buckner and didn’t destroy the partially-completed house.

Today, the eight-room structure known as Historic Riverview at Hobson Grove has been restored to the 1860-1890 era, and its furnishings bespeak those of a prosperous Victorian family living in south central Kentucky. Topping a small promontory and guarded by two towering white pines, the house is a commanding red brick presence amid rolling hills and careful landscaping. But my immediate question was quite obvious. If the house is called Riverview...

“Everyone asks where the river is,” says Lindsay Gardner Bland, Riverview’s director, when I walked in with that very question. Turns out, the Barren River still does run to the northern boundary of what was once the Hobson’s 400-acre working farm. But several years ago, it was dammed to create Barren River Lake and Barren River Lake State Park, dramatically changing the river’s water level.

As a result, she says, “We’re no longer afforded the wonderful view that the Hobson family once had.”

But Riverview certainly is every bit as grand as it was in its glory days, and I couldn’t help openly ogling its period antiques, including a Stoddard Parlor Grand piano, pocket doors, floor to ceiling windows, highly-polished oculus (a hole in the ceiling that leads up to a crowning cupola), and its lovely parlor ceilings. Exquisitely hand-rendered ceiling floral murals in the double parlor once drew kudos from architectural historian Clay Lancaster, who wrote that they “clinch the worthiness of the house.”

The Hobson family actually lived at Riverview until 1952. After a stint as rental property and several damaging fires, the property was acquired in 1965 by the city for use as a park and golf course, and the following year, the non-profit Hobson House Association formed to restore the house as a museum.

One of the tour docents, George Anna McKenzie, is the Hobsons’ great granddaughter, and she spices up her tour with stories of her childhood experiences at Riverview.

“It’s very special being able to show visitors the family home,” she says. “We moved from Nashville to Bowling Green in 1940, and all my growing up years I visited my grandmother and grandfather here at the house. They had no electricity, running water or central heat until about 1950. That had to be pretty labor intensive.”

Find out exactly how labor intensive those times were on a servant life tour come March, when costumed interpreters will incorporate life at Riverview as a part of Bowling Green’s African American heritage. At Christmastime, those lofty halls resound with Victorian holiday traditions and children’s games. And with prior arrangements, groups can even have tea here.

For more info, visit these museums’ websites: www.wku.edu/Library/museum and www.bgky.org/riverview.htm

Katherine Tandy Brown is a staff writer for The Lane Report.
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