Deemed “the Great Compromiser,” Henry Clay stands high in the pantheon of prominent Antebellum American political leaders. In 2017, Society members visited his homeplace, Ashland, during our Lexington, Kentucky annual meeting. A native of Hanover County, Virginia, Clay came to Kentucky as a young lawyer, having studied under one of the most famous of Virginia legal scholars, George Wythe.
In the early nineteenth century, Clay and his new wife Lucretia Hart began establishing a plantation near Lexington. They called it Ashland, which like many southern estates was a name taken from trees prominent in the vicinity. Ashland grew to over six-hundred acres, labor-intensive hemp being a particularly important cash crop and one that demanded the efforts of a large enslaved labor force. Along with aiding Clay’s horse breeding operations, those laborers also produced small grain crops, which would have resulted in flour for plantation use and most likely for sale in Lexington. Ashland’s antebellum gardens surely mimicked those of other such properties, offering a mix of vegetables and herbs for the table and flowers for household decoration. Along with a wide range of other outbuildings, Ashland also had a greenhouse, said in 1845 to be “filled with choice plants and beautiful flowers.” Typically, too, the enslaved families probably had their own small garden plots.
Strong imagination is required of a modern Ashland visitor to envision the realities of the Clay family’s slavery times existence. What they will discover, however, is a place of dual interest to the historian of more recent southern landscapes. First, of course, is the core property which includes the main house, rebuilt in 1857, several early dependencies, and a mid-twentieth-century Colonial Revival parterre garden, adjoined to an award-winning peony garden. These central elements, moreover, are set within seventeen-acre grounds, which also include the officially designated (2018) “Ashland Arboretum,” consisting of “over 400 trees and 44 different species.” A highlight of the Lexington annual meeting included a walk-about among these venerable evergreens and hardwoods led by forest scientist, Kentucky tree authority, and author, Tom Kimmerer.
Just outside the house-arboretum area is the six-hundred-acre Ashland Park historic district, the second Clay-connected spot here with significant landscape history interest. In the early-twentieth century, Henry Clay’s heirs engaged Boston’s Olmsted Brothers firm to design what would be one of a number of their important Kentucky commissions, John C. Olmsted leading the way in concept development. Construction in the National Register-listed district occurred mainly in the 1920s and echoes the architectural styles then fashionable.
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