Editor’s note: This is the 32nd in a series of in-depth stories based on the findings of the City of Frankfort’s African American Historic Context Report, which was funded in part by the city and a grant from the Kentucky Heritage Council. This section of the African American Historic Context Report is an overview of Frankfort and the Black neighborhoods documented as part of the reconnaissance survey of African American resources and focuses on the built environment and architectural resources associated with the historic context.
Individual neighborhoods — Part two
Located on the south side of the Frankfort Cemetery and the former Kentucky Institute for the Feeble-Minded, the Glenns Creek community — also known as Cliffside in the early 20th century — was a suburban neighborhood along Glenns Creek Road.
The community included a contemporary apartment complex, construction company, residences and the Bethesda Temple Church of the Living God, which was built by its Black congregation in 1982. African American family names associated with the area include Brown, Johnson, Payne, Terrell and Thornsberry, the report notes.
When it was developed near a tollhouse along the Glenns Creek Turnpike in the late 19th century, the community was predominantly white and featured a slaughterhouse and School No. 37. The turnpike, which was established in 1875, accessed two distilleries that opened in the late 1860s along the Louisville & Nashville Railroad and Kentucky River — John Cochran & Company’s Spring Hill Distillery and Old Oscar Pepper Distillery.
According to the report, the Kentucky Highlands Railroad (KHRR) was built from the Spring Hill Distillery southeast to Millville, where the Old Crow and Old Taylor distilleries were located between 1907 and 1908. The following year the L&N Railroad purchased KHRR and continued to operate what later became known as the Hermitage Spur line until the distilleries closed in 1999, which was when CSX Railroad pulled up the tracks along the line.
Census records and city directories from the early 20th century show that African American heads of household in the Glenns Creek community — many of whom were most likely formerly enslaved people and freedmen — included cook William H. Thornsberry; day laborer Joseph Terrell; cattle pen feeder at Spring Hill Distillery Richard James Payne; day laborer George Wilson; laborer Edward Patterson; day laborer Bush Marshall; and William Lenn. The majority of Black families lived on the west side of the road near the Kentucky River and the Spring Hill Distillery.
In fact, many of the African American families that resided in Glenns Creek worked at Spring Hill or Old Oscar Pepper distilleries — both of which ceased operations during Prohibition in 1920. Not long after, several Black residents left the Glenns Creek community likely to find employment elsewhere, including Payne, who moved to Topeka, Kansas, to work in construction.
Normal Heights
Located on the northeast side of the Kentucky State University campus, the Normal Heights neighborhood name is derived from Normal Hill where the Kentucky State Normal School for Colored Persons was founded in 1886 along the turnpike connecting Frankfort to Lexington. Referred to as a Colored settlement on the 1882 county map, by the 20th century, the neighborhood had been developed to include housing for professors and staff.
Paris, Kentucky-based Adcock Realty Company developed Normal Heights — the city’s first Black subdivision — in 1911 along the interurban streetcar line, which provided public transit between the capital city, Versailles, Lexington, Nicholasville, Paris and Georgetown between 1905-1934.
Normal Heights featured homes on both sides of Douglas Avenue and commercial businesses along East Main Street. Between 1961 and 1963 several residences in the northern part of the neighborhood were demolished to make way for Sutterlin Terrace, a 45-unit public housing complex for residents displaced by the North Frankfort Urban Renewal Project. Designed by local architectural firm Oberwarth & Livingston, the modest brick duplexes of Sutterlin Terrace cost approximately $550,000 to construct. More homes were destroyed or moved to Langford Avenue as the university expanded.
One of the community’s prominent Black businesses was LaVilla Restaurant and Tavern at 127 Douglas Ave., which was built in the 1940s and was frequented by high school and college students. LaVilla was owned by Dr. Eugene Daniel Raines, the chair of KSU’s chemistry department who lived at 122 Douglas Ave. and owned an apartment building next door, and was listed as a roadside business in the national African American Travelguide from 1947-50.
In the 1960s, the North Frankfort Urban Renewal Project also forced John Robert Davis Jr. to move his downtown barber shop to 519 E. Main St. Robert Lee Taylor purchased the shop at the intersection with Langford Avenue in the 1970s and the concrete block building with a permastone facade became a popular gathering spot for the local Black community.
At 133 Douglas Ave., Robert Esprit “Bob” Hogan, a stonemason who built many stone houses, fences and fireplaces in the capital city and neighboring areas, lived with his wife, Clara Elizabeth Hogan, before moving to 209 Missouri Ave. in the Cherokee subdivision, which featured many of the homes he constructed. But he wasn’t the only stonemason or brick mason in the neighborhood. Pete Marshall, William Clinton Jacobs Sr., John Henry Guy Sr. and John Henry Guy Jr. also lived nearby. In fact, the Guy family lived in a two-story Folk Victorian house at 531 E. Main St., which was demolished by the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet in 2015.
Many of the homes and businesses that called Normal Heights home have been demolished and replaced with academic buildings, student apartments and parking lots for K-State. The LaVilla Apartments were erected where the former restaurant of the same name once stood in the 1990s. Mr. Taylor’s Barber Shop was taken down in 2016 for an intersection realignment and two years later an historic marker was built on the site. Currently, there are approximately 10 historic dwellings remaining in Normal Heights.
Cherokee-Langford Avenue
Platted in 1962, the Cherokee subdivision is situated on a wooded hillside on the east side of the L&N Railroad and the southeast edge of campus. Approximately 50 suburban, modest Ranch-style and split-foyer homes were located on Langford Avenue, Missouri Avenue and Cold Spring Drive. Many of them were built by Hogan, including his own on Missouri Avenue in 1965.
On Langford Avenue, there are roughly a dozen homes that predate the Cherokee subdivision along with 200 Missouri Ave. mainly because Langford Avenue was originally an extension of the Normal Heights neighborhood. The majority of the residences were occupied by the Black working class and dated back to the 1940s and 50s.
John H. Hall lived in a gambrel roof bungalow at 106 Langford Ave. World War II veteran James Brawner Johnson Jr., who grew up in Glenns Creek and worked at Buffalo Trace Distillery for 42 years, and his father, James B. Johnson Sr., who was employed at the distillery for 52 years and served as its first Black foreman, lived in the area. Jacobs, the stonemason, who grew up on Douglas Avenue in Normal Heights built a home at 145 Langford Ave. in the mid-50s.
Louisville real estate developer and building contractor Harris Clinton Mueller in 1960 proposed to redevelop eastern Frankfort farmland into two residential neighborhoods — “a Negro subdivision with 85 lots near Winding Way (Drive) and another for white families with 85 lots in the Franklin Heights area,” a Lexington Herald article stated. However, with the subdivision lots at around 0.1-acre each and 60 feet of road frontage, the Frankfort Planning and Zoning Commission denied a rezoning request for the subdivisions due to their small lot sizes.
Two years later, as a trustee for the property owner, local lawyer Louis Lawrence Cox asked for the Cherokee subdivision to be rezoned to provide new housing for African Americans displaced by the North Frankfort Urban Renewal Project. It was in the same area where Mueller had proposed the Black subdivision development.
The Cherokee subdivision is served by an extension of Langford Avenue and Cold Spring Drive, which connects to K-State. It also abuts Winding Way — an all-white neighborhood with hundreds of suburban residences and the General Shoe Corporation factory, which was designed in 1955 by C. Julian Oberwarth and William C. Livingston, local architects.
Just south of the shoe factory, the city opened East Frankfort Park, a 47.5-acre public park adjoining the Franklin Heights neighborhood in 1971. However, there is no direct access from the Cherokee and Langford Avenue neighborhood to the park or the Winding Way neighborhood.
“A 1970s apartment complex, Hickory Hills Manor, features a through street, connecting Langford Avenue with Franklin Heights, however, the city blocked the through street with a steel guard rail at Langford Avenue,” the report reads.
The guard rail — which is still in place today — required Blacks in the neighborhood to walk or drive a 1.5-mile circuitous route to East Main Street and through the Winding Way neighborhood to access the public park.
“With no vehicular or pedestrian access to the abutting white neighborhood or public park, the African American Cherokee and Langford Avenue neighborhood is physically and psychologically separated from the surrounding white neighborhood.”
Read parts one through 31 at www.state-journal.com
