Louisville Magazine

MAY 2012

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

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Opposite page: Owners Chas Stephens and Kim Laramore- Stephens, and (inset) a c.1895 photo of ancestral residents Julia and Mary Ellen Hunsinger. This page: Charles and Lena Hunsinger and family in the 1890s, and the present-day home, with its artifact-filled parlor. took place, and a second twist is that he was taught by his nine- year-old brother. "It started right up," Stephens says, "and we'd have a hell of a good time." Te family's history in Louisville dates back to 1790 — "I don't think anybody has been on their land as long as we have, maybe in the state of Kentucky," says Stephens — before Kentucky was even a state. It begins with George Hikes Sr., a Revolutionary War colo- nel who, according to Te Encyclopedia of Louisville, purchased the land from another Revolutionary War officer, William Meriweth- er, in either 1790 or 1791. (Stephens says the land — somewhere between 1,500 and 4,000 acres — was a grant from the newly formed United States.) At the time, Jefferson County belonged to the state of Virginia, as Kentucky didn't gain statehood until 1792. George Sr. was industrious and civic-minded. He opened grist- mills and sawmills along the south fork of Beargrass Creek and encouraged the development of churches and schools. He parceled out his land in 200-acre plots to his four children, including George Jr., the architect and builder of the Hikes-Hunsinger House. Te house was built in the Federal manner, America's first native archi- tectural style, of local stone, including thick slabs of limestone for the basement. It is for these early Hikes family members that the Hikes Point area is named. According to the National Register of Historic Places — which registered the home in 1975 — George Jr. built and operated a gristmill and a distillery, though the family spirits were described as good only for "medicinal purposes." He also served as a Jefferson County justice in 1833, and during April 1845 deeded an acre of land to build the Hikes Grade School. He passed the house on to son Edward Jones Hikes, who passed it to daughter Lena Crawford. She passed it to son Claude Hob- son Hunsinger, who passed it to daughters Barbara Hunsinger Ste- phens and Marjorie Hunsinger Weeks. Te former then purchased her sister's share, and when her husband Charles passed away in 2005, she lived there one additional year before their son Chas got the home. George Hikes Jr.'s older brother Jacob also was an important figure in Louisville life. He made Louisville's first writing paper, owned a cloth-fulling mill and held $10,000 worth of stock in the Louisville and Bardstown Turnpike Co. He served with Gen. (and later President) William Henry Harrison at the Battle of Tippeca- noe, taking a slug he would carry the rest of his life. But his great- est achievement was a moral one. A slave-owner conflicted about that "peculiar institution," Hikes was a committee member of the American Colonialization Society — which supported repatriating slaves to Africa — as early as 1836 and paid for an entire family of [36] LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 5.12

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