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Moses and Phoebe Tyler’s family and slaves built or had built most of what we see today at Blackacre. Over time buildings were added, demolished, and on occasion, their uses have changed. The following buildings or structures are discussed in greater detail.
- The Appalachian double-crib log barn (ca. 1790s)
- The stone house located near the ridge (ca. 1790s)
- The stone springhouse (ca. 1790s)
- The big brick house—currently painted yellow (ca. 1844)
- The “weaving shed,” which originally was a house (1810s)
- The brick smokehouse (1950)
- The fields were created by the cutting of the forest that the Tylers found when they first set foot on the land.
- The limestone wall, a well, bridges, and other improvements built to make the land a productive place to farm (Many features—some old and some not so old—came after the Tylers. Look, for example, at the rebuilt cattle loader next to the barn.)
- A network of paths and roadways that linked the Tyler farms to one another and to the world outside
| Interior Tract of the Blackacre Homestead |
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| Top: The Wheeler family in the barnyard, ca. 1915. Fulton Wheeler collection. Bottom: Barn. Photograph by S. W. Thomas, 1981. |
In clearing the land and making it productive, the Tylers ended up with the materials they needed to build their barn. The massive poplar trees (Liriodendron tulipifera), which were seedlings in the 1600s, were cut down before the family developed fields and planted crops to feed their farm animals.
The poplar logs in the barn at Blackacre were probably cut down in the winter when there was no sap in the trunks, which kept the bark on the logs for a longer period of time. If ice or snow were on the ground, it made it easier to move the logs to the site where they were shaped with hand tools such as an adz and a broad axe.
The logs were trimmed at each end so that they would fit, similar to the way your fingers lock when you make one big fist with both hands. The logs were held together with wooden pegs, which were superior to nails for holding logs together.
The log barn has two sections (called a double crib) separated by a dogtrot. The open space in between the two cribs let the Tylers and later farmers drive wagons right into the barn, letting them load and unload hay under cover. They probably used those long oak beams between the two pens to lift everything from a carriage body to a hog for slaughter. To lift these heavy items, a series of pulleys called a block and tackle were used. The double crib arrangement was a common way to build barns and houses in the mountains of Virginia where the Tylers previously lived. This dogtrot allowed for plenty of fresh air to circulate through the building.
| “That old barn was all put up with wooden pegs with hardly a nail in it. What nails were those square cut nails. The floor in the loft was about three or four inches yellow poplar, 20 feet long. The driveway between the two log pens had that floor on it. We tore it out or something. I always figured that was where they tramped out the wheat. On the north side of the pens, it had two big doors you could close and cut off the north wind. It never did have anything over the south. It was just open. My father had a tin roof put on that barn. All across the back side of the barn, that is the west side, is where they fed the cattle, I think. It had a trough at least 50 feet long, hewed out of a big log and it looked like it had been sawed.” —Raymond T. Wheeler, whose family lived at Blackacre from 1910 to 1939 |
Originally, the barn had a wood shingle roof and was open on the sides. Little by little, as the need for enclosed spaces increased, the Tylers and later residents added sections of board and batten (a layering of boards in a pattern to cut down wind flow) until the whole outside was covered. In addition to storing hay, the covered area provided a dry area for their tools and a handy place to keep bridles and other wagon equipment. Since farmers spent a lot of time walking back and forth between the barn and the house at all times of the day and night, it stands to reason that the Tylers and other farmers would want their barns close to their homes. Farmers in New England often built their barns right onto the backs of their houses, keeping them out of the snow and cold during the winter. The barn’s blank wall faces west, the direction from which storms come in the winter. When the Tylers started building their log barn in about 1790, they picked a spot that was close enough to them to be convenient but far enough away so that the aroma and sounds from the farm animals would not be too strong or too loud.
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| Stone cottage, ca. 1920. Fulton Wheeler collection. |
The Stone Cottage
The 1790 stone house in which Moses and Phoebe Tyler and their family of 10 sons lived was probably an early addition to a slightly older dwelling next door. It was the custom to quickly build a log or crude wooden dwelling to have a roof overhead while a more substantial house was built. There is evidence that the Tylers first built some sort of house just to the east of the stone house, and, at some point, built the stone house and joined the two together. It appears that the structure fell into disrepair or was abandoned or eventually burned down. According to folklore, this is when the back part of the main house, the kitchen and a room above for slaves, was thought to be built. The eastern gable of the stone house shows that the stone is slightly different from the rest of the house. Not only does it look like it came from a different quarry, but it is laid in a pattern that does not match or line up with everything else. In addition, there is a noticeable seam that runs up and down where the new wall must have been built.
However, another possible history for the stone cottage is told in the Tyler Settlement Rural Historic District Application form for the U.S. National Park
Service:
“Until recently it has been believed that Moses Tyler lived in the stone house adjacent to the brick house on the Moses Tyler-Presley Tyler farm until his death in 1839. Based on comparisons of similar surviving structures, it now appears more likely that the stone house was a slave dwelling. The stone house has a simple interior and retains an enclosed stair that appears to be original. The stone house was once connected by a breezeway to a log slave house (since demolished). This connection may indicate that the stone house was, indeed, a slave dwelling and not a Tyler residence.” (p. 19, “National Register of Historic Places Inventory—Nomination Form”).
This idea seems to be supported by an interview conducted by Sam Thomas with Fulton Wheeler.
We called the old stone house the slave house. We butchered hogs in there and all that stuff. Two big fireplaces are in there. You could put a log four foot long in there. There was nothing built on to it then. Us kids used to go down there and pick lead out of the mortar joints to make sinkers to go fishing. Maybe we got them all.
—Fulton Wheeler, whose family lived at Blackacre from 1910–1939
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| Jane F. Marmaduke Tyler, 1812–1891, wife of Presley Tyler | Presley Tyler (?), 1796–1879, son of Moses Tyler | Frances Catherine “Kate” Tyler, 1833–1912, daughter of Presley and Jane Tyler | Fannie Marmaduke Barnett, died 1906, daughter of Andrew and Kate Barnett |
The Main House
When the Tylers first settled Blackacre they did their own building. They did not call up a real estate developer, an architect, or a contractor and tell him/her to build a house. Those jobs did not exist on the frontier. Instead, the family members and slaves gathered and shaped the stone, cut down the trees, and finished the lumber to build their homes and outbuildings.
There are obvious differences between the stone house and the main brick house, differences that illustrate the subtle ways that buildings and their builders interact with the world around them. Presley Tyler’s 1844 brick house faces a road that was a public road back when Presley hired a pair of builders from nearby Spencer County, Kentucky. This says something about how Presley’s world was different from his father’s. Presley apparently wanted something that he or his family or his slaves weren’t capable of building. Perhaps Presley wanted to project the kind of image that you get from living in something bought as opposed to something homemade.
| “The house was the natural red brick. The old soft brick, so I don’t know who painted it yellow. It had shutters. There were cedar shingles on this house. On all the outbuildings there was the old clapboard type. They were about 18 inches or two feet long. They just cut them out of a log, usually out of red oak. Dad used to make them himself. Someone else must have put a tin roof on this house.” —Theodore L. Kroeger, Jr., whose family lived at Blackacre from 1885-1910 |
Presley Tyler included several features to the house that make it appear more impressive because the road in front of Presley’s house was a public road, How do you make a good impression architecturally? Presley had a porch built, which was the newest and most modern Greek Revival-style porch available.
Presley Tyler also incorporated a brick cornice on his house. That is the bit of architectural detail where the wall meets the roof. It is what experts call a “dentilated” cornice, because the bricks are set in such a way that they look like teeth. What is remarkable about Presley’s 1844 dentilated cornice is that there are actually two cornices. There is one long cornice that runs all the way across the front of the house and a shorter cornice on the side of the house, making an impression on any traveller coming up the road.
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| Brick dwelling house. Photograph by Theodore Kroeger, Jr., 1940. Kroeger Family collection. |
The Flemish Bond style was meant to make a good impression—even if it was so subtle it was hard to see, much less appreciate. Presley was apparently into projecting a sophisticated image, and he knew it was Flemish Bond brick on the front of his house. This bonding pattern was also for strength as the bricks tied through the walls. The front and back walls needed to be stronger because the floor joists set into them and the roof rafters rested on them.
1844 bill for construction of the main house Click on image to enlarge |
Second bill for the main house and request for payment |
Other Architectural Details
Greek Revival porches. Dentilated cornices. Flemish Bond brick. Enough? Not, apparently, for Presley Tyler. He went one step further. He instructed his two housewrights to “pencil” the front of the house.
Penciling meant taking a bricklayer’s tool (known as a pointer’s rake) and running it through the mortar joints between the brick while the mortar was still wet. This left little grooves in all of the mortar, tiny lines running all over the house making a sharper shadow between the brick when it would catch the sunlight. This shadowing made the separate bricks stand out more vividly, therefore, making a good impression on anyone using the road.
How in the world do we know about all of this pencilling and Flemish Bond? Well, looking carefully helps—along with knowing what to look for. Written records about the building of this house are also helpful.
Builder’s records were created in the case of Presley’s 1844 dwelling. The records, including an 1844 bill (above) and a letter from the two housewrights to Presley, somehow managed to survive more than a century before they were discovered by a historian working at Blackacre.
Why are the two houses where they are?
Now, think about the placement of the other early buildings built by the Tylers at Blackacre. The little stone house was probably one of the first built, so that Moses Tyler and his family could have a roof over their heads. The house sits on the crest of a little hill that slopes down to the creek. This creek runs through the pasture to the north and then west all the way to Chenoweth Run Creek.
Why did Moses Tyler pick a spot on the edge of a hill, when he had hundreds of nice, flat acres from which to choose? The answer might be right outside his window on the side of that hill. That’s because the hill has all of those fresh, cold springs gushing out of it. The Tylers naturally wanted to be close to these springs, considering that the only way they could get water was to haul it—one heavy bucket after another—back to the house.
If climate and hills played such a big role in where Moses put his stone house (or even an earlier house) in 1790 and the direction he had it face, then what can you say influenced the same decisions his son Presley made 54 years later? That was when, in 1844, Presley Tyler built the big brick house that sits just a few feet from the little stone house his father built.
Just look at the two, and all sorts of differences pop out. Presley’s house sits with its front door facing the road to the east. There’s even a sidewalk that goes from the front porch to the gravel road. Moses’ house faces south toward the sun and summer breezes. Presley’s house is out in the open, while Moses built his house to hug the edge of the steep hill nearby.
Big differences? Not really. The front of Presley’s house might face east toward the road, but the side of the house where most people came and went, did their chores and gathered (like they still do today) to sit and shoot the breeze is on the south side of the house—the same as father Moses’! This is where the main part of Presley’s house meets the leg of the house that extends out to the back to make an L-shaped place.
The south-facing L on Presley’s 1844 house works the same way as the south-facing entrance on Moses’ 1790 house. It offers a way for the sun to light and warm the inside of the house and to catch a breeze in the summer. The porches also shielded the south side of Presley’s house from the fierce storms and cold winds that tended to come mostly from the northwest during the winter. Another similarity is the thickness of the walls. The stone house has 18-inch thick walls, while Presley’s house was built three bricks thick.
Plus, there’s a theory that Presley just built his brick house onto an older brick kitchen that was already there. If you look behind Presley’s house, you can see how there are two differently shaped, two-story parts that come together. In fact, if you look hard, you might be able to see a seam (like the one on Moses’ stone house) that shows where the two sections fit together.
In other words, functional is functional, whether it’s 1790 or 1844 or 1995. The way these two very different-looking houses respond to the land in very similar ways tells us that some decisions were, and still are, always practical.
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| Springhouse with the Smith’s outdoor tub. Photograph by H. Joseph Scheirich, 1964. S.W. Thomas collection. |
Why a springhouse? Well, the Tylers had food they needed to keep from rotting. In the pioneer days before refrigeration, this was possible in the fall or winter in two or three ways: smoke it, pack it in salt, or let the natural coolness of spring water circulate around the food. Nearly every farm in this period had access to a springhouse. Judging from the kind of stone—its color, shape, size, and the pattern in which it was laid—the springhouse at Moses Tyler’s place probably dates from about 1790, just when Moses and the rest of the Tylers started to settle the area between Chenoweth Run and Floyds Fork.
The springhouse sits on the bank of the same hill next to which Moses built his house. In fact, the two aren’t more than just a few feet from each other. At some point after it was built, the springhouse was enlarged. It’s hard to say exactly when, but if you look carefully, you’ll notice that the stone right under the eaves of the roof is just a little different in color. You can also plainly see the slanting lines where the roof used to sit on the walls before it was raised.
Creating the second floor was practical because the steep bank of the hill puts you eye-to-eye with the top of the springhouse. All it took was adding a little footbridge to get from the side of the hill right into the second floor. Adding the second floor to the springhouse was practical for another reason. Summers are hot and humid in Jefferson County and springhouses are cool. So, the Tylers (or somebody after them) had the good sense to take advantage of the possibility of a second floor. By making an upper level over the room where the food was being kept cool by the spring water, the Tylers created a cool place to do chores in the summertime.
The area around the springhouse has changed dramatically over the past 100 years. Sometime during the first half of the 1900s the cistern was built south of the springhouse. The cistern is a 25,000-gallon underground storage area that collects water from the barn and the houses for use as drinking and bathing water. Directly north of the springhouse a pond was also built. Another significant change more difficult to see is the fact that there is less water flowing from the spring. As the area has been developed, the water table has dropped, and during the summer the spring flows very little.
“The springhouse had an old clapboard roof on it too. When we were living here, you could walk back under this bank. That’s where the water came out back there. You could walk back 20 feet or so. There was a solid stone floor and someone had dug out a place about a foot deep and about four feet wide and six feet long and Dad used to have his milk in 10- and 8- and 5-gallon crocks and he would site his milk down in that trough they had hewed out and that spring water would come in and keep that milk cool all the time. Then it ran out and into this trough where the animals could get their drink. The hogs were all on the other side. There was a stone trough about four feet long and two feet wide. The horses and cattle used to drink out of it.
“Between the springhouse and the barn was another building. We used to call it the turkey house where Mother used to raise turkeys. It was maybe 50 feet east of the barn, right out in the barn lot.”
—Theodore L. Kroeger, Jr., whose family lived at Blackacre 1885 to 1910
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| Weaving Shed west of dwelling house. Photograph by S. W. Thomas, 1981. In 1988 this building was renovated into an office and classroom. |
There is one more significant Tyler-period building at the Blackacre site. Actually, it may be one of the most important buildings in Jefferson County, but it takes a detective to figure out its mysteries. It sits behind Presley’s house, facing the smokehouse and backing up to the barnyard behind it. This little frame building has seen a lot of changes. Right now, it contains the weaving looms and other cloth-making tools used as part of the Environmental Education Program run at Blackacre by the Jefferson County Public Schools.
Inside the weaving shed, you’ll see that at some point the building was used to store carriages. How can we tell? Look up at the beams that help support the roof and you can see square holes that once contained hardware used to rig pulleys for lifting a wagon bed from the wheels and axles below.
But before the weaving shed served as a carriage house, it was something else entirely. There’s one wall left that hasn’t been entirely changed, meaning that it most likely dates from about 1790 or the very early part of the 1800s. It is the wall that faces Presley’s house and the wall that holds a clue about the original use of this little building.
“You used to come in the driveway past the house, open the gate right there and go around and pull your buggies up in a wood carriage house. Right in front of that were two corn cribs. You could pull a load of hay between both of them. They were up on rocks I guess to keep the mice or rats out. Poplar strips with a small crack between each. They put their cars in the carriage house, but it has been remodeled.”
—Fulton Wheeler, whose family lived at Blackacre from 1910 to 1939
Can you guess why this east wall of the weaving shed survived and the other three didn’t? Well, changes in the use of this building changed at least one, maybe two walls. When the building was switched to a carriage house, a big wide doorway for wagons was cut into the wall closest to the barnyard. A shed was added to the south side of the building, covering or changing the original wall.
Function was one reason the walls were altered. Weather was probably another reason. Remember how Presley and Moses were so sensitive to the direction of the winds and storms in the winter? That suggests that the north and west walls, the ones most exposed to wintertime blasts and rains, got the most wear and tear.
That leaves the east wall. What clues does the east wall of the weaving shed reveal about the building’s earlier, and probably original, use? Look at the wood siding. It’s called clapboard because the wood made a clapping sound when the logs were split apart lengthwise to make boards. Along the edge of each piece of clapboard siding is a little ridge. It is called a bead, and it’s made when the carpenter uses a sharp planing tool with a blade attached to it and shaped it in such a way that it leaves a little ridge.
Why would someone go to the trouble of planing the edge of every clapboard around that building if it were just a carriage house or some other ordinary farm structure? They probably wouldn’t, but they would if it were a house! That’s right. This modest little shed was probably originally another one of the Tyler dwellings scattered around the farmstead. It is impossible to say for sure who lived in it: a grown Tyler child, a farm hand, or a slave.
There’s more evidence inside that the weaving shed was originally a house. Walk over to the wall on the south side of the building, the one next to the new shed attachment. Notice the heavy-looking, up-and-down, squared-off logs on this wall. How about the diagonal logs at the corners of the same wall? They’re all roughed up, as if someone took a tool like an axe and chopped the surfaces of each of these logs. Why would someone want the inside surface of these logs to be rough? These logs were roughed up so they could be plastered, that’s why.
What about the spaces between the logs? They’re empty now, but they once were filled with a mud, straw, and horse hair mixture called brick nogging. The brick nogging was not only good insulation material, but it was rough enough, just like the logs that separated it, to be plastered.
Okay, now for the final bit of evidence. In the very lower righthand corner of the wall, where the two walls come together, there’s a bit of plaster. This plaster was used to cover the inside of this dwelling and has somehow managed to survive 200 years. Surviving plaster may not be the most remarkable thing about this little building though. Go back and take another look at those vertical and diagonal logs inside the shed. How are they put together? They’re joined to one another without a single nail. Nailing together two-by-fours wasn’t common until mass-produced, factory-made nails and sawmill lumber were easily available in about 1830.
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| Carriage house, ca. 1950. Kroeger family collection. This building was torn down to build the garage and tractor shed. |
It may seem like we know a lot about the weaving shed or about the other buildings and human-made features at Blackacre. But there’s a lot more we don’t know. For example, if the weaving shed was originally a house, what was the arrangement of the rooms inside it? Are there any bits of evidence we should be looking for such as marks on the wall where another wall might have joined it at one time but has since been removed?
The Garage
Built in 1952, it replaced an existing carriage house. The farm machinery shed was added on in the late 1950s to ensure that all machinery was kept under cover. Both are off limits to the general public.
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| Garage and machine shed behind main dwelling house. Photograph by S. W. Thomas, 1981. |
The Tool Shed
Built in the early 1900s as part of the dairy operation, the small building for the past 40 years has been the office of the farmer and been used for storing tools and machines.
The Nature Center
The Nature Center was built in the 1940s initially as a heifer shed where cows and their calves could be separated from the herd while the calves grew and were weaned. If you look closely at the building, you can see some remnants from when it was a heifer shed. In 1980 it was converted to the Susanne Schick Nature Center by staff of the Kentucky Nature Preserves Commission and community volunteers. With foresight, the Nature Center was designed to take advantage of solar energy. There is a large clerestory and hot box on top of the building. The sun’s rays come through the plastic and heat the air in the hot box. Then a fan blows the heated air into the building. A southern exposure with large picture and ceiling windows allows in as much sunlight as possible.
The Clivus Multrum Bathrooms
Directly east of the Nature Center is a composting toilet for visitors’ use. The toilets, which use no water, are interesting because they recycle into compost all the waste produced by our visitors.
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| Moses Tyler’s 1817 receipt for payment of the Direct Tax on his property.
Click on image to enlarge |
The educational office was renovated in 1990 by summer youth workers. The students remodeled a storage shed that was used by the Smiths for 30 years. The office has a school system telephone, computers, first-aid equipment, and a resource library.
The Chicken Coop
The chicken coop was built in the first half of the 1900s and is on the western side of the weaving shed.
What Buildings are not here anymore?
| “Between the big house and the stone house, we tore down an old slave house. It was built of poplar four-by-fours, that was the studding, about so far apart. Between them studding was brick. On the outside the weather boarding and the inside was plaster. We throwed the brick down and covered them up and we took the old split lathes and made kindling out of them. It had a rock chimney. There was just one chimney to it. It was on the side of the big house. It had a basement or something under it. The front faced just like the big house, so the chimney was on the side. When the house was tore down, the chimney stayed there for a long time. We didn’t tear any other buildings down.” —Fulton Wheeler, whose family lived at Blackacre from 1910 to 1939
Mary Kroeger Hollis and Ella Kroeger, ca. 1898. Photograph by John Kroeger. (Structure between kitchen and stone house appears to be clapboarded or made of planks.) Kroeger family collection. |
| “The Privy just had little posts in the ground. It had a wooden floor which you stepped up onto. It had two holes side by side. There was no hole dug out in the ground. Dad had a trough-like thing on runners. When it would get full, he just hitched a team of horses to it and pulled it out into the field and dumped it out and then would bring it back.” —Theodore L. Kroeger, Jr. whose family lived here from 1885 to 1910 “We had two outside toilets. One was next to the carriage house. The catalpa tree is planted where the old toilet was by the carriage house. My brother Ray planted that tree. He got that tree at school. He set it there and that was it, just directly after we moved over there, not too long after. The other privy was down below the old stone house, next to the hog house.”
Carriage house and two-hole privy behind dwelling house. Note catalpa tree growing up beside carriage house. Ca. 1915. Fulton Wheeler collection. |
One building that is missing contained a still that was used to make whiskey. Moses Tyler had a liquor license, which meant he had permission from the government to make whiskey. Eventually, though, he gave up making whiskey because railroads made access to goods like whiskey easier. This decreased the demand for locally made whiskey.
The picture below of the stone chimney was taken between the stone house and Presley’s house. There’s a good chance that Moses or Presley would have had houses for grown children, employees, or slaves built near his own house.
Chimney remains of old frame house, ca. 1915. Fulton Wheeler collection. |
Log smokehouse and wood shed behind main house, ca. 1940. Macauley L. Smith collection. |
The first smokehouse at Blackacre was a log building on a stone foundation. In the 1930s it was dismantled and used to build the extension on the stone cottage. It was then replaced by a brick smokehouse that was used until the mid-1900s when freezers and refrigerators became available to keep meat fresh. Even so, we can see that the smokehouse remained an important building because its location remained near the main house.
Not only have buildings disappeared and been added, but life inside the existing buildings changed.
“We didn’t have no electric lights or nothing in them days. We just had to use a coal oil lamp. They used to have a little country store up at the railroad tracks at Tucker Station Road. Mr. Allen run a store there for a long time. I had to go up there and carry a coal oil can and get coal oil. That was what we filled our lamps with. After we had lived here several years, my daddy or my mother made some money and had a carbide lights system put in. You would turn the gas on and turn a little button and the sparker lit. The outfit was in the basement and you had to put 100 pounds of carbide in ever so often.”
—Fulton Wheeler, whose family lived at Blackacre from 1910 to 1939
EE Home | Blackacre Home | History of Blackacre | Preface | Time Line | Who Gave This Land | Settling Blackacre | The Farm | The Buildings | Tyler Settlement | Reflective Questions | Acknowledgements