Brief History of Woodford County

To learn more about Woodford County, Kentucky, visit http://www.geocities.com/kscales441/ The following discussion is based on interviews conducted for this documentary and represent the history of Woodford County through the eyes of its residents.

Ben Chandler, editor of The Woodford Sun, the local weekly newspaper, provides this overview of the county. The first settlers came along the old Wilderness Road in the late 1700s. After the fort at Lexington was built, people would come to what would become Woodford County in order to plant crops and then return to the fort at night for protection. The county was formed in 1789.

In 1789 the first county government was established and the city of Versailles was established in 1792 and Midway in 1846. By 1850, before the War Between the States, there were about 3,000 people living in the city of Versailles and 13,000 in the county. Interestingly, one hundred years later in 1950 there were about 2,700 people living in the city, and the population of the county had declined to under 12,000. Both Versailles and Midway were land locked, surrounded by large farms that had been held by families for generations. Up until the early 1960s, you worked in agriculture or the distilleries or, you left the community for other jobs.

The War Between the States split the county wide open. As Ben Chandler II explains, “There were a preponderance of Southern sympathizers and those were later on, because you voted as you shot, those were the Democrats.... and the Republicans had been for staying in the Union and worn the blue uniform.”

Given the rich limestone-based soils, it is not surprising that agriculture has defined the pace and nature of life in Woodford County from the beginning.
While the main crops have varied over time, what has been consistent since the late 19th century has been the importance of the breeding, raising and selling of Thoroughbreds. At various times, corn for whiskey, asparagus, hemp and tobacco have been grown and represented significant portions of farm income as have sheep and cattle. But theenduring thread over time has been the production of race horses. The horse farms of Woodford County  – Lane’s End, Gainsborough, Ashford, Shadwell, Three Chimneys, Airdrie, Pin Oak – are known internationally and Elizabeth II, the Queen of England, boards many of her brood mares at Lane’s End.
(See GOTOBUTTON BM_1_  TheKentuckyEncyclopedia, edited by John Kleber.Copyright 1992. The University Press of Kentucky.)

Since the late 1970s, the number of farms in Woodford County has fluctuated between 700 - 750, but the number of horse farms has increased 157% from 134 in 1978 to 344 in 2002. During this same time period, the number of horses on Woodford County farms rose from 2,445 to 7,760, an increase of 217%. The value of horses sold has risen from $9.2 million in 1978 to $152.0 million in 2002. Indeed, Woodford County ranks second in Kentucky in the total value of all agricultural products sold and the sale of horses represents 88 cents of every dollar of agricultural value generated in the county.

In the early 1900s, an interurban trolley linked Versailles with Lexington, Frankfort and Midway, opening up the community to the urban jobs in Frankfort and Lexington and starting the first wave of suburbanization.

“When TI (Texas Instruments) came in 1953.... it was the watershed, the biggest change that took us out of the static situation that we were in...being an agrarian society.... and it really did take the farmworkers out of the fields....and then we had much fewer people in farming and then the number of farms were fewer and the farmers had to get more sophisticated equipment which most of them couldn’t afford.”

In 1935 Albert B. (Happy) Chandler was elected governor and he had a plan to four-lane the Middletown Trail (US 60) from Lexington to Louisville. But funding ran out after construction of a 10 mile stretch from Louisville to Middletown and another 10 miles from Versailles to Lexington. When re-elected as governor in 1955, it was only logical to extend the four-lane highway from Versailles to Frankfort with a by-pass around downtown Versailles. With the completion of US 60 - the four-lane highway linking Lexington, Versailles and Frankfort – the county was opened to outside influences. First affected was the structure of the local economy as International Paper and Rand McNally, an industrial park and a shopping center all located along the by-pass. As Ben Chandler (Happy Chandler’s son) noted:

“Industry follows the big highways, the interstates, the crossing of the interstates, the four lane access...and we’ve got it here, and it has made Versailles and Woodford County really almost the geopolitical center of our state. And it’s part of the axis of the Golden Triangle from Cincinnati to Lexington to Louisville, and I guess it always will be. People will want to come here first until we fill it up and there’s no room for them.”

In 1972, the uneasiness about the changes in the county came to a head in the debate over the proposed Charter Oaks subdivision. This would be a classic example of leapfrog development -- an 800-acre development with 125 homes on 5 acre lots about halfway between Versailles and Frankfort with no sewers or natural gas, a rural water and fire district, and on a two lane road. It was a beautifully designed development, but it was in the wrong place. As Ben Chandler explains:

“It was a beautiful concept, lots of houses on the big tract of over 800 acres, a beautiful tract. But probably seven miles or so out from town. Just a huge leap frog development and like just as if it were parachuted down into the most beautiful, the prime farmland of the entire county, and maybe of the world. Right next to Woodburn Farm, the Alexandria place that’s been in operation since 1790, these big land grant farms.... and this just seemed to be unthinkable. There were other places to put a subdivision like that.”

“The Charter Oaks proposal galvanized people...As a result of the Charter Oaks proposal and the possibility that something like that could eventually sail through, and just open the county wide, the Woodford Save the Land was founded.... to give us slow, orderly, affordable, reasonable, sane growth.”

“When you drive from here to Frankfort, you’ve got an open shot of the world’s prettiest country, (there’s some almost as pretty in parts of England that I’ve seen) but this is just so beautiful, and you leave town heading to Frankfort and you don’t see anything but lovely farms and homes on those farms and barns until you get to the little community of Jett in Franklin County.”

“We got a subdivision here, there and everywhere. The value of homes and land went up. Eventually people moved in here, there was always a push to create jobs and then all of a sudden you’d look up and you’d read statistics where 46% of the people working in Woodford County lived elsewhere. They commuted to work here and then a lot of our people commuted to work at IB M and some places in Lexington or the state government in Frankfort. So it was a trading around of jobs. But in the meantime, there was much real estate activity and much growth in traffic and much growth in crime and some of the other unpleasant things that do go with growth and the eventual disabling, if not destruction of the original core of the downtown.

Libby Jones describes the emergence of opposition this way:

Woodford Save the Land is a broad-based community organization, a volunteer organization that began in 1972, or thereabouts, and the catalyst for it was the proposal to build a 125 home subdivision in the heart of some of Woodford County’s best farmland. As a matter of fact, it was next door to our farm and at least six miles from the nearest community. So it was very out in the country. It would not have been served by any kind of infrastructure. The houses would have been on septic tanks, which we were fearful would greatly degrade our water supply, because at the time, almost everyone was dependent on ground water for their drinking and cooking and bathing and for their animals.

And so, when this proposal came up, it was perfectly legal. The homes were going to be on 5-acre lots, which at the time was the minimum lot size in Woodford County. And the fact that they were contiguous lots – 125 lots – did not seem to the Planning and Zoning Commission any sort of conflict. Whereas to the farmers in the area, we viewed that as a residential subdivision. They were not 5-acre farms, they were solely for residential purposes, and so we were going to have a subdivision in our midst, and the conflicts between farming and residential use are acknowledged now. I don’t think so much then, because it was a fairly new trend to build these estate-type lots into the far reaches of the agricultural lands.....

As soon as a few of us in the neighborhood were aware of this enormous residential subdivision proposal for our area, we met at our home. We called all the neighbors; there were probably 25 or 30 people there representing 7 or 8 families. And we talked about what we could do and all we could do was to appeal to the planning and zoning board.... and the more people in the county outside of our immediate neighborhood became aware of it, the forces really rallied. And I think at the first public hearing there were probably well over 100 people there protesting. And so, that was the beginning of Woodford Save the Land.”

The Charter Oaks subdivision proposal sparked the formation of Woodford Save the Land, an organization that remains active today, albeit under another name. From this time forward, it has been said that no proposed development in Woodford County has been approved without objection and without a lawsuit.