Berry Mansion - History

History

This estate has had several names over the years. The earliest was Monroe Hill, after Thomas Bell Monroe (1791–1865) who served in the following offices: Kentucky House of Representatives, Kentucky Secretary of State, U.S. District Attorney, and U.S. District Judge. Before the Civil War, he built the first large house on this site, Montrose.

The property became a campground for Union Army soldiers during the Civil War. In 1863, a detachment of Confederate cavalrymen attacked an encampment of sick Union soldiers here. Union cavalry troopers coming into Frankfort from Louisville arrived in time to rescue their beleaguered comrades. Later the property was owned by a gentleman known as “Preacher Arnold.” It was from Preacher Arnold that George Franklin Berry and his wife Mary Stone Bush Berry purchased the property in 1899. Along the drive to the main house is a watering “trough” that bears the initials “GFB 1899,” noting the Berrys arrival and ownership of the estate.

They called the 200-acre (0.81 km2) estate Juniper Hill because of the many red cedar trees – Juniperus Virginiana – that grew here. Mr. Berry was a prosperous executive in the Frankfort whisky distilling industry with W.A. Gaines & Company, makers of Old Crow and Hermitage bourbons. The Berrys chose the Louisville architect William J. Dodd to design their new home. The house is representative of the grand homes built by wealthy Kentuckians in that era – extravagant but grounded in traditional architectural and decorative styles. The twenty-two-room mansion is built with stone quarried on the site. The basement was blasted from solid rock.

The architect, William J. Dodd (1862–1930) studied architecture in Chicago and worked in Louisville between 1884 and 1913. Dodd held apprenticeships with various prominent architectural firms, including McKim, Meade, and White – a premiere Beaux Arts architectural firm, and notable Chicago architect William Le Baron Jenney. While in partnership with Mason Maury, they designed the Kentucky Building for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Dodd’s work was not limited to just buildings; he designed furnishings and other decorative arts for some of his works of architecture. In the early 20th century Dodd was commissioned by Gates Pottery to design vases and other pots for the TECO line along with other famous architects Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis H. Sullivan, and Fernand Moreau. These pieces designed by Dodd and the TECO line are highly prized by collectors of early 20th century decorative arts.

Mr. and Mrs. Berry were married in 1878. Mrs. Berry was Mary Stone Bush (1859–1950), daughter of Samuel Stone Bush and Cornelia Wheat Bush of Louisville, and a granddaughter of Judge Zachariah Wheat, a prominent judge in Kentucky. Mr. Bush was an attorney and Mrs. Cornelia Wheat Bush was the first woman to serve as State Librarian in Kentucky, from 1878-1880.

Mr. Berry (1856–1938) was the son of Hiram Berry and Eleanor Berry. Hiram Berry and his wife and children moved to Frankfort while George Franklin Berry was an infant. Hiram Berry partnered with W.A. Gaines and E.H. Taylor to distill Old Crow bourbon. George F. Berry followed his father into the distilling industry.

Mr. Berry retired and sold his interests in the bourbon industry in 1927. He died in this house in 1938. His wife, Mary Bush Berry, lived here until 1950. At age 90, she declared she had lived long enough, withdrew to her upstairs bedroom, and died three weeks later. Both are buried at the Frankfort Cemetery in a plot purchased at the time of Mrs. Bush’s death in 1916.

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Paul Sawyier, an American impressionist painter, was commissioned by the Berry family to paint scenes the house and surrounding property. He completed 11 paintings of the estate, 6 of which were retained by the family until one was sold to the Kentucky Division of Historic Properties in 2005.

Berry, a bourbon whiskey executive at Old Crow, and his wife both died in the house, in 1938 and 1950 respectively. Their niece, Cornelia Gordon Roberts, inherited the estate until the city of Frankfort acquired it in 1953. The Commonwealth of Kentucky purchased the property in 1957 for a mere $50,000. This included the mansion, carriage house, wash house and approximately 38 acres (150,000 m2). The mansion was used as the State Library until 1982, when the State Libraries and Archives was built.