Native people lived in Central Kentucky for nearly 12,000 years. When the first European settlers arrived in the mid-1770s, one method for laying claim to land under Virginia law was to build a cabin and raise a crop of corn on a desired site. John May had a crop of corn raised at his expense on a site at the headwaters of what is now known as Town Branch fork of Elkhorn Creek that included a cabin built by John McCracken. This was most likely near a spring-fed pond, the main source of Town Branch, that was located at what is now National Avenue between Walton and North Ashland avenues.
McCracken and May, a Petersburg, Virginia, merchant for whom the city of Maysville was named, assigned their interests in the land to Col. John Todd, a Pennsylvania native who had come here from Fincastle, Virginia, where he practiced law. Based on their land “improvements,” assigned to Todd, a Virginia land commission meeting at Harrodsburg on Feb. 25, 1780, awarded Todd 400 acres plus the right to buy 1,000 acres beside it, which he did. This included land that is now the Mentelle, Bell Court and Kenwick neighborhoods, plus much of the surrounding area east of downtown. May’s two children would later sue Todd’s daughter, claiming their father had been cheated out of his interest in this land. After a decade of litigation involving some of early Lexington’s most famous people, Kentucky courts in 1824 rejected claims by May’s heirs.
Todd also got an adjoining 1,400 claim and preemption around a spring he named Mansfield, where he built a cabin in 1775 or 1776. This included much of what is now the Fairway and Chevy Chase neighborhoods and surrounding areas. (The Mansfield spring is still there, in dense woods on a private estate beside the Easter Seals hospital. Its flow creates a small creek beside Richmond Road that empties into the reservoir, which was created in the 1880s by damming up West Hickman Creek.)
Todd would not own this land long. He died on Aug. 19, 1782 at the Battle of Blue Licks in Robertson County. It was one of the last battles of the Revolutionary War, and the largest battle in Kentucky. A superior force of British loyalists and Native Americans, who had attacked Bryan’s Station, overpowered a militia of 182 settlers. Todd was in command of the militia, and he and half its members were killed. Daniel Boone, Todd’s second-in-command, escaped with his life. But Boone’s son Israel was among those killed.
Virginia authorities appointed Gen. James Wilkinson and four other men as commissioners to settle Todd’s estate. (Wilkinson would later be exposed as a notorious traitor.) Wilkinson and two of the other commissioners, Thomas Marshall and John Coburn, sold 100 acres of that land on Sept. 18, 1790 to James Masterson, who had fought with George Rogers Clark in the Revolutionary War. Masterson came to Lexington in 1779. His brother, Richard, founded Masterson Station, a pioneer fort five miles west of town.
James Masterson paid £60 Virginia currency for about 100 acres bounded by what is now East Main Street, Forest Avenue, Boonesboro and Cramer avenues and the southeastern edge of Mentelle Park. Masterson built a house on this land and it still stands, much remodeled, at 715 Bullock Place.
Masterson was “a genuine specimen of the pioneer type,” George Washington Ranck wrote in his 1872 book, History of Lexington, Kentucky: It’s Early Annals and Recent Progress. “He was straight as an Indian, and devoted to the woods and the excitements of a woodman’s life. Long after Lexington had become an important town, he continued to dress in the primitive hunter style, and invariably wore his powder horn and carried his rifle. He loved to tell of the dangers which threatened ‘the fort’ when he was married in it, and the number of deer and buffalo he had killed between it and the present Ashland.”
Masterson enslaved Black people to work on his farm. The 1810 and 1820 censuses recorded 11 enslaved people on Masterson’s farm. There were nine in the 1830 census. In his 1838 will, recorded shortly before his death at age 86, he bequeathed five enslaved people by name — Ben, Ryal, Tom, Jenny and Lucy — to his wife and children.
Masterson willed that his farm be divided equally six ways and left to his widow and surviving children. Section Nos. 1, 2 are now the Bell Court neighborhood and section Nos. 3, 4, 5 and 6 now make up a little more than half of Mentelle neighborhood. Masterson left his house and the adjacent kitchen and nearby well to his widow, Margaret.
Within a few years of his death, Masterson’s heirs began selling off the land. Thirty-five acres on the top end was sold in 1845 to Henry Bell, who built one of Lexington’s grand mansions, Woodside. It was destroyed by fire in 1884. Bell’s son, David Davis Bell, built a new mansion there, which is now owned by the city and called Bell House. The Bell family’s land, except for a park preserved around the mansion, was subdivided in 1906 to become the Bell Court neighborhood. (Read more about Bell Court here in this sketch by historian James Birchfield.)
The family of Masterson’s daughter, Margaret Metcalfe, acquired the lower portion of Masterson’s farm after the death of her brothers Joseph (1838) and John (1841). After Margaret’s death in 1846, her son, Charlton Metcalfe sold the 14 acres that is now Mentelle Park in 1854 to Waldemarde Mentelle Jr. He was the son of Waldemarde and Charlotte Victorie Leclere Mentelle, who had left Paris during the French Revolution. The elder Waldemarde Mentelle came to America in 1790 and, after living briefly in New York and Philadelphia, moved to the French settlement of Gallipolis, Ohio, where Charlotte joined him in 1793.
The Mentelles moved to Lexington in 1798, taught French and dancing lessons and were associated with Transylvania University and the Bank of the United States. Mary Owen Todd Russell Wickliffe, the daughter of Col. John Todd, inherited the land that is now the Kenwick and Fairway neighborhoods. In about 1805, she gave the Mentelles lifetime use of a house and five acres across Richmond Road from Henry Clay’s Ashland estate. The arrangement was formalized in 1839, and the Mentelles were given the use of an additional acre. (The Mentelles became good friends with Henry and Lucretia Clay, and their daughter, Mary, married the Clays’ son, Thomas. Their home was Mansfield, a circa 1845 mansion that still stands in the woods behind the Mansfield spring.
The Mentelles opened a day and boarding school for girls at their home in 1820. Their students included Mary Todd, the great niece of Col. John Todd and future wife of President Abraham Lincoln, who attended from 1832 to 1836. The Mentelles’ house burned in the 1840s. It was replaced and expanded on the same foundation with the house now at 116 Lincoln Ave., which has been beautifully restored.
Waldemarde Mentelle Jr., whose business ventures included a hemp factory, foundry and machine shop, built a six-room cottage on the 14 acres that is now Mentelle Park in 1858 and lived there until his death in 1886. The property, known as Greenwood Cottage, was left to his sister, Rose Mentelle, who lived there until her death in 1893.
Just west of Waldemar Mentelle’s property along East Main Street was 15 acres owned by J.W. McGarvey. This became the first part of Masterson’s farm to be subdivided into a neighborhood. Beginning in 1887, building lots were sold along East Main and a new street, East End Avenue, now called North Hanover Avenue. The next subdivision, in 1889, was built beside the Bell property along another new street, Walton Avenue.
The Mentelle Company was formed in 1905 by four Lexington businessmen: Mayor Thomas Combs, president of the Combs Lumber Company and the Lexington Telephone Company; Henry M. Skillman of the Security Trust Company; real estate broker Thomas L. Warren; and Charles N. Manning, chairman and president of the Security Trust Company. Three later investors were former Lt. Gov. Mitchell Cary Alford; J. Wood Browning, an attorney, businessman and later a Disciples of Christ minister; and Phoenix National Bank President D.F. Frazee. The Mentelle Company bought Waldemarde Mentelle Jr.’s cottage and 14 acres from Rose Mentelle’s heirs, including Thomas H. Clay, H.B. Clay and Charlotte Vimont, in December 1905 for $13,039 and soon demolished the cottage.
Their project, Mentelle Park, was planned to be one of Lexington’s most prestigious neighborhoods. The property was subdivided into 56 lots on a divided street with four small parks in the center that the developers called The Esplanade. Four limestone pillars were placed at entrances at each end. Mentelle Park had all of the modern amenities: Sewers, gas lines, limestone curbs and a macadam street. Power lines were run at the back of the lots so there were no poles along the street.
This was at the height of the Jim Crow era, and many deeds contained covenants that forbid Black people from owning property or living in what is now Mentelle neighborhood. This was a common tactic to further white supremacy in Lexington and around the country. Federal courts in 1948 declared these racist restrictions unenforceable, and they were outlawed by civil rights legislation in the 1960s. Deeds also contained restrictions that required minimum costs for homes erected on neighborhood lots to enhance and preserve property values and try to keep out poor people. (Within a few years, though, many houses contained rental apartments or rooms.)
The Mentelle Company held its first auction of lots in June 1906, selling 19 of the 56. Later that year, construction began on homes for three of the lots sold: 12, 9 and 18. Construction of speculative houses on lots 33 and 52 also began. The construction was done by Combs Lumber Company, whose president, Mayor Thomas Combs, was a partner in The Mentelle Company. The developers hired Thomas A. Knight, a photographer and publishing entrepreneur from Cleveland, to produce a marketing 
booklet published in August 1907. (See the entire booklet near the bottom of this page.) After many glowing ads and articles were published in the Lexington Herald and Lexington Leader, and free band concerts were held each pretty Sunday afternoon for months, the initial auction of lots and three homes was held on May 21, 1907. The first to sell was No. 52, to J.F. Walton for $3,400, apparently less than the cost of construction. Lot No. 50 next door was sold at slightly above the opening price. After no bids were made for lot No. 51, the disappointed developers ended the auction.
Sales may have been slow because Lexington was experiencing a building boom; Aylesford, Bell Court and other subdivisions were being constructed at the time. (Mentelle Park was outside the city limits until they were extended to include it in the fall of 1906). After that auction, lots and houses were sold privately. Following the death of Mentelle Company partner D.F. Frazee on Feb. 18, 1909, the 40 remaining unsold lots and two houses were auctioned off in June 1909. Frazee’s death had sparked litigation between his bank and his estate over debts involving himself and Alford, including loans related to the Mentelle Company. (Frazee was a member of the University of Kentucky’s Board of Trustees, and Frazee Hall, which was renovated in 2023, was named for him.)
Mentelle Park was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985. “Mentelle Park is one of the finest examples of a post-1900 residential development in Lexington, where the housing stock and landscape layout combine to create an ambience not seen in other developments of the period in the area,” according to the National Register nomination document.
Town Branch Creek, now buried along Midland and Vine streets, was once a considerable body of water fed by several springs scattered between east Lexington and downtown. Its main source was the spring-fed pond in the northwest corner of Mentelle neighborhood. Capt. John Fowler (1756-1840) bought 182 acres of the original John Todd land there in 1799 and built a dam and grist mill at the pond. Fowler was an early pioneer and officer in the Kentucky militia during the Revolutionary War. He later represented Lexington in Congress from 1796 to 1806.
Fowler turned about 85 acres of his property into a popular private park known as Fowler’s Garden, between Winchester Road and Masterson’s farm. It was the scene of many barbecues, gatherings, political speeches and festivities. Henry Clay spoke there several times, and his political rival, President Andrew Jackson, was the guest of honor at a barbecue there in October 1832. The pond, later called Scott’s Pond, and creek, before it emerges near Rupp Arena west of downtown, were covered over more than a century ago because they had become a smelly, polluted health hazard to Lexington citizens.
Scott’s Pond also was where construction began going east in 1871 on the Elizabethtown, Lexington & Big Sandy Railroad, which had been organized two years earlier, with Lexington and Fayette County each contributing $250,000 capital. The railroad was soon connected in downtown Lexington with the Louisville, Cincinnati & Lexington (later the Louisville & Nashville) Railroad lines. The EL&BSRR was purchased in 1892 by the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad. Passenger service on the line ended in 1971, and most service stopped in 1981. While the tracks remain in the neighborhood, there is little traffic aside from deliveries to Clay-Ingels Co. The building materials supply company is located just north of Mentelle neighborhood on a part of Fowler’s Garden that for many years was the site of the old C&O Netherland Yards, where railroad trains were once serviced and repaired.
The Lexington Brick Company bought some of what had been Fowler’s Garden and moved there in 1889 from its former plant on High Street. At its busiest point at this location, the company had 70 employees who produced 40,000 bricks a day. The company left the neighborhood in 1910 for a 57-acre property off the new Liberty Road, not far from its beginning at Winchester Road. The company’s property was sold at a master commissioner’s sale in 1922 after it went out of business.
Cramer and North Ashland avenues were built in 1906 to connect the Lexington Brick Company plant along the C&O Railroad line with Walton Avenue and East Main Street. Cramer was originally called Bullock Avenue, but was renamed Cramer for a family that lived on North Hanover Avenue (then called East End Avenue) and owned the brick company. Houses were built along both streets.
National Avenue was originally called Mary Street. The southeastern end of the street may have predated the filling in of Scott’s Pond in the 1890s, as early maps show it crossing the railroad track from Winchester Pike rather than extending from Walton Avenue through where the pond had been. At the end of Mary Street, near what is now Given and Richmond avenues and beside the railroad tracks, were more than a dozen small houses that were home to poor families, most of whom were Black. Residents got their water from a small spring until the 1930s, when an outbreak of typhoid fever there pressured city officials to extend water and sewer lines to the area. The north end of Mary Street was renamed National Avenue in the early 1900s as industrial businesses began using the former Scotts Pond area. The rest of Mary Street was officially renamed National Avenue in 1952. A similar neighborhood of poor, mostly Black residents was across Walton Avenue north of Boonesboro Avenue on a street called Ellerslie Avenue. It was demolished in the early 1980s and eventually redeveloped into townhouses.
Beginning in 1913, the land north of Cramer Avenue was developed into the Morningside subdivision, which included a new street, Aurora Avenue. Both the neighborhood and street were named as the result of a public contest. Two winners split a $25 prize for suggesting the name “Morningside” and 10 people split a $10 prize for the name “Aurora Avenue.”
While digging a sewer line across Cramer Avenue in 1915, construction crews found the graves of several victims of Lexington’s 1833 cholera epidemic, who had been buried in the southewest corner of Fowler’s Garden, according to a July 30, 1915 article in the Lexington Leader. “Who the victims were was never set down in history, just as scores of people were buried elsewhere at that time without a record being kept,” the article noted. The epidemic killed about 500 of Lexington’s 7,000 residents. 
The 18 acres of Masterson’s farm between what is now Walton Avenue and North Ashland Avenue was leased in 1882 and sold in 1887 to Maj. Robert S. Bullock, who fought with Confederate Gen. John Hunt Morgan during the Civil War and lived in Masterson’s old house. In 1915, his son, longtime Fayette County Judge Franklin A. Bullock, subdivided his family’s land into building lots along East Main, Bullock Place, Franklin and Hambrick avenues. (Hambrick Avenue was named for Judge Bullock’s wife, the former Grace Hambrick; Franklin Avenue was likely named for him.)
Given Avenue, Hanover Court and Memory Lane (originally called Mentelle Park Extended) were built by the early 1920s.
Also in the 1920s, a commercial district began developing along National and Walton avenues and the railroad line. Major businesses included the Epping Bottling Works (whose building is now Epping’s on East Side), Perry Lumber Company, Lexington Dairy Company and General Baking Company.
The Mentelle neighborhood was mostly developed by 1935, but new townhouses and infill residences have been added in recent years because of the neighborhood’s prime location and popularity.
The neighborhood has been home to an eclectic group of people, including some notable ones. Harriet Van Meter started the International Book Project in her basement at 17 Mentelle Park in the 1960s. Lawyer and historian William Townsend, whose books included Lincoln and the Bluegrass, lived at 28 Mentelle Park for 50 years, from 1914 until his death in 1964. Billy Reed, a Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame member who wrote mostly sports stories and columns for the Herald-Leader, Courier-Journal and Sports Illustrated, grew up on Memory Lane (then called Mentelle Park Extended).
At least three members of the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame have lived in the neighborhood: Ed McClanahan lived on Walton Avenue for 30 years before his death in November 2021. Walter Tevis lived on Franklin Avenue with an aunt as a boy when he first moved to Lexington. Guy Davenport also lived on Franklin Avenue for a time before moving to his longtime home in Bell Court. (And a fourth member, Gurney Norman, used to live just outside the neighborhood, on Richmond Avenue.)
The neighborhood has included two schools, two churches, a synagogue and a variety of businesses. Henry Clay High School was built in 1928 on former Bullock property along East Main Street between Walton and North Ashland avenues. The school moved to a new campus on Fontaine Road in 1973, and the old building housed central offices for the Fayette County Public Schools from 1975 to 2020. The original Ashland Elementary School on North Ashland Avenue was built in 1916 to relieve overcrowding at Maxwell Elementary. Ashland’s original structure was demolished in 1971 and replaced with the current building.
At the northwest edge of the neighborhood is Lexington’s own Flatiron Building, originally known as the IPC plant. It opened in 1927 at the corner of Walton Avenue and Winchester Road to make patent medicine and has had many uses since then. It is now called the Lexington Design Center. Click here to read more about it in this sketch by architectural historian Janie-Rice Brother.
The neighborhood continues to evolve. In recent years, Ashland Elementary’s reputation as one of Kentucky’s best public elementary schools has attracted young families, which has helped spark the renovation of many homes. New businesses have come to the neighborhood, most notably in the Warehouse Block redevelopment in the former industrial district along National Avenue. That adaptive reuse project by Walker Properties was featured in a New York Times article in 2015.
Magnificent Mentelle Park, by Thomas A. Knight (published August 1907)
Click on any image to begin slide show. (Images courtesy of The Kentucky Room, Lexington Public Library.)
Surrounding the neighborhood
The areas surrounding Mentelle neighborhood also have a rich history. Bell Court, to the west, was discussed earlier.
To the south, across East Main Street, was statesman Henry Clay’s Ashland farm. Clay was one of the nation’s most significant politicians in the first half of the 19th century. He was speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, a longtime leader in the U.S. Senate and a three-time candidate for president. His skill at political compromise stalled the Civil War for four decades. After the war, Ashland became the first campus of the University of Kentucky.
In 1904, the Clay family hired the Olmstead Brothers landscape architecture firm of Brookline, Massachusetts, to design the Ashland and Ashland Park neighborhoods for single-family homes and small apartment buildings. The brothers, John and Frederick, were the sons of Frederick Law Olmstead, the famous landscape architect whose creations included New York City’s Central Park and the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina.
Clay’s mansion, designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, who is considered America’s first professional architect, was demolished after his death in 1852 because of structural problems and replaced with a more elaborate home on the same foundation. That mansion and its surrounding 17-acre park are now operated by the Henry Clay Memorial Foundation.
To the east of the Mentelle neighborhood was farmland and Rose Hill, the Mentelles’ home and famous girls’ school. After the Civil War, the land became B.J. Treacy’s Ashland Park Stock Farm. In 1903, the Lexington Brick Company purchased 60 acres of this land and mined clay from the back portions, which account for many of Kenwick’s steep rolling hills. In 1909, businessman Harry Pilcher, who lived at 12 Mentelle Park, purchased 10 acres behind his home and developed the first section of what would become the Kenwick neighborhood. Most of Kenwick was built in the 1920s and 1930s, followed by the Fairway neighborhood beginning at Henry Clay Boulevard and ending at what is now Idle Hour Country Club. The northern part of Fairway was the site of the U.S. Army Remount Service station, which bought horses for the U.S. Cavalry. It closed after World War II and the Fairway neighborhood was extended from Menifee Avenue to the railroad tracks.
More historical photos from the neighborhood
If you have Mentelle neighborhood historical information or images worth sharing, contact Tom Eblen.