The Routes That Bind Us
story by Donna Hecker & photography by Talitha Schroeder
Picture a 3-D topographical model of the Bluegrass landscape – rolling hills of Astroturf green, streaked with railroad tracks and streams and narrow roads, running parallel at times and crisscrossing at others. Or a vintage Lionel train display – plastic horses grazing pastures while cars and trains hustle by; it would look a lot like central Kentucky today, especially if the roads had names like Fishers Mill, Grimes Mill, Peaks Mill, Armstrong Mill, Clays Mill.
Of all the mills that gave their names to Bluegrass byways, only one still operates commercially – Weisenberger Mill, established in 1865 in neighboring Scott County by a German immigrant named August Weisenberger. The stone ground corn grits milled there have a place of honor on all the menus in our Holly Hill restaurant family, and we bake Weisenberger flour into every loaf of bread and batch of cookies.
The present structure was built in 1913; an architect’s model is currently displayed at the Midway History Museum. Now in its sixth generation of family ownership, this gristmill on the south fork of the Elkhorn Creek is a genuine link to our farmers, our geography, our history and one another.
Over one thousand mills once stood along Kentucky waterways. Charles Hockensmith, president of the Kentucky Old Mill Association and a retired state archaeologist, ran down a list of the various types for us.
Sawmills, woolen mills, hemp mills, paper mills, cotton mills, gristmills, tanbark mills, even mills for grinding mustard and making gunpowder. Our creeks and rivers also supported distilleries, many of which constructed their own mills for grinding corn on its path to bourbon whiskey.
Charles went on to explain how early county committees would examine each proposed mill site and appraise its potential impact on other landowners.
An excerpt from Order Book “A” for Woodford County, dated June 1789, reads, “On motion of John McQuiddy to build a Mill on his own land across Glen’s near Widow Mitchums, the Sheriff is directed to summons (sic) twelve fit persons to meet on said land to ascertain the damages which may be sustained by building said Mill.”
The same Order Book included six other mill petitions; two on Glen’s Creek, two on Elkhorn Creek and two on unknown sites.
Glen’s (or Glenn’s) Creek starts out as a spring behind the courthouse in downtown Versailles, the county seat of Woodford. The spring was once the site of a carding mill as well as a distillery run by Elijah Pepper before he moved downstream to build the distillery that produced the original Old Crow bourbon; Woodford Reserve is made there now.
Our friends Richard and Lee Ann Jones own Happy Jack’s Farm in Franklin County near the Forks of the Elkhorn; from there the north fork wanders off to join the Kentucky River up by Owen County and the south fork snakes into Lexington. The fields at Happy Jack’s are irrigated by water drawn from the south fork, which borders the farm.
As we leave Happy Jack’s to drive toward Holly Hill Inn in Midway, the south Elkhorn is out of sight from U.S. Highway 421 but visible as a skinny blue squiggle on the dashboard navigation screen. It comes into view again behind a vacation cabin owned by our Holly Hill Inn neighbors Mike and Amy Perry, called the Cabin at Elkhorn Ridge and situated on old Parrish family property off nearby Georgetown Rd.
Former Kentucky Poet Laureate and Elkhorn Creek historian Richard Taylor described how Elkhorn Creek was the avenue by which white people settled the Bluegrass in the 1700s. Richard, whose own family was part of that settlement, calls Elkhorn Creek “the basepoint” and said prominent surveyors like John Floyd staked out large claims when Bluegrass land was divvied up by Virginia as compensation for veterans of the French and Indian War.
The Elkhorn is long for a creek but not easily navigable except by kayak or canoe; for transportation in the Bluegrass, buffalo trails proved useful until roads could be built. A stage line linking Frankfort and Lexington was established in 1824 along the route of Ky. Hwy. 1681, locally called Old Frankfort Pike or Shady Lane.
Today Old Frankfort Pike is a national scenic byway, popular with the Bluegrass Cycling Club and often part of its annual Horsey Hundred ride. The Offut-Cole Tavern, once a fixture on the stage line, still stands at the intersection with Midway Road, not far from our Wallace Station Deli and Bakery. Richard Cole, who operated the tavern between 1812 and 1839, was the grandfather of Zerelda Cole James, who mothered the notorious brothers Frank and Jesse.
Midway itself was the first railroad town established in Kentucky. Named for its location almost precisely “midway” between Lexington and Frankfort, the town and its tracks connected the richly productive farms of the Bluegrass to vital markets in Lexington, Louisville and Cincinnati. Wallace Station was a stop on the north/south route; trains picked up phosphate there from an adjacent mine and offloaded distillery supplies.
In Volume 19 of the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Woodford County historian William Railey wrote that “the soil of Woodford has ever been very fertile and productive” and that “visitors to the county early in its history often referred to it as the ‘Asparagus Bed’ in the ‘Garden of the Bluegrass.’”
Much asparagus still grows in central Kentucky and regularly shows up on our menus every spring but today the Bluegrass is better known for Thoroughbreds than produce. Still, there are many farms and orchards like Happy Jacks, Salad Days, and Reed Valley which supply us with fruits and vegetables nearly all year round.
Even the corn ground into meal at Weisenberger Mill comes from within a 100-mile radius, a lot of it grown on a farm owned by the family of former Holly Hill chef Nat Henton, whose ancestors have been farming in Woodford County since the 1700s.
Mac Weisenberger, who runs the mill with son Philip, says they grind about 1000 bushels of corn a week, most of it going to the foodservice trade through distributors like U.S. Foods and What Chefs Want, and the rest packaged for retail sale, especially in the form of popular mixes like corn muffins and fish breading. “When I was a kid”, he said, “you could take 25# bags to the store and sell them but people aren’t cooking at home much anymore.”
Folks are still placing orders online, though, or picking them up at the mill’s loading dock, which is where we found Mac himself on a recent Saturday afternoon. Dressed casually in a plaid shirt and khakis, accessorized with a single suspender, Mac took us around the mill, including up to the second floor where corn is ground into grits by a new millstone brought from North Carolina. “New” being relative as the stone’s been in place for 25 years now, just a fraction of Weisenberger Mill’s existence.
As the oldest continuously operating mill in Kentucky, Weisenberger Mill still depends on the waters of the Elkhorn Creek for power, but in a very 21st century way. Electricity turns the turbines now instead of water; the electricity itself comes in part from a small hydroelectric plant first installed in the 1980s. In 2015 a partnership between the University of Kentucky’s Center for Applied Energy Research and the designer of the mill’s original plant engineered an upgrade to a variable-speed generator; its power output nearly doubled as a result.
Back to those grits though – Mac Weisenberger credits Chef Ouita Michel with kicking off a renewed appetite for stone ground grits. He proudly showed us how each bag is stamped with a Kentucky Proud sticker and the name of the farm which supplied the corn. We told him how every online order from our Holly Hill shop is wrapped in a sheet of newsprint bearing artist Brenna Flannery’s sketch of Weisenberger Mill and a copy of our grits recipe.
No matter which Holly Hill restaurant they’re working in, our chefs still make grits the way they learned in the kitchen at Holly Hill Inn. In fact, the recipe for Weisenberger Mill Cheese Grits is the very first one in Chef Ouita’s cookbook, A Few Miles South: Timeless Recipes From Our Favorite Places. It’s proof in black and white of our connection to the Weisenbergers and their mill; to the farmers who grow our food; to all the byways and waterways that stitch us together across time and space.
We’ve covered a lot of ground in this story and we know it only goes back as far as the time when white people started arriving in the Bluegrass. But we’re still exploring the routes that bind us, that brought us to where we are, and that’ll take us to where we’re going next.
© 2022, Holly Hill Inn/Ilex Summit, LLC and its affiliates, All Rights Reserved
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