A Night of Romantic Felicity in Glasgow

Hall Place Bed and Breakfast: Green Street, Glasgow, Kentucky

This month I’m making a 12-day drive from Florida through Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, and the Carolinas. I’ll visit some historic sites with emotional significance for many Americans; Civil War and Revolutionary War museums; state parks; historical associations; and memorabilia and gun shops. To get a better sense of the narratives attached to these places and the events and people they might commemorate, I’ll be looking at the signage, collecting the literature, and talking to visitors, staff, guides, and rangers. And of course, mining the gift shops!

Narrative Nation is my place to collect some thoughts and images as I go. Ideally, some parts of these reflections will be incorporated into the book I am developing with the working title “Loads of Heresy”: White Supremacist Revisions of the American Narrative. But for now these stories are drafts to help me think about what I’m seeing and hearing. Please comment with corrections and add your own experiences with the way our nation’s story—past and present—is being told.

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After dropping my husband at the Nashville airport, I started on ten days solo with stops in Kentucky, both Virginias, and North Carolina.

My first drive was only 95 miles northwest through Amish Country to Glasgow, a historic home-rule class city of about 15,000 in Barren County, Kentucky. I had a reservation in a two-story brick home built in 1852 with some promising décor. Hall Place Bed & Breakfast was only about $85 and had good reviews.

to Hall Place

Earlier in the day I’d received a text from the owner Sharla with instructions about letting myself in and informing me I’d have the house to myself that night. This was later updated with the information that a man I’ll call James had just booked a room. “In case you run into each other.” Both possibilities were a little scary, but in any case Sharla would be there in the morning to prepare breakfast.

I arrived at Hall Place shortly after dark. I’m not much of a scaredy cat, but at the same time it seemed reasonable to send my husband a picture of what I presumed to be James’ license plate before going in. To meet my death.

Inside, the first floor was almost completely dark. For reasons, I chose not to turn any lights on as I walked through all the rooms, a character in a horror movie being yelled at by saavy strangers watching me inch closer and closer to it, to him, to the door that seems a lot smaller than it should. After eating probably a few more of the fresh cookies than Sharla anticipated when she left them on the dining room table, I went upstairs.

In the hall, time-ravaged portraits followed me past “Dr. Hall’s Room” to my own door, the “Theodosia Room.” The old piano, one of three in the house, mercifully kept to itself as I fumbled with the key. A baby boy on the wall would suck from my dry and cracking soul through the night as his parents, hanging directly opposite, stood guard.

Hall Place interior

My enormous room was amply furnished with period pieces, including a velvety green chaise lounge at the foot of the waist-high bed. Sitting on the chaise, I saw myself looking oddly small in the mirror above a vanity pushed up against the pocket doors that separated my room from Dr. Hall’s Room. Someone was making the floorboards creak in there—I’ll say it was twenty-first-century James through I never knew for sure, and at any rate it could have been me, not a reflection in the mirror at all but over there straining to look in on myself. Someone has to take care.

Above the vanity, light came through a crack between the pocket doors. If someone were to turn off the light in that room, would the crack be wide enough to watch me? Would the now kindly creaking floor let me know if a person or something mocking the weight of a person approached the wall and stayed a lot longer than it should?

We’d have to cross that bridge when we came to it. I pulled my running clothes out in silence, eventually went to sleep, and woke to James’ five a.m. alarm.

A laminated history of the property was there on my dresser. The house was built by Judge Christopher Tompkins in 1852, and he lived there with his daughter Theodosia and her husband, Dr. Hall. When the Civil War was gearing up in 1861, the family fled to Indiana and “rode the storm out,” after which only Judge Tompkins returned to Glasgow. After his death, the house passed out of the family. Other accounts of the Honorable Christopher Tompkins have him dead by 1858 and say nothing about the family fleeing town in 1861.

So these halls are not ancestral, and this was never a colonial mansion or even a hereditary estate. It’s just an old house that changed hands a few times and was let slip for a while until a member of Glasgow Baptist Church across the street salvaged it.

I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity—but that would be asking too much of fate!

Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it.

Else, why should it be let so cheaply?

The ghost of Dr. Hall left for his neighborhood rounds, and I headed out for my own run around town. I saw a Confederate statue in front of the main government building in the town square and ran through a small cemetery with a remarkable number of local war dead, from the Civil War through Vietnam.

stones at the Glasgow cemetery

Over a huge breakfast with Sharla, I briefly described my road trip thus far, including the visit to Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage. Sharla, initially conflating Jackson with Jefferson, asked if I knew that he fathered children with an enslaved woman. So I told her all about TJ and Sally Hemmings, and she told me all about the family that originally lived in the house she now owns, including the legend that they freed the several enslaved people living there when they fled the war. She added that, though they were enslaved because those were the times, they were not treated badly and lived in the house like part of the family.

Quickly changing the subject before arguing that last point—I was a guest after all—I mentioned the Confederate monument I had seen that morning.

“Oh, you saw Johnny Reb, as they call him. Yeah, that’s still here.”

I wanted to know what Sharla thought about removing or adding context to any of the monuments and signs around Glasgow, or whether that was ever much of a discussion. She was more willing to talk frankly about these old white men’s sex crimes than their human property crimes and starting a civil war over it. While she agreed that it’s not great to suggest any celebration of enslavement or the Civil War, she also expressed concern about taking down history and things people in the community care about. I would learn more about Johnny Reb at the Museum of the Barrens later that morning.

Sharla—running a business after all—proffered a response as diplomatic as her property’s display of “both sides” in the downstairs hall.

As I was getting packed up to check out of Hall Place and visit the museum down the road, a woman who helps maintain the property knocked on my door. She gave me a quick tour of the other bedrooms, including the space that had been the enslaved people’s quarters with a now closed stairway down to the kitchen and the back of the house.

The white folks’ ghosts were only the too-familiar denizens of my own imagination, triggered by prints and paintings with no connection to the original inhabitants. But after being in that last space for only a few minutes and recognizing the old service door when I went to my car, I wondered what other spirits might want their stories heard at Hall Place. I wondered where the people formerly enslaved at 313 Green Street went with their freedom, and how they were treated there and later, and what ever became of that “part of the family.”