Without due regard to these essential facts the social system of the State must ever remain poorly understood. Hitherto they have been but little considered. To the popular imagination the most familiar type of the early Kentuckian is that of the fighter, the hunter, the rude, heroic pioneer and his no less heroic wife: people who left all things behind them and set their faces westward, prepared to be new creatures if such they could become. But on the dim historic background are the stiff figures of another type, people who were equally bent on being old-fashioned creatures if such they could remain. Thus, during the final years of the last century and the first quarter of the present one, Kentucky life was richly overlaid with ancestral models. Closely studied, the elements of population by the close of this period somewhat resembled a landed gentry, a robust yeomanry, a white tenantry, and a black peasantry. It was only by degrees--by the dying out of the fine old types of men and women, by longer absence from the old environment and closer contact with the new--that society lost its inherited and acquired its native characteristics, or became less Virginian and more Kentuckian. Gradually, also, the white tenantry waned and the black peasantry waxed. The aristocratic spirit, in becoming more Kentuckian, unbent somewhat its pride, and the democratic, in becoming more Kentuckian, took on a pride of its own; so that when social life culminated with the first half-century, there had been produced over the Blue-grass Region, by the intermingling of the two, that widely diffused and peculiar type which may be described as an aristocratic democracy, or a democratic aristocracy, according to one's choosing of a phrase. The beginnings of Kentucky life represented not simply a slow development from the rudest pioneer conditions, but also a direct and immediate implantation of the best of long-established social forms. And in nowise did the latter embody itself more persuasively and lastingly than in the building of costly homes.
With the opening of the present century, that taste had gone on developing. A specimen of early architecture in the style of the old English mansion is to be found in "Locust Grove," a massive and enduring structure--not in the Blue-grass Region, it is true, but several miles from Louisville--built in 1800 for Colonel Croghan, brother-in-law of Gen. George Rogers Clark; and still another remains in "Spring Hill," in Woodford County, the home of Nathaniel Hart, who had been a boy in the fort at Boonesborough. Until recently a further representative, though remodelled in later times, survived in the Thompson place at "Shawnee Springs," in Mercer County.