Harriet Everett

By Marcella Johnson
The Courier-Journal

One hundred years ago, Cherokee Park and Eastern Parkway were forest and farmland. Cows grazed between scattered estates along Bardstown Road.

City planners had just begun envisioning it as a beautiful place to build streets, homes and a park for a growing Louisville. Eventually the area developed into the Bonnycastle neighborhood, named after a family that lived on a grand estate there. It filled with homes and apartments, developed a bustling commercial strip along Bardstown Road and harbored open land in tranquil Cherokee Park.

The first settler, Isaac Everett, purchased about 150 acres from Angereau and Myrah Gray for about $25,000 in 1848 and set out making plans for a fine new mansion and farm named Walnut Grove outside of Louisville.

Everett was a successful dry-goods merchant and co-proprietor of the old Galt House. In 1849, his wife, Adele Barney Everett, died, leaving him with two small children, Harriet and Isaac Jr.

Slaves built the Walnut Grove mansion for them in the 1860s, and it still stands near Cowling and Maryland avenues. Historical accounts vary on when the family lived there, but Everett eventually gave the land to Harriet, who married John C. Bonnycastle. They began living on the estate in the late 1860s, according to Louisville's Historic Landmarks and Preservation Districts Commission.

The Bonnycastle estate covered much of what is now the Bonnycastle neighborhood, which is bounded by Eastern Parkway, Bardstown Road, Speed Avenue and Cherokee Park.

The Greek-revival style, 2 1/2-story, brick mansion featured porches, large rooms and marble fireplaces. Its long driveway marked by stone gates at Bardstown Road went along what is now Bonnycastle Avenue, to Cowling -- originally called Everett Avenue -- then into a circular driveway in front of the house. Their nine children had plenty of room to play.

A honeymoon cottage was built behind the mansion around 1900 for one son, Arthur C. Bonnycastle, and his bride Mary Eva Wieland, a German immigrant. Anne Helm, of Alta Avenue, their great-granddaughter, said the family recalls their romantic meeting. "He was engaged to someone else, saw her on a trolley and fell madly in love," said Helm.

The brick cottage was on a hill above a small spring that still pours into a small goldfish pond. The cottage had large beds of flowers and benches. The cottage, later sold, was torn down last year and a new home is under construction on the land.

John C. Bonnycastle died in 1884 before the neighborhood's development surged. As Louisville looked for land on which to grow, Harriet Bonnycastle donated part of her estate to the city for the development of a park that she and planners hoped would make the area attractive to developers.

The city hired noted landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted in 1891, and he made the Bonnycastle land part of Cherokee Park. Eastern Parkway was designed to connect Cherokee with Iroquois and Shawnee parks.

The expansion of trolley service south along Bardstown Road at the turn of the century made new homes in demand. Bonnycastle began selling parcels of land for development during the next 20 years. Helm said real estate brochures described the area as a place to find "lush, country living."

Harriet Bonnycastle maintained the mansion and a 14-acre, bell-shaped parcel of the land bounded by Cowling, Spring Drive and Speed Avenue until she died in 1906. The family sold the mansion to the Kentucky Home School and the remaining land was sold.

Kentucky Home School was a private college-preparatory institution that operated there until it moved in 1948. About 100 girls each year attended classes from kindergarten through 12th grade.

Adath Israel B'rith Shalom purchased the property in 1948 and greatly altered the look of the property, removing the mansion's porches and building a synagogue where the curving driveway to the mansion had been. The back of the new building came to within a few feet of the front of the mansion.

Highland Evangelical Church now uses both buildings.

Another landmark home was known at one time for its gardens and later as a haunted house, according to Diane Shelton, of Murray Avenue, who wrote a history of the neighborhood this year.

The property, next to the Bonnycastle estate, was owned by Dr. Henry Bullitt and later by Albro Parsons and his son Albro Jr. It was at what is now the southwest corner of Alta Avenue and Parsons Place. The three-story, Gothic Revival brick mansion was built in the late 1850s, and the estate's garden flourished with exotic trees, flowers and shrubs.

Parsons worked in the insurance business and his son was a doctor. They lived in the mansion until the mid-1920s, when they moved to Great Britain. The home was rented for several years and eventually boarded up. Children called it "the haunted house."

The structure was destroyed by a mysterious fire on Halloween night in 1935, according to a University of Louisville class report by Edward Brownstein in 1939.

The garden was developed into what is now Edgewood Place, a one-block court of houses that share front yards divided only by parallel sidewalks. In the 1920s several large brick apartment buildings were built in the neighborhood. The largest, the 11-story Commodore at 2140 Bonnycastle Ave., was designed in 1929 by Joseph and Joseph architects. Around the same time, the firm was designing the Willow Terrace-Dartmouth apartment buildings on Willow Avenue, the now-defunct Rialto and Majestic theaters, the original Atherton School on Morton Avenue and the Republic Office Building on Fifth Street.

Around the turn of the century, Bardstown Road was evolving as the lifeline of the neighborhood. Small businesses, including feed and hay stores, lined the road near Bonnycastle, which was the trolley turnaround until 1912, when the route was extended to Douglass Loop (and later to Taylorsville Road as the city grew).

A traffic light at Bardstown Road and Bonnycastle Avenue kept order as early as 1935, when a Piggly Wiggly grocery store was at the corner. A variety of stores, including a bakery, dry goods store and the Uptown Theatre in the Schuster Building near Eastern Parkway were nearby.

The Cherokee Sanitary Milk Co. that operated on Bardstown Road is well-remembered by longtime residents. Its delivery trucks were a common sight in the area. It also sold ice cream and candy. Scowden Kohnhorst, a resident of Bonnycastle Avenue since 1915, recalled that the shop was a popular place to go after church on Wednesday nights when "it cost 15 cents for a double dip and it was very, very good."

In 1939, Charles Herold wrote for a University of Louisville class report that, "The Bardstown Road shopping district has become so important that many think it will eventually replace the Fourth Street shopping district."

That section of Bardstown Road has remained a vital artery to the city, sporting restaurants and shops in the old buildings.

A fire station, Engine 20, that is still in use at 1735 Bardstown Road, was built in 1916. Kohnhorst recalled seeing the fire equipment pulled by horses "streaking down the road, and all the people would chase after it to see what was happening."

Emergency services had a lot to contend with one spring afternoon in 1974, when the peaceful community was struck by an event that changed the character of the area.

A tornado on April 4 did extensive damage to homes and to the large trees that lined Eastern Parkway, Cherokee Park and streets in the area. In the wake of its destruction, it did help unify members of the Bonnycastle Homestead Association, which had formed a few months earlier. The group sprang into action replanting trees and seeking zoning help from the city to deal with developers who began purchasing damaged homes to replace them with apartments. In recent years the association has remained active in zoning issues to protect the single-family character of the neighborhood, a part of the Highlands Historic District. It planted a flower garden on Spring Drive at Cherokee Park. It was also the first association to join the Louisville Friends of Olmsted Parks, a group to seeks to restore and preserve parks designed by Olmsted. Partial proceeds from September's Bonnycastle Homestead Association Festival on Spring Drive will go toward an improvement project in the park.

As Barbara Jeziorski, association president, leads the group, she has a constant reminder of the way things used to be. The back yard of her home on Spring Drive overlooks the Bonnycastle mansion and the land where the cottage sat.

"To drive in from Bardstown Road and to see that structure must have been impressive," she said. "We are fortunate to have a 200-foot front yard, but they had 2-1/2 blocks of front yard."⁴