Welcome to the Manor House of Glenview Springs. This unique historic home – with new wings – commands 1.77 acres overlooking the Stone Bridge, original springhouse, and Lime Kiln Lane. Preserved in the subdivision of the property are approximately twenty-three acres of open commons - of which seven acres are between Lime Kiln Lane and the house. The Manor House’s new address is 6005 Springhouse Farm Lane. Prior to 2008 the address was 3315 Lime Kiln Lane.
The landmark home, completed by John T. Bate in 1841, has faced this historic thoroughfare for 167 years. It sits on land purchased around 1808 by James Smalley Bate and his wife Lucy Moore Throckmorton Bate; it adjoins land James and Lucy bought between 1805 and 1817 that extended from the Ohio River to Brownsboro Road – a 1000 acre tract now known as Glenview. In 1774, two years before the American Revolution - a team of Virginians surveyed these large tracts of land throughout Jefferson County for veterans of the French and Indian War (1756-1763). James Smalley Bate and his brother John, who were adventurous enough to leave Virginia, purchased the land from the original owners and their heirs.
According to family lore, James Smalley Bate, his wife Lucy, and his mother Susanna Bond Bate traveled to western Kentucky in 1798. His father, Dr. James Bate, died in 1770 at the age of fifty, while traveling from Charles County, Maryland to Fredrick Town, Maryland. His death left Susanna, who never remarried, to raise their six young children by herself.
In 1805, James Smalley Bate bought 420 acres of the Glenview land and began building “Berry Hill” which was said to combine elements of the “old” Bate homes in Maryland and the first “Berry Hill” Susanna completed in Virginia after her husband’s death. The original Georgian-style brick home, with its elegant Flemish bond exterior, is said to have contained twelve rooms with twelve-foot ceilings, and was heated by eight fireplaces.
James Smalley and Lucy were the parents of seven children, born between 1801 to 1817: James Smalley Bate II, Catherine R. Bate Washington, Susannah L. Bond Bate Robertson, Lucy Ann Bate Gray, Robert Throckmorton Bate, John Throckmorton Bate, and Gerard Bond Bate, the baby of the family who was eight years younger than John T.
James Smalley Bate was a civic-minded entrepreneur. In 1822 he and William Croghan of nearby Locust Grove were founding members of Christ Church Cathedral. In addition to farming Berry Hill land, James Smalley owned a mill, factory, small distillery, and by 1809, twenty-eight slaves. By 1827, that number had grown to fifty-seven.
Lucy was named sole executor of her husband’s 1834 will. She apparently lived at “Berry Hill” with her bachelor son Gerard for the rest of her life. He inherited the farm outright when Lucy died in the fall of 1851, but the Civil War changed forever what had been the Bates’ slave-dependent lifestyle. In 1869, just a year before his death, Gerard sold “Berry Hill” to James C. McFerran. McFerran established a Standardbred horse breeding operation at “Berry Hill”, renaming it Glen View, from which the present city takes its name. His Glen View Stock Farm and Glenview Track are prominent on the 1879 Jefferson County map. According to local tradition, after the 1891 tornado destroyed the original roofline, McFerran rebuilt the house with a full third story. Architectural historians believe that McFerran also added a hipped roof, dormers, and an elaborate exterior roofline frieze with garlands and swags at that time.
John Throckmorton Bate, who was born in 1809, married Eleanor Ann Locke in 1834. They first lived at his father’s 2,700-acre Mount Merino farm in Union County, which John T. inherited when his father died. James Smalley also made provision in his will for John T. to trade the farm for five hundred acres on the Berry Hill estate after Lucy died – which he did.
By 1841 John T. and Eleanor had returned to Jefferson County and built a home on 315 well-watered acres across Lime Kiln Lane from Berry Hill. This frame house, which sat on the crest of the hill, was designed with a wide entrance hallway flanked by a spacious, tall ceilinged room on each side. Of note was the wide back hallway where a beautifully carved, curving staircase led to the second floor. The springhouse, built in the hill near Lime Kiln Lane, is the only outbuilding still standing; but there would have been a detached kitchen, well, and smokehouse on the grounds as well as housing for the enslaved.
John T. and Eleanor had two sons. Octavius died as a result of an accident while a student at Centre College. Clarence married Octavia Zantzinger. Sometime after his mother’s death in 1851, John Throckmorton moved his family across Lime Kiln Lane to their new home, “Woodside,” which was located about a mile from “Berry Hill.” Eleanor died before 1860, and John T. never remarried. He retained ownership to the Lime Kiln Lane property until 1881 when he sold it to brothers John W. and Marcellus Shallcross, whose father was a partner in the firm of McFarren, Shallcross & Co. John T. spent the rest of his life at “Woodside” with Clarence and Octavia and their four children. On January 20, 1898, several days before he died, John T. wrote a short will leaving everything to Clarence. Then Clarence, who stated that he was in good health at the time, wrote his will on February 2, 1898, leaving everything he had inherited from his father to his four children. He died three months later. In 1905, Clarence’s second oldest son, another John Throckmorton Bate, sold “Woodside” to Peter Lee Atherton, who enlarged the home and added a formal garden.
The Shallcross family sold John T. Bate’s Lime Kiln Lane house and 315 acres to James S. Ray in 1890. The property went through half a dozen owners in 118 years being purchased by Steven T. Cox Builders in 2007. Mr. Cox is developing Glenview Springs, a sixty-three lot subdivision with over twenty-three acres preserved as a conservation easement on the property. Robert H. Rice of the RHR Development Group then purchased the original J. T. Bate house and surroundings in January, 2008. Mr. Rice removed all the later additions and the aluminum siding before lifting the original 1841 structure off its low-ceilinged stone and brick cellar to pour a new foundation. He has enlarged the house adding a modern kitchen, two-story great room with a magnificent stone fireplace, upstairs library, and fully functional third floor. These improvements and a three-car garage with a second-floor apartment truly make the John T. Bate house a twenty-first century Manor House.
During your tour of the Bellarmine University Women’s Council 2008 Designers’ Show House, you can glimpse the vision of the Bate family, who turned wilderness land into agricultural and industrial enterprises and superintended the construction of homes that still stand today.
We are indebted to historian Lynn S. Renau, preservation consultant Mary Jean Kinsman, Jefferson County Archival Coordinator David Morgan, Staff Member of the Jefferson County Clerk’s office Stevon Morris, Security Officer Cave Hill Cemetery Robert Roberts, Mark Shallcross, Mrs. Timothy Shallcross, and Neal O. Hammon.
Published Sources:
So Close from Home, The Legacy of Brownsboro Road by Lynn S. Renau, Herr House Press, 2007
Louisville’s First Families – A series of Genealogical Sketches by Kathleen Jennings, The Standard Printing Co., 1920
Jefferson County Survey of Historic Sites in Kentucky by Elizabeth F. Jones and Mary Jean Kinsman
Old Cemeteries of Jefferson County published in 1920, Glenview Bate family cemetery research by Alice E. Trabue
