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Where is the past? Does it sit like tree rings inside every square inch, working its poky seedlike magic? Has it been sloughed off like dead dust to sit in restless piles, ever-buried, nevermore? Can you get in it, sit in its chairs, walk around and knock on its doors, stroll in its streets?
Strangely, yes and no: the past is in us, around us, and under us. In another sense, of course, all our yesterdays are irrevocably gone.
But we are a collecting species, marked by a penchant for longing, and with UK Libraries’ archival collections – especially its over two million historical photographs – our gathered store of memories are well-organized, precisely labeled, and available, though partially mute, to all queries.
We tangled with the labyrinthine nature of history with a stroll down one of Lexington’s main thoroughfares, Limestone Street, sinking in as we walked along to mingle with its ghosts.
Originally known as Mulberry Street, Limestone was one of Lexington’s two primary north-south streets (along with Broadway, then known as Main Cross Street) when Lexington was platted in the 1780s. It was the main road leading from Lexington to the Ohio River at Maysville – and so a trail for much horse-drawn trucking – and associated from the start with early leaders of the city, as its Northside 19th century historic homes attest.
As we dove into the historical record, comparing blocks and addresses of the past with how they appear today, again we encountered that strange yes and no.
Many buildings have lasted decades – some are now approaching two centuries – and though their uses or their tenants have changed, their facades appear hardly different from when they were first built.
A more striking sensation is just how many of the buildings along Limestone no longer exist. There’s the Twin Kiss Ice Cream shop that’s now a McDonald’s, or the immense Johnson School with its imposing turret at Limestone and Fourth St., now a block of townhomes. Or the former slave house, noted only as existing “next to Wendover Stables.”
Zoom out to take in the whole city, and it’s remarkable how much has been effaced from the landscape: racetracks, schools, hotels, train stations, ropewalks, factories, roller rinks, monumental homes, the aforementioned and many other stables – all have vanished. Buildings whose heft would surely seem to mark them for permanence have been replaced by arenas, towers, hospitals, and apartment complexes, which in their turn seem fated to be razed and replaced, and so on for as long as humans habitate along Town Branch.
Exploring the photographic collections, one has the bewildering sensation of peering into countless different Lexingtons all stacked up in layers: and the uncanny feeling that a flimsy photographic negative, scanned into a string of numbers, living on a thin silicon wafer in an air-chilled server, can outlast stone.
From day to day we occupy a different city that somehow retains its identity. It is not unlike the paradox of Theseus’ ship: how is a oneness maintained through countless mutations? Is it still the same Lexington when its wooden beams and bricks are replaced with glass and steel?
Well, Emerson says, the true ship is the ship-builder, and the same must hold for a city: for our city. It is Lexingtonians – old ones, new ones, those who plant lives here and those just passing through – who make Lexington. And though we ourselves are also always changing, we all equally lay claim to and create this place.
For the record of our city’s permutations is all of our possession. This is a core tenet of the mission of UK Libraries: to collect, preserve, and provide access to materials that document our common history. Sink in yourself at exploreuk.uky.edu, or start with some of our most prominent and unique photographs collections below.
