Once home to Mary Todd Lincoln’s half-sister, historic Lexington estate sells at auction

After it was put up for sale last year, Lexington’s Helm Place has a new owner — a local family that plans to eventually make the historic antebellum estate their home.

“We are extremely pleased with the outcome,” said Gwen Thompson, director of the Mary Todd Lincoln House and executive director of the Kentucky Mansions Preservation Foundation, which previously owned the Helm Place property.

The foundation had been searching for a new owner for the estate, which was once home to former First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln’s half-sister. After putting the home at 2650 Bowman Mill Road up for auction in October, the foundation found a buyer in late December. The sale closed the 21st of that month, Thompson told the Herald-Leader.

Thompson declined to name the buyers, stating they preferred to maintain their privacy, but a copy of the deed obtained by the Herald-Leader indicates the property has sold to Barker Holdings Investments LLC, under registered agent Stephen G. Barker.

Thompson did disclose the new owners have lived in Lexington for years, own a business headquartered here and currently live in an historic home in the city’s historic district.

Those factors were what ultimately led the foundation to accept the buyers’ bid of exactly $2,491,515.16. Data from the office of Fayette County Property Valuation Administrator David O’Neill puts the home’s fair cash value at $2,886,700.

“Our overwhelming impression is that Helm Place is in good hands for many years to come,” Thompson said in an interview, speaking for the preservation foundation.

Thompson explained that because the home has several overlapping preservation easements, many original elements, such as the murals lining the dining room’s wall, cannot be altered.

Because the nonprofit no longer owns the parcel, it will no longer have tax-exempt status.

Thompson previously told the Herald-Leader in October when Helm Place was put up for auction the foundation was seeking a buyer who could restore and preserve the historic property in the long term.

“We absolutely want to find someone who wants to become the next steward who intends to preserve the property,” Thompson told the Herald-Leader at the time.

A historic property in Lexington

Helm Place’s origins trace back to America’s infancy, when in 1779, on the land where it now stands, American pioneer and Lexington founder Levi Todd built a fort there. The fort was known as Todd’s Station.

After the American Revolution, Todd abandoned the fort. It was then entrusted to Col. Abraham Bowman by military grant as a reward for his service as an officer in the war. In 1781, the Bowman family first settled on the property and began developing it into a sprawling plantation and grist mill.

Unlike their counterparts further south, Kentucky plantations did not grow cotton. Other profitable crops like rice and sugarcane were rejected in favor of corn, wheat, oats, barley and hay. Those types of crops tend to tolerate cold and frost better.

To work the plantation, George Bowman, Abraham’s son, enslaved between 36 and 29 people between 1840 and 1850, Thompson previously told the Herald-Leader. That number of enslaved people is consistent with what would have been a large plantation for Kentucky at the time, where between 20 to 50 enslaved Black people worked the land on the state’s largest plantations of the era.

At the time, the property was called Cedar Hall, but when the Bowmans sold it in 1859, it changed hands several times before the Helm family bought it in 1912.

It was Emilie Todd Helm, the half-sister of Mary Todd Lincoln, who renamed the estate Helm Place in honor of her late husband, Ben’s, ancestral home in Elizabethtown.

In 1856, a younger Emilie Todd married her husband Ben Helm, a graduate of West Point Military Academy and the son of a Kentucky governor. Five years later, when the American Civil War was heating up, Helm turned down his brother-in-law’s offer to take an administrative job as paymaster in the Union Army. Instead, Helm joined the Confederate Army, and Emilie and their young children followed him south.

Emilie Todd Helm was in Georgia when word arrived to her that her husband had been killed in the Battle of Chickamauga. The year was 1863. After his death, Emilie Todd Helm tried to return to family in Kentucky, but she refused to take the oath of allegiance required to cross into Union-controlled territory. Border soldiers, not sure what to do with the president’s sister-in-law who was dumped in their laps, telegraphed President Abraham Lincoln.

“Send her to me,” was his reply.

Emilie Todd Helm became a guest in the White House. At that time in December of 1863, her presence caused quite a stir in Washington, with critics branding her the “Rebel in the White House.”

She ultimately made Helm Place her final home, where her three adult children Katherine, Elodie and Ben Jr. joined her. Her daughter Katherine, a successful artist in her time, painted the dining room murals that remain in the home to this day.

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