Remains of Lexington’s first castle
Question: There’s a building at 1099 S. Broadway called The Gate House. I would like to know it’s history.
Tom Dixon
Answer: I found the answer in Clay Lancaster’s book “Vestiges of the Venerable City: A Chronicle Of Lexington, Ky. “Where South Broadway turns into the Harrodsburg Road stands the much altered gatehouse (No. 1099) of Ingleside, the former Henry Boone Ingels estate of three hundred acres, once presided over by one of the most charming little castles ever built in America”.
And J. Winston Coleman in his book The Squire’s Sketches of Lexington calls Ingleside a two-story Gothic Revival house with four towers. The 15-room mansion was built in 1852 and demolished in 1964 to make way for a trailer park.
The gatehouse originally was 1 1/2 stories with a center arch for a carriageway. It has since been converted to several uses including apartments, shops and businesses.
The gatehouse, then, is all that’s left of Lexington’s former “Bluegrass castle”.
Linda Niemi
Filed under: Lexington History
My mother was a public school librarian. I earned a bachelor’s degree in music and a master’s degree in library and information science from the University of Kentucky. The Herald-Leader hired me as a news assistant 25 years ago; soon after, I moved to the news research department, where I’ve been ever since. We used to clip newspapers. Now, almost all of our research is online. We've come a long way.