Was Tates Creek road ever a turnpike
Question: A well-used street in Lexington is Tates Creek Road also once known as Tates Creek Pike. What exactly is a pike and is there a creek that runs near the road?
Answer: The street sign now says “Tates Creek Road” but I don¹t know when the name was changed from Takes Creek Pike. I found a reference in the December 12, 1890 Leader calling the road Tates Creek Turnpike. A turnpike normally is an expressway or highway on which tolls are collected but I don¹t know if Takes Creek was ever a true toll road. I have a call out to Randy Shipp, a historic preservation specialist, for the answer.
I found out the creek answer from Phillip Stiefel, a GIS analyst, with the GIs section of the city’s computer department. He says that more than one creek flows along Tates Creek Road. One is where Redding and Lansdowne roads meet and is called the Wilson Downing Tributary. It flows south under Wilson Downing Road and ties into a bigger creek behind the Tates Creek Kroger called West Hickman Creek. Another small creek, which is more like a ditch, runs behind Malone’s Restaurant and has no name. On the mapping site of the LFUCG web page you can actually follow the flow of creeks and streams through the city.
Linda Niemi
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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.
As to the creek, if you keep going across the ferry and drive to Richmond. The road on the other side of the river is also called Tates Creek and the creek running adjacent to it (almost all the way to Richmond), I presume, is Tates Creek.