Lexington, KY - Historians are always on guard to keep their personal biases and cultural familiarities out of any attempt to interpret lives and events of a former era.
By example, we recoil in horror to the thought that our ancestors owned other human beings as slaves. And, yes, it is "our" ancestors, because slavery was just as prevalent in the North as it was in the South in the time of the American Revolution. But, to the people living in those times, it was an accepted practice; one that over time became unacceptable.
Accepting the role of prostitution in an earlier society poses the same dilemma. One such time in Lexington's history was the Victorian Era in the closing decades of the 19th century. Although we think of that time as one of very prim and proper social mores, prostitution was, in fact, an accepted part of community life. So accepted that city directories of the period (the Lexington History Museum has one such on display from 1885-1886), marked each of the practicing madams' names and addresses with "M," just as it would delineate physicians and lawyers. Later directors have bold-faced listings for madams alongside other "legitimate" businesses.
Lexington society was clearly more tolerant of prostitution than it is today. The question is, why? And what forces came to bear that changed that tolerance?
One answer to the former is that before birth control as we know it, a wife, having borne a half dozen or more children, would have removed to separate bed chambers, and tolerated her husband's visiting a bawdy house to free herself from the rigors of childbirth. The generation that last experienced that social convenience has now left us, and our firsthand knowledge of the practice is no longer just a memory.
What changed? In a word, war. During the Spanish-American War, army training camps in and around Lexington experienced problems with soldiers frequenting "The Hill," Lexington's red light district centered at today's North Eastern Avenue and Wilson Street. As a result, when the army mobilized in 1917 for "The Great War," it shut down the city's brothels. Of course, they reopened after the war, and it took the reform movement of the 1950s to remove open prostitution from Lexington.
Should Belle Brezing, Lexington's most famous madam (the person on whom Belle Watling, from "Gone with the Wind," is based, and who TIME magazine said "ran the most orderly of disorderly houses"), return to Lexington today, would she recognize the place with its booming suburbs and drastically altered downtown?
Remarkably, Belle would most likely recognize most of the sites relevant to her life, which existed in an orbit from one end of Main Street to the other.
Belle was born Mary Belle Cox on June 16, 1860, the younger of two illegitimate daughters of Sarah Ann Cox. The following year, Sarah married George Brezing, a local saloon owner, and the girls took his last name with its confusing spelling.
Belle's childhood (after a fashion) was spent in the neighborhood on West Main and Jefferson streets - oddly, within sight of a house that later would forever define her. As a child and young woman, Belle suffered many of life's cruelest events, including assignation, murder, a child out of wedlock and destitution.
At age 19, unable to buy food or firewood for her 3-year-old daughter, Daisy May, Belle made her fateful Christmas Eve 1879 decision to go to work at the bawdy house owned by Jennie Hill. That is a house Belle would definitely recognize today: The Mary Todd Lincoln House near the Civic Center on West Main.
Within just two years, Belle had succeeded in her chosen profession to strike out on her own as madam in a strip of leased row houses located at 314-318 N. Upper St. - today's Women's Field House at Transylvania University. Just a year later, in 1882, Belle was arrested and charged with "keeping a bawdy house."
In January 1883, Belle was pardoned by Gov. Luke Blackburn - perhaps testimony to her rising social and business status. In June of that year, she purchased her first house just more than a block south of the row houses on North Upper. Today, that site is where Jonathan's at Gratz Park and the Gratz Park Inn are located.
In 1889, pressure mounted to close the red light district along North Upper. With the backing of a Philadelphia newspaper and railroad owner, Belle purchased the famous "House on the Hill" on the south corner of North Eastern Avenue and Wilson Street, near Midland Avenue.
From there, she would be driven in her horse-drawn carriage to do her banking at the old Lexington City National Bank at the corner of West Main and Cheapside. Along the way, she would have passed the north side block on Main between Limestone and Upper that is undergoing a commendable renaissance of facades dating to her era.
As an astute businesswoman (she lived off her investments from 1917, when she turned off her light, until her death on Aug. 22, 1940), Belle attempted to franchise into the African American community along Deweese Street. Her efforts were thwarted, but the shotgun house she purchased stood until 2005, when it was razed to make way for an expansion of St. James Place.
Belle's Lexington story ends at Calvary Cemetery on West Main where she is buried alongside her still-born second daughter.
(EDITOR'S NOTE: The Lexington History Museum's annual fund raising event, "Belle's Birthday Ball," takes place 5 - 8 p.m. June 18 in Cheapside Park. For information, visit www.LexingtonHistoryMuseum.org or call 859-254-0530.)