Dr. Amanda Higgins, Ph.D., executive director of LexHistory, is working to usher the organization formally known as the Lexington History Museum into a new era. The organization is now based in the Thomas Hunt Morgan House and will soon expand for an even bigger physical footprint. Photo by Emily Giancarlo
A local institution that’s long been dedicated to preserving the history of Lexington started a new chapter in recent years.
This month, as the city celebrates “History Month” in its yearlong 250th anniversary celebration, the Lexington History Museum is making strides to reinvent itself, and provide opportunities for locals and visitors to learn more about the city’s storied past.
The Lexington History Museum was founded in 1998 by Mayor Pam Miller, and opened its doors at its original location in Lexington’s old Fayette County Courthouse building in 2002. For the next decade, that’s where the collection remained, until asbestos and mold — “things that are bad for both objects and humans,” according to Amanda Higgins, executive director for Lexington History Museum since 2022 — were discovered in the building in 2012.
“Rightfully, [the museum was] asked to vacate for our own safety,” added Higgins. Left with nowhere to go, the organization remained without a permanent home for the next decade — but that didn’t stop the dedicated board of directors from ensuring that the museum was adding to Lexington’s cultural and educational offerings.
“The board did a lot of work [during that time], making sure we were still out there hosting events, making sure books were published, doing work with film crews, and hosting pop-up exhibits in locations around town,” Higgins explained. “But a museum is a place — you need somewhere to go and explore a collection.”
A partnership with the Blue Grass Trust for Historic Preservation finally allowed LexHistory (as the organization is now informally known), to make that new home in the Thomas Hunt Morgan House, located in downtown Lexington on North Broadway. The organization opened its doors to the public in this new location in August 2023 with a reimagined permanent exhibit. In November 2024, Blue Grass Trust relocated its offices to Hopemont, the former home of John Hunt Morgan, allowing LexHistory to take over the entire building. For the first time in many years the entire collection is located in the same building, and LexHistory can expand its exhibition space.
With a fresh start in a new home, the museum has updated interpretations of its collection.
“When you come to the museum, you should see a piece of yourself,” explained Higgins, a University of Kentucky graduate and former staff member of the Kentucky Historical Society. “Whether you've been in Lexington for eight generations or eight seconds, you will learn something new.”
Not only does the museum’s permanent exhibit include information about the bourbon and horse industries, but it also provides information on lesser-known aspects of the city, from the indigenous people who resided on the land as far back as 9000 B.C.E. and the history of the local hemp industry, to the history of tourism and hotels in Lexington and the ways in which IBM influenced the development of the city.
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LexHistory's permanent exhibit traces various aspects of the city's history in a way that's designed to give context to the city's past and present. Photos by Emily Giancarlo
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LexHistory's permanent exhibit traces various aspects of the city's history in a way that's designed to give context to the city's past and present. Photos by Emily Giancarlo
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LexHistory's permanent exhibit traces various aspects of the city's history in a way that's designed to give context to the city's past and present. Photos by Emily Giancarlo
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LexHistory's permanent exhibit traces various aspects of the city's history in a way that's designed to give context to the city's past and present. Photos by Emily Giancarlo
“Our goal is not to tell other people's stories. When you come to the museum you're not going to learn about Henry Clay or Mary Todd Lincoln. They have their own museums and can tell those stories better than we could,” Higgins said. “Instead, we contextualize it. Henry Clay and others made money from hemp, so we want to talk more about the product itself, the enslaved people who were doing the manual labor, and let you touch hemp fibers to see what processed hemp feels like.”
And while the final chronological step in the permanent exhibit’s interpretation currently stops with IBM becoming Lexmark in the late 20th Century, 21st Century Lexington is making its way into the collection.
“We're very lucky to have a display of items from ‘Take Back Cheapside,’ including the shirts that organizers Russell Allen and DeBraun Thomas were wearing the day that the City Council voted to move the Confederate statues from the lawn next to Tandy Park,” Higgins said. “Those are important pieces of Lexington’s modern history, We are really proud to be able to share a piece of that.
“Our goal is that every Lexingtonian has a chance to see a piece of their history, and that's very aspirational,” she said. "We're not there yet. There are stories that we are not yet able to tell because we don't have the objects in our collection, or we don't have the necessary relationships established to tell certain stories carefully, but we're continuously working towards it.”
In addition to its permanent exhibit, LexHistory is hosting "Among Women: 130 Years of the Women's Club of Central Kentucky," which weaves together the history of the Woman’s Club and Lexington’s social and cultural changes over more than a century. Photo by Emily Giancarlo
Higgins and the LexHistory team has already started planning what will happen with the additional space the museum has recently acquired.
“One room will continue to be a community room that will be available for small community meetings and things like LexArts Hop, pop-up exhibits, and those sorts of things,” she said. “And the parlor will tell the Hunt Morgan family story, focusing on Thomas Hunt Morgan who grew up here.”
Thomas Hunt Morgan won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1933. Through his study of fruit flies, he demonstrated that genes are carried on chromosomes and are the basis of heredity, establishing the foundation for the modern science of genetics. The house was built in 1869 by Thomas’s parents Charlton Hunt Morgan and Nellie Howard Morgan, and the exhibit will explore the family connections to Nellie’s grandfather, Francis Scott Key, attorney and author of “The Star Spangled-Banner,” among others.
There are certainly aspects of the family’s history that are contentious and problematic — Carlton Hunt Morgan’s mother, Henrietta Hunt Morgan, was unapologetically pro-Confederacy and pro-slavery; Thomas himself was a member of the Eugenics Society for a period, though he eventually left that organization because he couldn't prove their beliefs through his work. But its important to the history purveyors at LexHistory to present the true story of the people who once resided in their space.
“If we deny that this house is a seat of uncomfortableness, we aren’t doing anything to learn from that history,” said Higgins.
“We know that this house doesn’t feel like a safe place to everyone, but we want to ameliorate that by telling stories that would never have been spoken aloud in these spaces when they were occupied by their original owners,” she added.
LexHistory looks forward to telling more stories about Lexington’s past, shining a light on unknown stories of the formation and evolution of the city, and creating a space where all Lexingtonians can find a part of their own history on display and share their stories of life in Lexington.
Upcoming Events at the LexHistory Museum
210 N. Broadway • lexhistory.org
- Feb. 8: Revolutionary Girl Dreaming: A Creative Writing Workshop for Young Women Grades 5-12. 9 a.m.-3:45 p.m. Registration required at whywrite.org.
- Feb. 8: Dr. Simonetta Cochis performs as Madame Mentelle. (2 p.m.)
- Feb. 17: Lexington History Hop (10 a.m.-4 p.m.) On Presidents’ Day, three museums admission to The Lexington History Museum, Ashland: The Henry Clay Estate, and the Mary Todd Lincoln House will be available to all Presidents’ Day.