A Hotel That Asked Us To Bring It Back
We are Eric and Kristen, the husband-and-wife team behind The Woodford Hotel. When we first walked through this building, we already had a feeling for old Kentucky buildings — what they remember, what they ask of an operator, and what they refuse to give until they’re treated right. This one had been waiting a long time.
Before this building, Eric’s work was environmental engineering. He spent years as a professional environmental engineer traveling Kentucky’s small towns to work on power plants — serving as engineer of record on the retirement of the KU Tyrone power plant, just across the Kentucky River from us, and on many projects at the E.W. Brown station in Harrodsburg. Power plants are almost always in the middle of nowhere, which means weeks at a stretch staying in small Kentucky towns. The plant was usually the county’s largest economic anchor. What stuck with Eric was this: the towns themselves were the real draw. The bourbon, the horses, the limestone, the storefronts on Main Streets that had been quietly waiting since the Gilded Age. Most travelers passed through them on the way to chain hotels off the interstate. The towns where the environmental work actually happened were closer to the real Kentucky than any branded experience could deliver. That observation — earned in the field over years of industrial-environmental work — is what eventually became The Woodford Hotel.
He had inverse evidence for the same observation. One of his earliest professional projects was design work on Babcock Ranch — the master-planned community in Florida that tried, from a blank field, to manufacture the kind of walkable downtown atmosphere these Kentucky towns already had organically. He watched developers everywhere trying to build, from scratch, what Bardstown, Danville (home of Centre College), Frankfort, and Bloomfield — which Linda Bruckheimer restored building by building over years until the entire downtown district was on the National Register — had simply preserved. The model was already here. These towns didn’t need to be invented. They needed the right kind of careful work to let travelers see them for what they are. Versailles is next.
There’s older family history in this work too. Eric’s great-grandfather was a German cooper — a barrel maker, the trade that makes bourbon possible. He worked along Glenns Creek — the same Woodford County stream where Dr. James Crow worked and died, the corridor that is today the spine of Brown-Forman’s Woodford Reserve operation. He could carve anything out of wood. When Prohibition closed the cooperages in 1920, the family was forced to Louisville, where they lived in an alley and loaded luggage by hand for pay. The same era that hollowed out Hotel Woodford’s golden age hollowed out his family’s trade.
A generation later they came back. The wood, water, and metal of the cooper’s trade are the same materials Eric works with as an engineer, and the love of working problems out with your hands runs in the family. We feel that line when we walk through this building.
It had been a hotel before. It had been a great one. Then it had been quiet for over a hundred years. Eric had been working through the archive on this building for years. When the moment came — in the middle of a pandemic, with three young kids underfoot and the most unstructured time most of us will ever have — family pulled the money together to make it happen.
The hospitality world was at its lowest ebb the day the deal closed. We did it anyway, because we believed in this building and in what the moment after would ask for. We were right about that. The guests who come through these rooms now are people who pay attention — to history, to craft, to the difference between a hotel and a place that means something.
Versailles is where Kristen and I have built our life together. This building is our next chapter of life together — and our place in a story this town has been telling since 1800. That’s the work. That’s the story we want to tell you.
Two and a Quarter Centuries of Hospitality on This Block
The corner of Main Street that holds The Woodford Hotel has carried travelers in some form since 1800, when Henry Clay’s step-aunt opened Watkins Inn — the first tavern in Versailles. The town was founded in 1792 by General Marquis Calmes, a Paris-educated Revolutionary War officer, comrade of George Washington, and lifelong friend of the Marquis de Lafayette. Calmes named the town for the French palace in honor of that friendship. When Lafayette returned to America in 1825 and toured the new republic, he stopped here. Not by coincidence — he was visiting an old comrade’s town.
By the mid-1800s, the Old Versailles House stood on the very site where our front door is today. We know this in part because of an 1869 advertisement in The Kentucky Gazette (Lexington, November 17, 1869): “Versailles House — Campbell & Stitt, Versailles, Kentucky. We have refitted the Versailles House in the neatest manner and will entertain boarders and travelers on reasonable terms.” The same W.J. Stitt running the Versailles House in 1869 would go on, twelve years later, to tear it down and build the brick three-story hotel you stand in today. The lineage of operator continues through one man.
For 225 years, this block has been where Bluegrass Kentucky met the world. Most of that history was forgotten. Some of it was deliberately quiet. We took it on as our job to honor it — accurately, completely, without invention.
The Original Era — Hotel Woodford, 1881–1913
Versailles, Feb. 14, 1896
In July 1881, the building you stand in today opened as Hotel Woodford, with W.J. Stitt as the founding proprietor. The opening advertisement read: “NEW HOTEL! Just Open and Ready for Business. Built upon the site of the Old Versailles House, Main Street, Versailles, Kentucky. A new building of twenty-eight rooms, handsomely furnished with new goods of modern style. Office, Reception Room, Reading Room on first floor. Bar Room in connection.”
The Woodford Hotel Company — a Kentucky corporation chartered by an Act of the General Assembly with express statutory power to construct a hotel in Versailles — purchased Lot No. 22 from the Stitt family on March 8, 1880 for $3,000. The architect was Phelix Lundin of Lexington, rendered “P. J. Lunden” in the 1975 National Register nomination, working in the Italianate style. The cornice, hoodmolds, and long, narrow windows are the period character-defining features that survive intact today. Hotel Woodford sits within Lundin’s documented apex period, alongside what is now Lexington City Hall (Jackson Hall, 1879) and the Maria Dudley House on Gratz Park (1879). It is the only known Lundin commission in Versailles, and the National Register calls it “the first building erected in Versailles expressly for a hotel.”
The Hotel Woodford’s immediate south-side Main Street neighbor in 1880 was Johnson Miller — a Woodford County distiller whose distillery, established about 1834 some four miles west of Versailles, was still producing under his name on the 1891 Sanborn map. The Stitts had recently sold him a portion of Lot No. 22 directly south of the hotel parcel; the year before, he had built the McCauley Building immediately on Block A, Main Street, on the site of the old Shelton Tavern.
The original operation ran through four management eras over its three decades: Stitt → Frazier & McDaniel → Rodenbaugh → O’Neal. The building was known variously by proprietor names — Dean House, Oneal House — markers of those eras.
By the mid-1890s, under Frazier & McDaniel (with Dave McDaniel as resident manager), the hotel was running at full Gilded Age luxury standard. A display advertisement in the February 14, 1896 Versailles paper described the property: “Electric Bells, Barber Shop, Billiard Room, Sample Rooms, Reading Room, Gas over entire building; all modern improvements — making it the best appointed country hotel in Kentucky.” The ad named the property the Commercial Men’s Headquarters — the address Kentucky’s traveling business class kept on file. The same page carried an engraved illustration of the three-story brick façade we still occupy.
The hotel sat at the center of a town that already carried its founder’s Paris education, Lafayette’s friendship, and a quarter-century of formal hospitality before its doors first opened.
Drummers and Whisky
The “sample rooms” the ads boasted of were the working floor of the nineteenth-century American economy. Drummers — the period name for traveling salesmen who fanned out from Kentucky’s railroad junctions across the country — moved through Hotel Woodford constantly. Dry-goods men, hardware men, tobacco men. And the whisky drummers most of all: Frankfort and Louisville distillers sent their men out to call on small-town merchants with sample cases of bourbon, line cards, and a credit book. The bar room downstairs and the sample rooms upstairs were two halves of the same trade. The drummer’s life ran on whisky, on long days and longer evenings, on a network of country hotels exactly like this one. Hotel Woodford was, in its prime, one of the busiest stops on that map.
1895 — The Lane and Rodenbaugh Case
We could leave this part out of the story, but we won’t. Real buildings have real histories, and the dignity of the property comes from telling it straight.
The Rodenbaugh family had taken over Hotel Woodford only five months earlier — in March 1895. Col. H.C. Rodenbaugh was a former Union cavalry officer (First Lieutenant, 8th Kentucky), a postmaster of Nicholasville under President Grant, a prominent thoroughbred turfman, and previously the proprietor of the Hotel Nicholas. His son James Rodenbaugh had been in Versailles for two years working as a salesman in the patent-fence trade — a drummer himself, in another line.
On Sunday, August 4, 1895, William Newton Lane — a Montgomery County man of about 28, a political partisan of Col. W.C.P. Breckinridge — arrived in Versailles still drunk from the previous night in Lexington. He took a room at Hotel Woodford about noon, slept until four o’clock, and came downstairs to settle his board bill. He found James Rodenbaugh in the hallway. Lane began abusing him — James walked with a crippling injury from years before — and words went to blows. Both men drew pistols. Lane fired first; Rodenbaugh fell, the first shot severing the jugular. Col. Rodenbaugh opened the door at the sound and Lane turned on him, firing twice — the second bullet lodging in the spine. Two dead in the hallway.
The Woodford Sun began covering what it called “the Hotel Woodford killings” on August 9, 1895. The story carried to Lexington, Louisville, and the regional national press, illustrated with engraved portraits of all three men under the headline “THE KENTUCKY WAY — Another Deadly Duel in the Blue Grass State.” Col. Breckinridge would lead Lane’s defense. The Louisville Courier-Journal of February 27, 1896 carried the first trial — a hung jury. The second trial, in March 1897, returned an acquittal on grounds of self-defense.
The detail matters: the trade that built the hotel was also what ended it. James Rodenbaugh was a drummer — the kind of guest the building had been built to host — and he died in its hallway over a board bill. After the case, the commercial-travel community read the news in the papers across Kentucky and beyond, and the hotel never fully recovered the trade it had been the headquarters of.
A Century in Between
Jim Curtis, NPS NRHP
cornice & Manley Cab Co.
The hotel did not close in 1913. It continued to operate, more quietly each year, as “The New Woodford Hotel” — that signage still legible on the brick cornice in photographs taken into the 1960s. By the post-WWII decades, the building had become a kind of patchwork of Versailles life: in the 1960s the storefront housed Manley Cab Company’s 24-hour taxi service; by 1974, the ground floor had become the Woodford County Senior Citizens Center — the gathering place for the town’s elders, occupying the same brick walls where drummers had once unpacked their sample cases.
That same year — 1974 — the building was photographed by Jim Curtis for the documentation submitted to the National Park Service. On September 2, 1975, the Downtown Versailles Historic District was entered into the National Register of Historic Places, with our building listed as a contributing structure (Block A, east side of North Main Street).
Several attempts to return the building to a hotel began and stalled over the decades. The block continued to anchor downtown Versailles, but the standard the original Hotel Woodford had set was not met.
The building waited — in plain sight, on Main Street, on the National Register, hosting Versailles in different forms until its original purpose came back.
The Bourbon Cornerstone — Dr. James C. Crow
Three blocks south of our front door, in Versailles Cemetery (Section B2, Lot #37), rests Dr. James C. Crow — a Scottish chemist trained at the University of Edinburgh who emigrated to Kentucky in the 1820s. Working at Oscar Pepper’s distillery — the property that is today Brown-Forman’s Woodford Reserve — Crow scientifically standardized the sour mash process that defines modern bourbon. He died on April 20, 1856. “Old Crow” bourbon carries his name.
The location of Crow’s grave was not common knowledge in the bourbon world until recent years. I (Eric) spent years working through the archive on this one. The location is now published in Fred Minnick’s Bottom Shelf, page 298, where I’m cited by name as the source who guided Fred to the marker. We mention this only because it matters for what we can offer guests — when we walk you to Crow’s grave (we will, if you ask), you’re walking with the person who put the marker on the modern bourbon canon.
The man who brought Scottish distillation methodology to American grain rests within walking distance of the room you sleep in. That is the geography of where you’ll be staying.
The Limestone Beneath the Bluegrass
There are three great limestone shelves on Earth famous for the water they hold and the spirits made from it: Scotland’s Speyside, Kentucky’s Inner Bluegrass, and Texas’s Edwards Aquifer. Scotland chose its terroir centuries ago and built a global luxury category on it. Kentucky’s path was the same elemental water — limestone-filtered, iron-free, calcium-rich — but the cultural product became bourbon rather than whisky, and the thoroughbred horse rather than the stag hunt. Same ground. Different chapter.
The Calmes Pyramid — the limestone tomb of Versailles’ founder, three miles east of us, built to his own design from quarried Kentucky stone — is the literal articulation of this. The man who named the town after Lafayette’s palace chose to lie permanently in the limestone shelf that defines it.
When we say The Woodford Hotel rests on the second great limestone shelf, we mean it precisely. And when our European guests tell us this is the part of America they didn’t know existed — Kentucky as America’s Scotland, not America’s Napa — we know they’ve seen what we’re building toward.
What We Built
When we took this on, we knew the building had stories older and larger than us. Our job was to give it back what it had been built to do — host travelers in the manner the original era achieved — and to layer in what the moment now asks for: real quality, real hospitality, real connection to the place and the people around us.
Eight suites under one roof, each named for a Kentucky bourbon — Wild Turkey, Blanton’s, Old Crow, Pappy Van Winkle, Four Roses, Woodford Reserve, E.H. Taylor, Buffalo Trace. The full hotel is available as a single buyout for groups, weddings, and bourbon-club bookings. Kristen and I are personally involved in the operation. Guests reach us directly. The room you stay in is one we’d want to stay in ourselves.
We made the call that this property should be the kind of place where the historical depth of this town actually shows up in the experience — not as wall art, but as why we do what we do. The longer you stay, the more of it you see.
Come Stay With Us
We’d be honored to host you. Whether you’re here for the Bourbon Trail, the horse country, a wedding under one roof, or just the kind of weekend that asks you to slow down and pay attention to a beautiful old building — we built this for that.
We’re Eric and Kristen. The door is open.
A Note on Sources
The historical record above is drawn from primary-source materials: the 1869 Kentucky Gazette (Lexington); the 1881 Hotel Woodford opening advertisement; the February 14, 1896 Versailles paper; the August 9, 1895 Woodford Sun coverage of the Lane case; the regionally-syndicated 1895 article “The Kentucky Way.” Period photography by Jim Curtis (1974, negatives at Woodford Sun) submitted to the National Register of Historic Places, Downtown Versailles Historic District (entered September 2, 1975). Original research by Eric Carrico, with thanks to the Woodford County Public Library History Room and the Woodford County Historical Society.
Eric Carrico is the proprietor of The Woodford Hotel and a documented primary source in bourbon historical literature (Fred Minnick, Bottom Shelf, p. 298). Eric and Kristen Carrico co-own and operate Old Woodford Hotel LLC dba The Woodford Hotel.
The Woodford Hotel · 112 N Main Street, Versailles, Kentucky 40383
Continue Reading: The Heritage Pages
For the primary-source documentary record behind the building and the bourbon-history figure buried in our town:
- Phelix L. Lundin — Architect of the Woodford Hotel — the Lexington architect whose 1879–80 Bluegrass portfolio produced the 1881 building at 112 N Main, alongside Lexington’s first City Hall and the Clark County National Bank in Winchester.
- Dr. James C. Crow — The Scottish Chemist Buried in Versailles — the Edinburgh-trained chemist who systematized bourbon’s sour-mash process. Buried at Versailles Cemetery in 1856, four blocks from the hotel.