Marquis Calmes

The Lafayette visit, 1825

In 1825, during his triumphal tour of the United States, the Marquis de Lafayette — the French aristocrat who had crossed the Atlantic at nineteen to fight for the American Revolution — left Louisville for Lexington. Between the two cities he made a personal detour to Caneland, the Woodford County estate of his old comrade-in-arms.

This is the single most consequential French-American moment in the documentary history of the Bluegrass. Two men who had fought together under Washington at Monmouth and at Yorktown forty-five years earlier — one a French nobleman of Versailles, the other a French-Huguenot Virginian who would name his Kentucky town after that same Versailles — collapsed into each other on a small Kentucky farm. There are no photographs. There is only Railey’s transcription, preserved in the canonical Woodford County history.

The Calmes family — from Carcassonne to Kentucky

The Calmes are an ancient French family of the parish of Carcassonne, in Languedec, appearing in the nobility before the middle of the fifteenth century, with records back to around 1290. Master Pierre Calmes was called “town clerk of Carcassonne” in an act of July 14, 1445. Another Pierre Calmes was notary at Trebes in 1524 and was father of Claude Calmes (Lord of Barbeiran), Jean de Calmes (first of the family raised to nobility), and the third son who founded the line that would, in modern times, hold the title of Baron.

The family preserved a tradition of Huguenot faith. The records of the 16th and 17th centuries are records of persecution: three Calmes condemned at Toulouse in 1568; Bernard de Calame condemned at Toulouse in 1562; “the unhappy Huguenots escaped, but the greater number were executed” appears in a 1652 list. After the Edict of Nantes was revoked on November 18, 1685, the family scattered. Jean-Jacques Calmes was condemned to the galleys for the faith on August 18, 1689, and “died in the harness” — the phrase Haag’s La France Protestants uses for a man worked to death rowing a French ship.

The first of the family to reach English asylum was Marc de Calhome, listed among the elders and deacons of the French Church of London in 1578. Marquis Calmels was naturalized by the King of England on December 17, 1687.

From London the family came to Virginia in the early colonial days. William Waller Calmes, born January 18, 1727, was a large landowner in Frederick and Hampshire Counties, Virginia, and a lieutenant in the Frederick County militia. His wife, Lucy Neville, born January 17, 1732, was said to descend from Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick — the “King-maker” of fifteenth-century England. Their eldest son, born on the family’s Frederick County estate on February 26, 1755, was named Marquis Calmes.

Brother in arms — the Revolutionary War

Young Calmes was sent abroad to be educated. The Revolutionary War interrupted that education. He hastened home, raised and equipped a company of soldiers at his own expense, and, as its captain, joined the Third Regiment of the Virginia Line, commanded by Colonel Thomas Marshall — the man whose son, John Marshall, would later become the fourth Chief Justice of the United States.

On September 11, 1777, at the Battle of Brandywine, Col. Thomas Marshall was badly wounded. Calmes — by then a lieutenant colonel — took command of the regiment and distinguished himself for bravery. He was with Washington at Monmouth in 1778 and at Yorktown in 1781. He received four thousand acres for three years’ service as a captain in the Virginia Line.

The friendships forged in those campaigns — with Marshall, with Lafayette — would define the remainder of his life.

Settlement at Canewood

Calmes began taking up Kentucky land between 1783 and 1785. About 1785, on Thomas Marshall’s invitation, he moved to what became Woodford County and settled at Canewood (sometimes recorded as Caneland) on Payne’s Mill Pike, off the Lexington Road. His estate adjoined Marshall’s “Buck Pond” and the Crittenden farm. Calmes, Marshall, and Crittenden — close personal friends and former comrades in arms — lived as neighbors in the Bluegrass for the remainder of their lives.

At Canewood, Calmes lived as a planter. He owned enslaved people and had them taught the trades of the farm. He brewed his own whiskey and brandy and dispensed it, William E. Railey wrote, “with a generous hospitality.” He never abandoned the colonial customs of dress: his hair in a queue tied with a black ribbon, a broad cocked hat, a sweeping blue cloth coat with metal buttons, velvet knee pants and stockings, shoes with large silver buckles. Thus equipped, he rode to Versailles to attend the county court — “of which honorable body he was for many years a valued member.”

Naming Versailles

On June 23, 1792 — twenty-two days after Kentucky was admitted to the Union as the fifteenth state on June 1, 1792 — Calmes was one of five commissioners who laid off the city of Versailles on eighty acres of land owned by Hezekiah Briscoe. His fellow commissioners were Colonel Richard Young, John Lee, Case Johnson, and John Watkins. The town was one of the first chartered under the new state’s constitution.

Calmes was one of the commissioners who laid off the city of Versailles. He named it for the city of his ancestors’ birth in France — the seat of the French monarchy, the palace of Louis XIV, the city whose name the Calmes family had carried out of Carcassonne into Languedec into London into Virginia into Kentucky.

He also served as a commissioner who laid off the Kentucky State Capitol, and represented Woodford County in the Kentucky General Assembly in 1795.

A bronze tablet on a block of stone, erected by the General Marquis Calmes Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution at the head of North Main Street in Versailles — on or beside the block where The Woodford Hotel stands today — bears the inscription: “Near this spot lived and died General Marquis de la Calmes, gallant Revolutionary soldier, who named this city Versailles.”

The War of 1812

Upon the outbreak of the second war with Britain in 1812, Calmes, then in his late fifties, volunteered his services and was commissioned a brigadier general. He commanded the First Brigade under Generals Harrison and Shelby. On October 5, 1813, he was present at the Battle of the Thames in Upper Canada — the engagement in which the Shawnee leader Tecumseh was killed and the British general Henry Procter’s army of British, Canadians, and Indians was routed.

The tomb

Calmes’ wife, Priscilla Heale, predeceased him by several years. In the General’s 80th year — 1833 — he directed the construction of a stone mausoleum on his Canewood estate. Limestone was quarried on the farm. An enslaved expert stone-mason laid the tomb without mortar, dry-stack, while the General sat beside him and directed the operation. The structure is approximately ten feet square and eight feet tall, with a conical roof that tapers to an opening at the apex — the four side walls continuing upward into the roof in an unbroken dry-stack ascent. It is believed, per family tradition, to be modeled after both the ancient cairns of Ireland and the rural mausoleums of France.

Calmes died one year later, on February 9, 1834, and was entombed beside his wife inside the vault he had directed. The Historic American Buildings Survey, in its 1970 inventory (HABS WD-86), called it “one of the strangest tombs to be found in Kentucky.”

On July 26, 1974, the Kentucky Heritage Commission approved the Marquis Calmes Tomb at the state level and recommended its nomination to the National Register of Historic Places under the National Park Service.

The tomb stands today on Paynes Mill Road, two-and-a-half miles northeast of Versailles, on what was the George Dunlap farm at the time of the 1970 survey and is now the farm of Mr. and Mrs. Wayne G. Lyster III. The Calmes home was destroyed by fire in 1937; the limestone vault remains.

The Hôtel de Ville gavel

A walnut gavel carved from a post of the original Calmes home stairway is held today in the Hôtel de Ville in Versailles, France — the town hall of the mother city — where the mayor uses it to call council meetings to order. The gavel was presented to Mayor Henri Haye of Versailles, France by the General Marquis Calmes Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. In return, Mayor Haye sent to Woodford County, Kentucky a bronze urn filled with soil from the grave of an American soldier.

The exchange remains in effect. Two cities named Versailles — one in France, one in Kentucky — share, by way of a hand-carved gavel and an urn of soil, an active ceremonial diplomatic linkage that runs directly through the man buried under the limestone vault on Paynes Mill Road.

Where to visit

The tomb: Paynes Mill Road, two-and-a-half miles northeast of Versailles, on the Lyster farm. Limestone dry-stack. Open to the public per the 1970 HABS inventory; please respect the working farm.

The DAR tablet: Head of North Main Street, Versailles — on or beside the block of The Woodford Hotel.

The hotel: The Woodford Hotel, 112 N Main Street, Versailles, in the town Calmes named.