Shelby, Thomas, House

About this property

The Thomas Shelby House, also known as Kerr House, is a historic home located near Lexington, Lafayette County, Missouri. It was built circa 1855, and is a two-story, Greek Revival style brick I-house. It has a two-story rear ell with two-story porch. The front facade features an entry portico with tapering octagonal posts and scrollwork balustrade. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997. The Thomas Shelby House is no longer standing, though a German bank barn, built ca. 1900, associated with the property still stands. The Shelby House originally fronted on the old Santa Fe Trail, a route paralleled by today's U.S. Highway 24. Nearby are apple orchards, modern apple processing and storage buildings and a circa 1900 German bank barn. The Shelby House is said to be constructed of bricks fired at a kiln east of the property. The brickwork is precise, with bricks laid in a common bond. . . . The Shelby House is the only extant antebellum building of the Thomas Shelby plantation. Antebellum outbuildings which originally included a brick carriage house and a slave cabin have been razed. The Shelby House is significant in the area of agriculture as the main living center of the operating family of a documented hemp plantation. Thomas Shelby, who owned many slaves, was a major participant in the local hemp market. In 1860, Shelby harvested more dew-rotted hemp than all but a handful of other Lafayette County growers. While exemplifying the Greek Revival l-House property type favored by many of the transplanted Southerners, the Shelby House also displays architecture of exceptional quality (see MPS cover document, "Antebellum Resources of Johnson, Lafayette, Pettis, and Saline Counties, Missouri: Associated Property Types: Greek Revival l-Houses, Central Passage Subtype"). Builder Shelby was among the wealthier of the slave-owning farmers, and this is reflected in such embellishments as a projecting pedimented gable, cast iron lintels, and massive entablature enframements. . . . Located in prime hemp country, the Thomas Shelby House housed the slaveowning Shelby family and was the centerpiece of a large plantation where a transplanted Southern culture flourished prior to the Civil War. Shelby harvested 47 tons of dew-rotted hemp in 1860, and his interest in hemp was so great that he continued harvesting immense quantities into the 1870s, when the market was greatly diminished. Shelby was relatively wealthy and his farm already consisted of more than a thousand acres when the Shelby House was constructed in circa 1855. In 1860, the census reported the farm's cash value as $60,000 and listed its size as 1,580 acres, 800 of which were improved. Shelby's "personal estate" was valued at $36,000 in 1860. To operate the plantation, Shelby had an overseer and 41 slaves.

Location

Categories

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

More in Lafayette County

Historic places, battles, and census history across Lafayette County.

More historic places in Missouri

Browse all historic places in Missouri.

Conflict records

Explore 19,000+ military engagements across American history.

Missouri history

Colonial settlement, territorial period, and statehood narrative.