Historic Hotels & Inns in Kentucky

Ways in

Themes in Kentucky

Louisville’s grand hotels and Old Louisville

Otto and Louis Seelbach opened The Seelbach at Fourth and Walnut in 1905. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who visited while training at Camp Taylor in 1918, used it as the model for Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s wedding in The Great Gatsby, and staff and guests tell of a ‘Lady in Blue’ at its number 3 elevator. Lumber businessman James Graham Brown built The Brown Hotel at Fourth and Broadway in 1923 to rival it, and chef Fred K. Schmidt created the Hot Brown there in 1926. Whiskey Row on Main Street housed the bourbon trade from the mid-to-late 1800s. In Old Louisville’s Victorian district, the Bourbon Barrel Inn themes its four suites on Kentucky bourbon and horse racing, and Tripadvisor named the Louisville Bourbon Inn the No. 1 B&B and inn in the U.S. in 2025 and 2026.

Bardstown, around Court Square

The Old Talbott Tavern, a stone tavern on Court Square built in 1779, was the western end of the stagecoach road from Pennsylvania and Virginia. Guests it names include Andrew Jackson, George Rogers Clark and a five-year-old Abraham Lincoln; today it rents six rooms and runs a bourbon bar, and its owners rent 15 more next door at the Talbott Inn, in a 1913 building. Half a block from the square, Jailer’s Inn fills the 1819 front building of the Nelson County Jail, part of a jail used until 1987, and rents a converted cell as a room. Both have ghost stories: staff and guests at the Talbott report a man in a long coat they call Jesse James, and guests at Jailer’s Inn report a ‘Mrs. McKay’, said to have been one of the original jailers. Bourbon Manor occupies Bruntwood, an 1840 Greek Revival house the inn says was Confederate Gen. William J. Hardee’s headquarters in 1862, and the Red Rose Inn is a Federal-style house the inn dates to the early 1800s.

Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill and Harrodsburg

Pleasant Hill was the third-largest Shaker community in the United States, active from 1805 to 1910 and home to almost 500 members at its peak in the 1820s. Over 105 years the Shakers built more than 260 structures, including a municipal water system. The village is a National Historic Landmark, which it calls Kentucky’s largest, and its inn has 72 rooms in 13 restored buildings, among them the East Family Dwelling (1817–19), the West Family Dwelling (1821–22) and the Trustees’ Office (1839–41). A stay includes admission to the historic center, farm and nature preserve; no overnight building has an elevator. Also in Harrodsburg, the Beaumont Inn has occupied the Greek Revival building of Daughters’ College since 1919, on the site of a women’s college that ran from 1845 to 1916, and the Dedman family, descendants of founders Glave and Annie Bell Goddard, still runs it.

Berea’s Boone Tavern

Berea College built Boone Tavern from 1907 to 1909 to designs by the New York firm Cady & See, with bricks from the college brickyard and labor largely from its woodwork department. Eleanor Frost, the college president’s wife, pressed for a hotel after the couple hosted more than 300 visitors at the president’s house in one summer. Named for Daniel Boone, it stood on the Dixie Highway through town, and students worked as clerks, bellhops and servers through the college’s labor program. Guests have included Calvin and Grace Coolidge, Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry Ford and Maya Angelou. Its furniture is made by hand in the college’s woodcraft shop, and Historic Hotels of America calls it the first LEED-certified hotel in Kentucky.

Road trip

Louisville to Berea, inn to inn

Louisville

Start with two nights in Louisville: a grand hotel on Fourth Street or a Victorian B&B in Old Louisville from our Louisville guide.

Bardstown

Stay on Court Square at the Old Talbott Tavern, built in 1779, or book the Jail Cell room at Jailer’s Inn, half a block away.

Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill

Sleep in a restored Shaker building at The Inn at Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill; the stay includes the historic center, farm and nature preserve.

Berea

End at Boone Tavern, the hotel Berea College built in 1909, with furniture made by hand in the college’s woodcraft shop.

Context

History and architecture

Kentucky joined the Union in 1792 as the 15th state and the first west of the Appalachian Mountains, and its oldest inns stand on early roads and rivers: the Old Talbott Tavern in Bardstown, built in 1779 at the western end of the stagecoach road from Pennsylvania and Virginia, and the Lee House in Maysville, begun about 1798 at Sutton Landing on the Ohio River. Bardstown built the front of its stone jail in 1819, and at Pleasant Hill, a Shaker community from 1805 to 1910, the inn’s oldest building, the East Family Dwelling, dates from 1817–19. Antebellum houses followed: The Meeting House in Frankfort (1837), Bruntwood in Bardstown (1840), and in 1851 both Daughters’ College in Harrodsburg, now the Beaumont Inn, and Thomas McElroy’s house near Springfield, now Maple Hill Manor. Old Louisville was built as a suburb from the 1870s, and its B&Bs fill houses from about 1879 to the 1890s. In the 20th century came the hotels and the commercial buildings that became hotels: The Seelbach in 1905, Stewart’s Dry Goods in Louisville in 1907, Boone Tavern and Coppin’s department store in Covington in 1909, the Fayette National Bank in Lexington in 1914 and The Brown Hotel in 1923.