Sellout crowd hears and sees the history of Holly Hill Inn

Artifacts old and recent were on display, many atop Desdemona "Mama Des" Parrish's quilt. (Click on photo to enlarge.)

Story and photos by Lauren McCally
University of Kentucky School of Journalism and Media
               Holly Hill Inn celebrated its 20th year under Chef Ouita Michel and her husband, Chris, Saturday morning with an event called “Up Home” about the history of the building that was a home, an inn and now a restaurant.

               “Welcome to Holly Hill Inn,” speaker Bob Rouse told the sellout crowd. “And while you’re here, consider yourself up home,” which Rouse’s father and grandmother often called the place.

               The event began with a lunch by Michel that included Nat’s Naples fish chowder and poached chicken. Dessert was angel food cake with custard and boiled icing. Then guests were able to walk around the dining area and see artifacts that belonged to Rouse and Perry’s great-grandmother. Then everyone went into the main dining room for a presentation on the history of the Inn, talks of ghost sightings, and a little bit of family history from Rouse and his sister, Amy Rouse Perry.

               Holly Hill Inn began as Stevenson’s Tavern, a building closer to Leestown Road. The first post office in the area was established here as Stevenson’s, and was renamed Midway when the town was established in 1837. In the early 1840s, after the tavern burned down, Handcock Davis built the first few sections of the modern layout of what eventually became the Holly Hill Inn.

Bob Rouse and his sister, Amy Rouse Perry, discussed the history of the house.

               “Mr. Davis built, we believe, three rooms facing Leestown Road: the present-day kitchen, dining room, and front entry hall,” Rouse said. “The main entrance would have been on the north side of the house, facing Leestown Road, not where the front door is today,” on the west side.

               Davis sold the building to Squire William A. Moore and his wife Mary in 1854. Moore was the president of the Midway Paper Mill Co. and a magistrate on the Woodford County Fiscal Court.  After he died, she lived in the house until it was sold to Isaac Parrish, officially becoming the Parrish family home, in 1903.

               “Amy and I are part of the sixth generation of Parrishes to live in and around Midway, and we can tell you a lot about the Ike Parrish family that lived here beginning in the early 1900s because their oldest daughter created a rather detailed journal later in her life,” Rouse said. “Now, many families at the turn of the century had similar life experiences. We’re not saying the Parrish family was extraordinary; it’s just our family.”

               The writer of that journal was Honeywood Parrish Rouse. Her first name came from her great-aunt, Adelia Honeywood Bailey, the woman who took in Rouse and Perry’s great-grandmother Desdemona, her brother Jim and sister Katherine “Nat” Parrish when their mother died.

               “Honeywood was our paternal grandmother, who we called Honey. She was a Southern matriarch, community leader, historian, entertainer, and party girl, all rolled into one,” said Rouse. “She was also a stay-at-home writer who penned toast and notes for her neighbors. ”

               The family was known for their happy home and great hospitality. “On any given night, no one would know how many people would be at their supper table until they were about to be seated,” Rouse said. “Visitors came often, and one night stays might stretch into days or even weeks.”

               In 1922, Honeywood Parrish married Howard Rouse and moved into the town of Midway, where she died at the age of 92 in 1990.

                “She never lost sight of her childhood home, especially when she passed it every time  she visited her grandchildren, whose house is on the grounds of the old apple orchard,” Rouse told the crowd.

               In 1979, Isaac Parrish's grandson Ike and his wife Jean converted the home into a “modern country inn,” according to the Holly Hill Inn website.

               It was the year 2000 when the Inn came into the possession of the Michels, by luck. At the time, Rouse was interviewing Ouita for a magazine article about a Lexington restaurant she helped run, Emmett’s on Tates Creek Road.

               Michel and Rouse told the Messenger in 2014 that when he told her, “You must love this place, you’ll never leave it,” she replied, “Well, I do love it, But I’d only ever leave it for the Holly Hill Inn in Midway.”

               What she didn’t know was that Rouse and his family had started talking that very week about needing to sell the inn. They did, and Rouse said in 2014, “I consider that the greatest thing I've ever done for this community.”

               Then Ouita began seeing ghosts, and that provided one of the most interesting parts of the program. Rouse said she saw a vague image of a young man standing at the kitchen door and a face in a window above the kitchen. In 2009, she and Perry had a husband-and-wife team of ghost hunters try to add context to the sightings. The face in the window turned out to be Tom, Jim’s cousin, who used to come and visit.

               Perry recalled that one ghost hunter “spelled out ‘What’s your first name and did you live here?’ They didn’t live here, but they visited here, so we figured that it was Jim’s cousin, who would have visited here.”

               There have been so many real-life visitors to the Inn in the last 20 years that it became the start of Michel’s unique chain of eight restaurants in Lexington and Midway, serving fresh, farm-to-table food. The newest is named Honeywood.