Hernando Building Was First Home of Ashland, Inc.
Beginning in 2005, the Lexington History Museum began providing a series on local business history for the Central Kentucky business journal, Business Lexington.  This is the first of the series written by Museum President Ed Houlihan and published December 30, 2005.



The Hernando Building located between Limestone and the Harrison Viaduct on the south side of Main Street housed the Western Union offices for many years.  This picture shows the bicycle delivery team that zipped telegrams to Lexington businesses and residences. © University of Kentucky, all rights reserved. Special Collections and Digital Programs, University of Kentucky Libraries.

            Until it was demolished in 1952, Lexingtonians had known the three-story office building tucked in the busy section of downtown between the Phoenix and Lafayette hotels and Union Station for its ground floor occupants – the Western Union office and the Canary Cottage, long recognized along with the neighboring Golden Horseshoe as Lexington’s “places to be” for food or drink.  Yet the Hernando Building, which had originally been built as the home of the Lexington Business College in the late 1800s, housed a varied range of offices in the first half of the last century.  The Blue Grass Consolidated Traction Company first started the effort to create the interurban lines that ran to Nicholasville, Versailles and Paris  and the Gentleman’s Driving Club of Lexington had offices there in 1904.  In 1909 city officials signed a $2000 one-year lease for “temporary” city offices that they eventually occupied for almost 20 years.