54 BAKEWELL FAMILY Baker to Dr. William Hunt of Covington in 1872 and their decision to make their home at 620 Greenup St. with John and Henrietta. Misfortune struck again when Margaretta and William Hunt’s only child, daughter Katie, died of spinal meningitis on her 15th birthday. These two family deaths meant that the Baker and Hunt families were left with no heirs, and Margaretta Hunt wanted to establish the foundation so that the proud traditions of the families would continue. To ensure a good beginning for the kind of programs Margaretta envisioned, a two-part plan was launched. The first was to construct a building that would house an excellent natural-history collection owned by Archie Williams of Covington. He later became the curator when the museum opened in October 1930. The museum provided education classes for Covington schoolchildren and a variety of other programs that were recognized for excellence. The museum operated until the late 1940s. The second phase of the plan stipulated that Margaretta’s personal secretary and confidante, Virginia Reed, be named executive secretary of the foundation when it became operational. Reed worked with the board of directors to recruit talented and trained staff members. By 1932 art and music classes for children were begun, and they became very popular. Later, craft classes for boys and sewing and knitting classes for girls were added. The Six-Twenty Club for young businesswomen was organized to provide educational, social, and service activities for them. The need for such a program became evident when it grew so rapidly that membership limits had to be set. Other adult classes included training in art, music, drama, and leadership. The drama and choral groups offered public performances for the community. The variety of programs offered to the public by the Baker-Hunt Foundation during the troubling years of the Great Depression and World War II became significant for the people of Covington and Northern Kentucky. The art and cultural activities gave them time away from personal and world problems to participate in uplift ing cultural experiences. Designing programs to meet changing times has continued to be a challenge for the Baker-Hunt Foundation’s board and the executive program directors. The foundation’s success continues, as evidenced by the increasing number of people enrolled in class offerings through the years. Until 1995 there were no fees for the children’s classes. In addition to the ongoing emphasis on drawing, painting, and ceramics, there has been expansion into other cultural areas with classes in dance, languages, and music. A recent innovative class called WORMS (We’re Organically Re-cycling Mulchers) has been offered for children of ages 5 to 11. This program celebrates nature through art, gardening, and community projects. Many art classes offered at the BakerHunt Foundation’s facility also benefit children who are homeschooled or otherwise lack public school art instruction. Outreach to the community has also been enhanced with scholarship programs for youth and seniors. The Baker-Hunt Foundation has supplied
art teachers for senior centers and other organizations requiring on-site art lessons; these offerings have been supported by the Friends of Baker-Hunt, a volunteer organization. The Friends of BakerHunt has established a house museum in part of the original mansion, consisting of a unique collection of clothing, furniture, letters, paintings, photographs, and journals belonging to the Baker and Hunt families. This collection not only features the artifacts of bygone generations but also documents a valuable component of the history of Covington. The legacy of Margaretta Baker Hunt has favorably impacted the community. The BakerHunt Foundation prides itself in making this contribution and being a part of the rich historical and cultural fabric of Covington and Northern Kentucky. Archives of the Baker-Hunt Foundation, Baker-Hunt Foundation, Covington, Ky. “Baker-Hunt to Begin Classes,” KP, December 30, 1931, 1. Franzen, Gene. “Now & Then—Covington’s Baker Hunt Foundation,” KE, October 8, 2000, B1. “Garden of Mrs. Hunt Described,” KP, August 15, 1914, 1. “Natural History Museum Planned,” KTS, May 14, 1929, 1. Stevens, Harry R. Six Twenty: Margaretta Hunt and the Baker-Hunt Foundation. Covington, Ky.: Baker-Hunt, 1942. Whitson, Frances, and Margaret Jacobs. “If These Walls Could Talk: Covington’s Baker-Hunt Foundation,” NKH 12, no. 1 (Fall–Winter 2004): 2–10.
Mary Frances Whitson
BAKEWELL FAMILY. In 1832 developer and businessman Thomas Wood house Bakewell (1778–1874), of the firm of Bakewell, Page, and Bakewell, acquired substantial property in Covington, which by the mid-1830s had become the Johnson-Bakewell subdivision, a part of the West Side (see also Main Strasse). Thomas Wood house Bakewell began his business career working as an importer in New York for his uncle Benjamin Bakewell of Pittsburgh, Pa., “the father” of flint glass-making. Back in England, William Bakewell, the father of Thomas Bakewell, had known the grandfather of Charles Darwin. William Bakewell immigrated and settled in 1802 near Valley Forge, Pa., where he became a gentleman farmer. A neighbor, famed naturalist John James Audubon, married William Bakewell’s daughter Lucy. In 1819 Audubon moved to Cincinnati and sketched cliff swallows near the Licking River. William Bakewell’s sister Ann married Alexander Gordon, a well-to-do New Orleans businessman whose father, Maj. William Gordon, owned a sugar plantation and was a part owner of a mercantile house at Natchez, Miss. Thomas Bakewell learned the southern cotton business from the Gordons. By about 1820, Thomas Bakewell had become involved in foundry and shipbuilding enterprises in Louisville. Having moved to Cincinnati in 1824, Thomas Bakewell set up two businesses, to build steam engines and to build sugar mills. He operated a
shipyard that produced three steamboats each year until 1830. While living in Cincinnati, Bakewell was a director of the Mechanics Institute and of the Cincinnati branch of the Bank of the United States, a director and president of the Ohio Insurance Company, and a member of a special three-man committee seeking to build a railroad between Cincinnati and Charleston, S.C. (see Cincinnati and Charleston Railroad). Another business partnership, the Bakewell-Cartwright foundry, lasted until 1844. The panic and economic depression of 1837 caused Bakewell, who by this time had expanded into a number of business enterprises in Covington, to divest himself of some of his businesses. He sold off his interest in Covington’s JohnstonBakewell housing subdivision and also lost the title to his large Covington burlap-bagging factory. In the mid-1830s, that factory had produced $25,000 worth of finished hemp per year. It manufactured bags and ropes for transporting 400-pound bales of cotton. After another depression in 1857 closed his business career, Bakewell resided with one of his 12 children near Pittsburgh until his 1874 death and burial in Spring Grove Cemetery, in Cincinnati. According to Mrs. Stephens Blakely, a descendant of Thomas Bakewell, his daughters attended a fashionable female academy as residents of a venerable family mansion built by Bakewell, located at 653– 655 Dalton St. in Covington. Demolished in 1970, the estate was said by a local newspaper society columnist in 1929 to be “a home of great interest, the lawns being covered with statuary . . . the meeting place of artists and literary men of the day.” In Bakewell’s day, men with dreams and with economic motives such as Thomas D. Carneal, William Bullock, and Thomas Bakewell viewed the area west of Covington as potentially a pristine retreat from the bustling activities taking place across the Ohio River in Cincinnati. Inventors, developers, and entrepreneurs in the steamboat era were often teachers, artists, and people of culture, and the Bakewells were members of that class of society. Blakely, Mrs. Stephens L. “The Covington I Remember.” Papers of the Christopher Gist Historical Society, vol. 1, paper read March 28, 1950. Laidley, Mary. “This Was Meeting Place of Artists and Teachers,” KP, October 27, 1929, 8. Sinclair, Bruce, ed. “Thomas Wood house Bakewell’s Autobiographical Sketch and Its Relation to Early Steamboat Engineering on the Ohio,” FCHQ 40, no. 3 (July 1966): 235–48. Tenkotte, Paul A. “Rival Cities to Suburbs: Covington and Newport, Kentucky, 1790–1890,” PhD diss., Univ. of Cincinnati, 1989.
John Boh
BALL FAMILY SINGERS. The Ball Family Gospel Singing Group of Covington began in 1969, when Herbert Ball, his son Nelson Ball, his daughter Peggy Ball Arnold, Carole Hill, and Ruby Williams decided to “make a difference.” Since then they have traveled all around the country in a tour bus that once belonged to magician David Copperfield. Previously, gospel singer Herbert Ball