Carter House History

For more than a century, this corner of Second and Main has refused to sit empty. Over the years the building that now holds The Carter House Collective has been many different things, and it survived a fire and a flood besides. We don't take that lightly.

It started with a fire. The original Carter House was a hotel down on Front Street, near where the Vanceburg Christian Church stands today. It burned in 1894, right as Thomas Carter was finishing its replacement up on the corner of Second and Main. That new building opened in 1897 as the New Carter House Hotel: three stories of brick, trimmed in Italian marble, with wrought-iron galleries running along both street-facing sides.

For a while, it was the finest hotel in Eastern Kentucky. By 1905 it had 43 guest rooms and a dining room people talked about. Thomas's nephew Jack ran the place and kept a bar lit by electric light, stocked with bourbon and rye, cold beer on tap. Traveling men made it their regular stop.

The good years didn't last. In 1906 Vanceburg voted itself dry and the saloon closed, and between the liquor laws, the changing ways people traveled, and the cost of running a grand hotel, the Carter House slowly stopped paying for itself. By 1919 it had become a rooming house, full of the men building the first locks and dams on the Ohio River just below town.

Then the building started shedding floors. A fire in 1920 gutted the third story. Max Block bought what was left, took the top floor off, built himself an apartment up top, and opened a department store on the ground floor. It stayed in the family for years, passing to his son and daughter-in-law, Celia and David Timmer.

In 1937 the river came for the whole town. The Ohio crested at 75 feet and put every street in downtown Vanceburg under water. The bank gave way and 1st Street slid into the river and never came back. To this day there is no 1st Street in Vanceburg, only Front Street, with every street behind it renamed in order from the water. The Carter House stood through all of it.

When the department store finally closed, the building kept finding new uses. The upstairs became a law office. The ground floor became the Cabinet for Health and Family Services, until the state moved out to a new building on the AA Highway.

Then Shirley and Cary Cagle bought it and gave it back its name. They turned it into the Carter House event center, hosting weddings and reunions and Friday night steak dinners grilled by Shirley's brother Kenny Claxon, who ran the old Kenny's Restaurant just down Second Street. Their whole goal was to bring back the elegance the place had a hundred years before.

Now it's  it's The Carter House Collective. A marketplace, a stage, a kitchen, and a gathering place, all under the same wrought-iron roofline that's been watching over this corner since 1897. We kept the name because it was never really ours to change. We're just the next chapter.

Come see it on Second Street. The building's still here. So are we.

Where this story comes from: We pieced it together from Lewis County History by Dr. Wm. M. Talley, the Carter House historical marker at Second and Main (placed by the Lewis County Chamber of Commerce and Eagle Scout Damon Kennedy in 2018), and the City of Vanceburg. Thank you to everyone who's worked to keep this building's history alive.