BY JENNIFER MOONSONG
GLASGOW NEWS 1
If a person were to quiz many Barren Countians about where exactly in the county Blue Spring Grove is, not many could answer, but a few old-timers might recall the original name of Hiseville.
Hiseville is a hamlet in Barren’s northeastern corner, and in the mid-1850s, it was a thriving Kentucky town that was vested with many things, including its own distillery.
“It is said the best whiskey and brandy could be purchased there for thirty or fifty cents a gallon,” said a passage in Cecil Goode’s Barren County Heritage.
A crowd gathers outside the old Hiseville Baptist Church in the early 1900s.
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE BARREN COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Florence Edwards Gardiner, a resident of Hiseville who started her life in Hiseville in 1846, recorded the early history of the community in a book titled “Cyrus Edwards’ Stories of Early Days.” Edwards was Florence’s father; he died at the age of 93 in 1939, but not before passing down his stories.
Before Hiseville was settled the land on which its main street sits, it belonged to three families: Thompson, Walton and Gadberry. Edwards recollected that from 1816 to 1858, the road was busy, with the Nashville-to-Lexington Stage Coach passing through daily. Hiseville was also home to the first post office in the county outside of the county seat of Glasgow. The Blue Spring Grove Post office was established in the 1840s, but the name of Blue Spring Grove did not last long.
Many names were proposed; Amity and Social Point were two of them. Jokingly, someone suggested the name Goosehorn, and the name became just that until 1867. The name of the post office was changed to the Hiseville Post Office in honor of Elijah Hise, a congressman from Hiseville. The rest of the town soon followed and became known as Hiseville, incorporated in 1869.
The Hiseville School, with students and staff gathered in 1912, was established earlier in the 1900s.
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE BARREN COUNTY HISTORIC SOCIETY
Over the next decade, the town became home to two drugstores, two dry goods stores, two doctors, a steam mill, a hotel and a tobacco warehouse. Agriculture was, and is, a crucial component of the success of the town and its inhabitants. Hiseville School was established in the early 1900s.
Today, Hiseville still thrives with a bustling grocery, Phillips IGA, which was established in 1960. The bank, a feed store, a service station, a post office, a Dollar General Store and several others businesses and churches remain.
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