Locust Grove, built around 1790, is a living relic of Kentucky frontier history.
It's where Louisville's founding father George Rogers Clark lived the last years of his life, with his sister and her relatives, including Clark's niece Ann Heron Croghan. Her name is up on the family tree quilt that hangs at Locust Grove but no portrait. So what Ann looked like has always been a mystery.
"We knew from the documents that a painting had existed, but it was gone," says Carol Ely.
But then one day on the eBay Internet auction website Locust Grove staffers saw a vintage woman's portrait by painter Charles Bird King offered by an antiques dealer. She looked like Croghan family.
Ely says, "And it turned out when we got to speak to the dealer, he had found it in a barn in Oxfordshire England. It had a huge hole in it. We could see that from the pictures on eBay that it wasn't in perfect condition and no one knew how it had gotten to a barn in Oxfordshire England."
So they bought it, and after months of restoration...
"She's more than 200 years old, but looking pretty good." Ely says.
"We found her miraculously. She's a long-lost Louisvillian who's come back home to Locust Grove."
Here at Locust Grove is where Ann was born in 1797 and right over the fireplace is where that long-lost portrait will hang. It's a portrait her husband complained about after she died: he thought her nose was too long.
Ely says, "I think she's a handsome woman. She's not pretty, but she looks kind and she looks handsome, and yes, she has a prominent nose."
The portrait of Ann's mother Lucy, George Rogers Clark's sister, doesn't show her looking very happy. But Locust Grove's Carol Ely sure is happy.
"Oh, it was great," she says. "Because we work so hard to imagine what these people were like. We're going 200 years in the past. And now with this portrait, another piece clicks into place. We don't have to imagine Ann Croghan. She's here."
And she'll stay here with her enigmatic smile that seems to say, I'm so happy to be home.
