Garrett Davis, a lawyer, state legislator, and congressman who lived one block north, played a leading role in preventing Kentucky’s secession in 1861. He represented Bourbon County in the legislature and served in Congress from 1839 to 1847 and from 1861 to 1872, and in the Kentucky Constitutional Convention in 1849. A Whig ally of Henry Clay, he later joined the American, or Know-Nothing, Party but refused its presidential nomination in 1856, and later became a Democrat.