Spindletop Hall
Near Lexington, Kentucky
When Pansy Yount's husband struck oil at Spindletop Hill near Beaumont, Texas, in nineteen twenty-five, the fortune that followed was large enough to build a fantasy. Mrs. Yount spent a million dollars constructing a forty-room Georgian Revival mansion on more than a thousand acres of Kentucky horse country, completing it in nineteen thirty-seven. The house had fourteen bathrooms, eleven fireplaces, a Gothic library, a Louis the Sixteenth bedroom suite, and a New Orleans-inspired ballroom.
The purpose was to breed the world's finest American Saddlebred horses. Mrs. Yount named it Spindletop after the Texas oil field that made it possible. The property went to the University of Kentucky in nineteen fifty-nine, and in nineteen sixty-two it became a faculty and alumni club. Texas oil money became a Kentucky institution.
