Remote home of KY artist and author spent years in disrepair. This group is saving it.
“In the distant future someone may relate — if anyone will listen to him — how his grandfather, as a small boy, used to go down to Payne Hollow when it was still a wilderness. There on the riverbank, in a house which they had made out of rocks and trees, lived a couple all by themselves.
They planted a garden, kept goats, ate weeds and groundhogs and fish from the river, which in those days was full of fish. They never had to go to a store. The man worked with axe and hoe, without machines. He painted pictures of the old steamboats and made drawings of the life they lived.” — Harlan Hubbard
Harlan and Anna Hubbard may be the most famous Kentuckians you’ve never heard of.
Born at the turn of the 20th century, he was an artist drawn to the Ohio River, and she was a fine arts librarian at the Cincinnati Public Library.
They married in their 40s and built a life, as Harlan put it, “on the fringe of society.”
Harlan painted and authored several autobiographical books, detailing how he and Anna built a houseboat and spent years floating it down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, and how they found joy living free from the trappings of modern society on the banks of the river in Trimble County.
The couple lived off the land in a home Harlan built himself without electricity. They gardened, fished, foraged and raised goats for meat and milk. Water was pumped into the cabin with a gravity-fed cistern that Harlan devised.
But their existence was also one of simple elegance. Anna Hubbard served their meals on good china. The couple spent time daily playing music together — he on violin and she on a grand piano they had carried a mile down to their cabin from the nearest road. Several times a day, they paused to read classic literature aloud to one another, sometimes in foreign languages.
Stacey Burkhardt remembers visiting Payne Hollow as a child. His family lived on a farm about 2 1/2 miles upstream from the Hubbards on the Ohio River.
“We would take them tomatoes in the summer by boat,” Burkhardt recalled in a recent interview with the Herald-Leader.
And like almost all Trimble County fifth-graders in those days, he visited Payne Hollow on a field trip.
Burkhardt remembers Harlan’s garden.
“He would be growing stuff way up into the fall,” like in November and December, using glass panes to keep his plants warm, he said.
He remembers the couple’s hospitality to the visitors who came by the hundreds over the years, curious about their unconventional lifestyle.
“They were so kind and welcoming,” he said.
And Burkhardt remembers the excitement in the community when Harlan and Anna Hubbard were included in a feature about the Ohio River in National Geographic in 1977.
“We were witnessing in real time a lasting legacy in the making,” he said.
Now an adult, Burkhardt is part of a movement to preserve and promote that legacy — one of art and sustainable living in Kentucky that honors the land and river on which the Hubbards lived.
The Hubbards’ homeplace is a significant landmark, not only because of who lived there, but also, it turns out, because Payne Hollow offers a wealth of ecological resources.
“It’s a place out of time,” said Jessica Whitehead, who has published two books on Hubbard and his work.
And it’s time, Burkhardt said, to “give Payne Hollow the attention it deserves.”
In 2022, a small group of people formed a nonprofit organization, Payne Hollow on the Ohio, which has bought the remote 40-acre property and begun the work of stabilizing it after decades of neglect.
The group says they want to preserve Payne Hollow “as a space for learning and reflection,” a place blending “art, nature, and community,” according to the group’s strategic plan.
They hope to give people “an opportunity to connect more deeply with the environment and their own creative potential while incorporating the values of simplicity and sustainability into their lives and work.”
“It’s very important that we preserve that piece of history for the next generation,” Burkhardt said.
But that has not been an easy task.
Payne Hollow is reachable only by boat or by hiking about a mile down a steep hillside to the riverbank on an old wagon road, built in the 1800s to serve what was then known as Payne’s Landing. The elevation change is about 500 feet, said Joe Wolek, one of the founding board members of Payne Hollow on the Ohio.
In the Hubbards’ day, visitors who came to see them from the Indiana side of the river would ring a dinner bell, and Harlan would row across to ferry them over in a boat. He wrote that he would hike up to the road to collect the mail about once a week.
Today, supplies for the restoration are brought in, and trash is carried out, by boat. Wolek said LG&E brought in a barge at one point to help with trash removal.
There is no electricity at the cabin, nor will there be, Wolek said, so work is being done with battery-powered hand tools.
Who were Harlan and Anna Hubbard?
Harlan Hubbard was born in 1900 in Campbell County, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. His father died when he was young.
Hubbard was one of three well-known brothers. Lucien Hubbard was a Hollywood screenwriter and movie producer, including as an uncredited producer for the 1927 film “Wings,” which won the first-ever Best Picture Oscar.
His other brother, Frank Hubbard, was a commercial illustrator in New York City.
Heavily influenced by the writings of Henry David Thoreau, Harlan Hubbard appreciated the solitude of nature and longed to escape the day-to-day bustle of the modern world with a life on the river.
In his early 40s, he realized that dream after marrying Anna Eikenhout, a fine arts librarian at the Cincinnati Public Library who encouraged him to build the shantyboat of which he had always dreamed.
Hubbard chronicled their boat travels in his most well-known book, “Shantyboat: A River Way of Life” and its sequel, “Shantyboat on the Bayous.”
After wrapping up their yearslong shantyboat journey in 1951, the couple embarked on a trip out West before returning and deciding to put down roots in Payne Hollow, where they had tied up their boat and grown a garden during their first summer drifting on the Ohio River.
The site is about a two-hour drive northwest of Lexington, between Louisville and Cincinnati.
Hubbard was a prolific artist, producing paintings in watercolor and oil, as well as woodcuts and sketches.
He was a naturalist who lamented the damage people had done to the landscape.
He was a writer and avid journaler who chronicled the day-to-day doings of his life, his philosophies about it and the world around him, notably in “Payne Hollow: Life on the Fringe of Society.”
He was an innovative carpenter who built his own boats, home, art studios and furniture.
He was a fisherman and gardener.
He played music.
He sometimes did his own translations of Greek and Latin poetry, said Whitehead.
“Harlan was remarkable in the sense that he had so many interests,” said Whitehead, who has studied the Hubbards since her days as a student at Hanover College.
What’s being done
After Anna Hubbard died in 1986, fellow artist and family friend Paul Hassfurder moved in with Harlan Hubbard, then 86, to help with chores such as chopping wood and tending the garden.
Harlan Hubbard died a few years later in 1988, and the property passed to Hassfurder, who Wolek said was “of a like-minded spirit” to the Hubbards.
But Wolek said Hassfurder did not live at Payne Hollow full time, and over the years, things began to fall into a state of disrepair.
Nearly three years ago, Hassfurder and his nephew agreed to sell the property to Payne Hollow on the Ohio with the requirement that the place would remain as it is, promoting the legacy left by the Hubbards and Hassfurder, Wolek said.
“The inside of the house was totally ransacked,” Wolek said. “I think it was more critters than anything else.”
While the group that bought the property found the buildings in a state of disarray, there was a treasure trove of artifacts inside them, including paintings, household goods, old photographs, sheet music and other written materials.
Most of those items have now been removed so they can be cataloged and preserved.
But the spirit of the place is still alive.
Snowdrops covered the ground around the remote cabin on a sunny March afternoon, and the sun glistened on the water.
The long, handmade dining table and benches where the couple took their meals stand before tall windows looking out on the river.
Some of Harlan’s paints and pigments are still piled in an old washtub in his studio.
Some of Anna’s canning jars still line the shelves in the cellar beneath the cabin.
The first order of business for Payne Hollow on the Ohio was stabilizing the buildings. They poured concrete footers to hold up the back of Harlan’s studio and workshop, which was in danger of collapsing off the hillside, and rebuilt its foundation.
A freestone wall built into the hillside behind the cabin has been rebuilt.
Fallen gutters have been replaced, and the cistern has been cleaned up.
New footbridges have been built nearby, using lumber and bags of concrete that were brought to the site in what Wolek described as “two dozen trips on a pontoon boat.”
“We spent more money fixing the house than Mr. Hubbard spent his entire time building it,” board chairman David Wicks said.
This year, the board will likely replace or repair the roof on the cabin, Wolek said.
“We’ve still got a lot of work to do,” he said.
Wolek and his wife have helped facilitate the restoration by buying a home on a nearby property, now affectionately known as “Hollowpayno,” serving as a “base camp” for people working on the site or visiting for an occasional, specially arranged group tour.
Hollowpayno provides for parking and the nearest bathroom facilities with running water.
Last summer, the Woleks housed at Hollowpayno a group of AmeriCorps volunteers who built some benches for the trail leading down to the cabin and rebuilt the rock paths near the cabin before they were forced to leave early to provide cleanup from Hurricane Helene.
In April, another AmeriCorps team will return to work on the steep trails leading down to the cabin.
Access to the site needs to be improved before Payne Hollow on the Ohio can move forward with more programming for visitors. And even then, Wolek said, “it doesn’t have to be the next tourist attraction.”
For now, the site is open only for volunteer cleanup days, specially arranged group tours and an occasional open house.
Wolek is in the process of selling 20 acres of his Hollowpayno land to Payne Hollow on the Ohio, which will protect the entrance to Payne Hollow and provide more of a “buffer zone” between it and other properties, Wolek said. A grant from the Kentucky Heritage Land Conservation Fund will provide some funding for that.
Wolek said he plans to use the proceeds from the sale to develop a space for visiting artists, and he said a second nonprofit is being established to set up an artist-in-residence program in conjunction with Payne Hollow.
Payne Hollow on the Ohio is also working to designate the site a historic landmark, and Wolek said a class from the University of Kentucky will be helping with that process in the fall.
Groups from the University of Louisville — which holds a collection of the Hubbards’ papers measuring nearly 35 feet — will be doing research and working on developing a virtual reality tour of the site this summer.
Rekindling old relationships
While the Hubbards lived a secluded lifestyle, Wolek and Burkhardt are quick to point out that they were not hermits.
“They weren’t isolationists by any means,” Wolek said. “They just liked their independence. They were 19th-century people living in the 20th century.”
“They were very active in the community,” Burkhardt said.
That was especially true of the community at Hanover College, just across the river in Madison, Ind.
The Hubbards frequented the school’s library, attended concerts and plays and became friends with Hanover professors who visited them at Payne Hollow to play music together or introduce their students to them.
Now, the leadership of Payne Hollow on the Ohio is hoping to rekindle that relationship with Hanover College, where a collection of Harlan Hubbard’s work hangs on display in the library.
On a Thursday night in March, the board hosted a reception and presentation about their work on the Kentucky side of the river.
“It’s important for us to develop a relationship with Hanover,” said board member Susan Griffin Ward. “It’s an opportunity to connect with the next generation who can be inspired by Payne Hollow.”
She said she’d like to see students creating art and doing environmental science at the site. The board hopes interns from Hanover will be working with them soon.
“We really do need to get youth involved,” Wolek said, noting that the Hubbards’ philosophy still appeals to a segment of young people “who want to get untethered” from the pressures of living in the digital age.
The group is working to engage with the Trimble County community, too.
“There’s not a lot of destinations for this area,” Wolek said, noting that Payne Hollow could in some ways be “a lodestar for the community.”
Board member Burkhardt, a steelworker and cattle farmer, said local banks and churches still proudly display murals painted by Harlan Hubbard.
He hopes school kids will someday be able to tour the site like he did when the Hubbards lived there.
He said the Hubbards are still teaching.
“We’re so dependent today on everything. We depend on Amazon or Walmart,” he said. “He touched us in so many different ways. The way they lived, the art he created ... being an author. We can take it to our lives today.”
‘A spiritual place’
Ward, of Louisville, said it was serendipity that brought her to Payne Hollow.
“My husband and I accidentally found Payne Hollow while we were boating on the river,” she said.
Following a path into the woods, she recalled seeing “this beautiful cabin, the cabin of my dreams,” but then she left and didn’t think much more about it.
That winter, she said she was watching KET one evening when the cabin flashed on the screen, and Ward said she “realized it was someplace special that other people knew about.”
Ward later met Hassfurder and visited the hollow with friends.
“It just always felt like a really special, inspirational place to me. It’s a spiritual place,” she said.
“It’s as important as other places that have received a lot of public attention, like Shaker Village and the Abbey of Gethsemane,” she said. “It can serve as a source of inspiration much like Shakertown and Gethsemane have.”
Wolek said he hopes Payne Hollow will be an educational center, an “interactive environmental space.”
Someday, he said, artists and writers may return to Payne Hollow to find inspiration.
“A person could live alone for a week, two weeks, a month,” he said. “I think it’s always going to be a place to come and visit.”
The wealth of natural treasures helps, too.
A detailed natural and cultural landscape inventory at the site found more than 200 plant species and 40 different species of trees, along with several springs, board members said.
Wicks said a retired state botanist told him the site has an unusual diversity of edible plants, which he said the Hubbards nurtured.
Not only that, he said, they also wrote about them in the detailed journals Harlan kept through the years, making Payne Hollow “a great place to look at plant communities and change over time.”
And, he added, the journals also describe sightings of 52 different bird species.
At the center of it all, Wicks said, is the river.
Hubbard spent his days from childhood until he died painting, boating, fishing and swimming in the river, which he once referred to as “the last frontier.”
Wicks, an adjunct professor of environmental science at the University of Louisville, said Payne Hollow on the Ohio could also be “a river educational center.”
The work at Payne Hollow, Wicks and Ward said, is one small aspect of a larger movement to protect and recognize the value of the Ohio River.
Ward, who works for the Kentucky Waterways Alliance, said she considers the Ohio “one of the great rivers of the world,” but it has never received the protection funding of other bodies of water, like the Great Lakes and the Everglades.
While she said she hopes that will change, regardless, “the board at Payne Hollow is committed to managing, restoring, caring for this wild place on the river.”
The Hubbards in books, art
Whitehead, the biographer of Harlan Hubbard, was part of the original group that formed to buy Payne Hollow in 2022, and she still serves as historical adviser for the collection of artifacts now owned by Payne Hollow on the Ohio.
Her most recent work is a biography, “Driftwood: The Life of Harlan Hubbard,” released Feb. 25 by the University Press of Kentucky.
A gallery exhibit by the same name will open April 13 at the Behringer-Crawford Museum in Covington.
There’s also a traveling panel exhibit sponsored by Payne Hollow on the Ohio and based on the book, as well as a virtual exhibit being developed on the “Driftwood” website.
The panels will be on display at UK’s Lucille Caudill Little Fine Arts & Design Library from July to September.
Whitehead has been researching “Driftwood” for 12 years and said she undertook a new biography of Hubbard to “fill in some of the gaps that hadn’t been filled in before.”
“Not much has ever been written about the early life of Harlan Hubbard,” including his family and how his relationships with them influenced the man he became, Whitehead said in a recent interview with the Herald-Leader. “My book is geared to give you lots of information you may not have had before.”
Wendell Berry, a longtime friend of the Hubbards, published a biography, too, in 1997, titled “Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work.”
Whitehead, who also works as the senior curator of collections at the Kentucky Derby Museum, has recently given several talks and presentations around the region in connection with the book’s release.
She’s scheduled to be in Lexington at McConnell Springs for a book talk Oct. 14.
At a recent event in Frankfort, Whitehead drew connections between Hubbard and artist Paul Sawyier.
“Both Sawyier and Hubbard were river-lovers and enjoyed sketching and painting while rambling in their beloved riverine landscapes,” Whitehead wrote in a social media post. “Sawyier even had a houseboat on the Kentucky river, on which he would paint — a fitting prelude to Harlan and Anna’s creative life on their own shantyboat. Hubbard and Sawyier were a generation apart in time, but they were of the same mind and spirit.”
“There are still too many people” who don’t know who the Hubbards were, Whitehead said.
“There’s a lot more to come,” Whitehead said. “The work is being done, and it’s a real pleasure to be part of it.”
A neighbor’s admiration
Jimmy and Lynda Covert, who live across the Ohio River in Otisco, Ind., have mixed feelings about the work at Payne Hollow.
Jimmy Covert said it’s good “that people will understand such a life is possible.”
But his wife, Lynda Covert, said, “It’s too bad that it’s going to have so much activity there.”
They saw firsthand the toll being well-known took on the Hubbards.
“It was so sad,” Jimmy Covert said. “As time went on, they got so interesting, they were flooded with people. It was tough for them.”
The Coverts became friends of the Hubbards in the 1970s and, like the Hubbards, have tried to live “close to the land,” Jimmy said.
“We admired Harlan because of his lifestyle,” he said. “Living a quiet life. It made us realize it was possible.”
Lynda remembered the first time she met Harlan: “We were going up the river on a houseboat, and he was canoeing by.”
She said Harlan had a special affinity for Jimmy, because, as a teenager, he had paddled a canoe from Louisville to New Orleans, a journey the Hubbards had taken on their self-built shantyboat.
They remembered the care the Hubbards had for their animals, refusing once to sell them a billy goat they’d hoped to acquire for their herd.
And Jimmy Covert recounted a time they went to see Harlan after a flood.
When they arrived, Jimmy said Harlan asked, “How’s the car look?” since the Hubbards kept their vehicle parked on the Indiana side of the river and rowed across when they needed to drive somewhere.
“He said, ‘You suppose it’s ruined?” Jimmy Covert recalled. “I knew it was. I took a spark plug out ... and water came out.”
Anna had one nice dress, Lynda Covert said. It had been inside the car and was no longer fit to be worn after the flooding.
The Coverts had been planning to sell their Volkswagen Beetle anyway, so Harlan took it for a test drive.
“He said, ‘This is just like a Model T!’” Jimmy said.
Lynda Covert said the Hubbards paid for the car, and the next time they visited, Harlan also expressed his pleasure with it by gifting them a painting of a river scene, including a flatboat and a team of mules.
When she pointed out that it wasn’t signed, she said Harlan picked up a nail from the floor and scratched his name into it. The opposite side had been painted as well.
Sometimes Hubbard did that. The group that bought Payne Hollow found a few paintings on the undersides of drawers that Hubbard must not have liked, so he repurposed them.
Lynda Covert said she had the painting Harlan gave her framed in such a way that she can flip it to display either side.
And the Beetle they sold the Hubbards? A photo of it is still in the drawer of their dining table at Payne Hollow.
“He helped us,” Jimmy said simply.
This story was originally published March 27, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
