"Hicklin Hearthstone is a Greek Revival central passage I house constructed of brick, and dating, it is said, from the 1830's. It was the centerpiece of what in pre-Civil War times was an active farm, and several outbuildings including a six-cell slave quarters, a two-cell slave house, and a brick cellar house survive. This complex, approximately one-and-a-half miles east of Lexington, Missouri, is located some 100 yards north of U.S. Highway 24 at the end of a lane which defines the west side of the front yard. Highway 24 follows the approximate route of the Santa Fe trail that once ran through this neighborhood, and the ten mile stretch of road between the towns of Lexington and Dover, popularly known as the "Dover Road," probably presents the finest rural antebellum cultural landscape to be found in Missouri. Once, some eighteen mansions lined this stretch, the centers of hemp plantations, and of these approximately a dozen have persisted down to the present. Hicklin Hearthstone is the oldest, and one of the finest of these mansions.
The house in many ways is typical of the type of pretentious residence being built in the Missouri River valley by slave owning migrants moving into Missouri following the War of 1812 from states that make up the Upland South: Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee. James Hicklin, the builder, was from Tennessee. The house faces south and presents a five bay facade, laid up in flemish bond. This primary facade is dominated by a one bay wide two story pedimented portico with doors surrounded by sidelights and transoms opening at each story. At the eave line is an elaborate frieze a backcountry carpenter's interpretation of the Doric order with well executed triglyphs and guttae. This frieze does not extend beyond the front facade. The unfluted doric columns, which had no bases, once extended the full two stories of the portico, but at some point were cut off at the second story level and replaced on the first story by square piers each having a base, capital and elongated recessed panels...
Hicklin Hearthstone is significant as a vernacular interpretation of the Greek Revival style in western Missouri, as an exceptional survival of a plantationtype building complex, and as the seat of James Hicklin, one of Lafayette County's earliest settlers and a representative of the Southern slaveholding world view as embodied in a Tennessean transplanted in Missouri.
The architectural significance of Hicklin Hearthstone is that the house illustrates the combination of stylistic influences the Greek Revival,- expressed in its southern vernacular manifestation as a variation of the Classicism introduced into America with the 18th century Georgian style and traditional vernacular form in this case an Upland South I house that appears in a trans-Mississippi West setting. Its stylistic unsophistication combined with the impulse to erect a permanent and dignified architecture resulted in a house which is an important document of a distinctively southern culture appearing at yet another stage in the opening of the West.
The life of the builder of the house, James Hicklin, is presented as conforming to a typical southern career pattern such as depicted in the writings of Frank Lawrence Owsley on southern "plain folk." Born and raised to early manhood in Tennessee, Hicklin came to Missouri as a young man after serving in the War of 1812, and he became one of the early settlers of Lafayette County. By the 1830's he had married, acquired a farm, built "a "log house on it and done some trading in slaves, Not a plantation owner as his "big house" with its quarters might suggest, he engaged in diversified agriculture. His thirty-plus slaves elevated him to a plantation life-style, and there is strong evidence-that he gained a substantial portion of his wealth through the slave trade. One index of this is the sharp decline in his fortunes in the aftermath of the Civil War and his reaction to that decline. This thread is followed in the next generation with a look at the situation of Young Hicklin, James' son and successor as master of Hicklin Hearthstone. An analysis of the agricultural census records reveals that in 1880 he was living at a far less grand level in terms of property and personal value than had his father in the heyday of slavery along the "Dover Road" during the boom times of the 1850's." - National Register Nomination form
The house continues to be owned by members of the Hicklin family and continues to be the centerpiece of the farm operations.