Lewis and Elizabeth Bolton House (The Colonel Bolton Home)

The Lewis and Elizabeth Bolton House, a prominent Greek Revival style, five-bay I-house built around 1833, was erected by Lewis and Elizabeth Bolton, one of Cole County's first Euro-American settlers. Lewis and Elizabeth managed a successful farmstead and owned more than 400 acres of land along the Osage River, where Lewis operated several businesses related to the county's river traffic. The second primary residents were the Winkelmann family, who lived there longer than the Boltons. In addition to managing the farm, Herman Winkelmann served an instrumental role in creating the Cole County Farm Bureau. 

The establishment of permanent Euro-American settlements in Cole County coincided roughly with the onset of steamboat travel on the Missouri River in the late 1810s. Cole County is bounded by two navigable rivers where most early settlers made their homes: the Missouri River on the northeast and the Osage River on the southeast. U. S. surveyors performed their cadastral survey of the area around 1819, allowing for the creation of townships, county organization, and finally, the first recorded land sale by 1823. 

A North Carolina native, Meriwether Lewis Bolton (no relation to the famous explorer) came to Missouri in 1831 at age 32 with his first wife, Elizabeth, whom he married in 1826. In fact, Lewis was one of several Boltons to make the trek from North Carolina to Cole Cunty. Typical of the era, childbirth and childhood survival proved to be a challenging endeavor. Lewis and Elizabeth had several children, but only four survived into adulthood. Elizabeth died in 1848, the same year as the birth of their youngest daughter. Lewis remarried months later, marrying a widow, Anna Darnes. She brought two children into the marriage and then had three more children with Bolton, but two of them also died while young. 

Although Bolton acted as the first warden of the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City and served as a high-ranking officer in the 6th Division of the Missouri Militia around 1838, his main occupation involved farming and running river-related businesses, accumulating more than 400 acres of land, with much of it adjoined the Osage River. The Bolton home and its seven acres of land arose in the eastern part of Cole County, near a favored early crossing of the Osage River (which soon came to be known as Bolton Shoals) and a mere few miles south of its intersection with the Missouri River. Bolton's farmland produced a diverse set of crops and commodities, including tobacco, corn, oats, hogs, and cattle. And because the house occupied a blufftop lot with sweeping views of the Osage River and Osage River Valley, Bolton could easily see incoming river traffic from his home.

A log house likely sat on the land where Bolton's now-historic stone house arose, and the family probably used the log homes as their residence while constructing the new home. The stone for the home appears to have been transported from a quarry to St. Louis, where the stones were finished before shipping on a barge to present-day Jefferson City. The quality of the stonework leads one to believe that Bolton had hired skilled craftsmen and specialized stonecutters to build the home, demonstrating his wealth.

Thus, the house survives as one of the earliest examples of well-crafted, vernacular stonework in Cole County. The house is also an excellent example of an antebellum Greek Revival style I-house. Popular throughout the Midwest during the early- and mid-nineteenth century, I-houses mainly ran one room deep and at least two rooms wide, and the widest part of the house sat parallel to the road resulting in the broadest possible facade.

Bolton retained ownership of the house and managed the farm until he died in 1855, leaving an estate that included the house and well more than 400 acres of land. Anna died in 1869, which led to two decades of legal squabbles over the rights to the family property. Finally, in 1888, Herman Winkelmann and his cousin Herman Adrian bought the Bolton farmstead. They soon after divided the property into two parcels; Winkelmann kept the house and more than 300 acres. A few months after he bought the farm, he married Johana Melies, also a Missouri native, and they moved into the house that was to be their family home for decades. All eight of their children were born on the farm, and most of them grew to adulthood there. The legal problems and extended vacancy left the home in poor condition by the time the Winkelmanns purchased the property. In addition to adding some Victorian-style ornamentation to the historic home, the Winkelmanns built a room used as a school classroom for area children (including their own) and a bathroom, which included the installation of an interior cistern for a gravity-operated indoor plumbing system. 

A successful farmer, Herman Winkelmann proved instrumental in founding the Cole County Farm Bureau, and he was an active proponent of Agricultural Extension work in the area. Hermann operated the farm until his retirement in 1922 when he turned the business over to his sons Edmund and Otto. However, in 1925, two years after his wife died and after his son, Otto, also died, Winkelmann moved back to the farm to help Edmund; the two managed to keep the farm successful during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression era of the 1930s. 

Herman died in 1946, and the farmhouse and land were sold to Ed and Mary Heckman in 1947, who occupied the house until 1963. After decades of the home sitting vacant, Jude and Mary Markway purchased the historic home in 1998 and began an extensive rehabilitation project; Jude Markway was the great-great-grandson of Herman Winkelmann. Today, the completely renovated and restored home is known as the Colonel Bolton Home. In addition to enjoying the same look and feel of its antebellum-era days, it serves the community as a historical reminder of its early nineteenth-century past and as a cultural center used for events and weddings. 

"The Colonel Bolton Home." Accessed December 7, 2022. https://www.thecolonelboltonhome.com/

Freiman, Lauren Sable. "Colonel Bolton Home." Jefferson City Magazine. December 28, 2016. https://jeffersoncitymag.com/colonel-bolton-home/. 

Sheals, Debbie. "Registration Form: Bolton. Lewis and Elizabeth. House." National Register of Historic Places. mostateparks.com. 1999. https://mostateparks.com/sites/mostateparks/files/Bolton%2C%20Lewis%20and%20Elizabeth%2C%20House.pdf.