Its days as a restaurant apparently in the past, Bowling Green’s historic Mariah Moore House at 801 State St. has a new owner and a new purpose.

Bluegrass Ingredients, a supplier of specialty food ingredients that has had its headquarters in Glasgow for the past 25 years, has purchased the 200-year-old building from Franklin Bank & Trust and will move its headquarters to the building that is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Founded as Bluegrass Dairy in 1995, Bluegrass Ingredients has been since 2010 a subsidiary of the Dubilier & Company capital investment firm.

As Bluegrass Ingredients expanded its product mix beyond dairy powders to fruit, citrus and vegan powders in recent years, its leaders began looking for a new headquarters building.

Hoyt Huffman, Bluegrass Ingredients chief executive, said the Mariah Moore House that has been a Mariah’s restaurant and a Steamer Seafood eatery in recent years was the right fit.

“We’ve been in the process of looking at space for a corporate headquarters in Bowling Green,” Huffman said. “Someone showed us the restaurant. It’s a good fit for our management team.”

Renovations of the building will start immediately and be completed by the end of the year, he said.

Bluegrass Ingredients’ headquarters will include an innovation center and test kitchen, Huffman said. He expects the 12,000-square-foot building to house about 20 full-time employees.

“The new innovation center will provide a creative space to allow clients and Bluegrass research and development teams to collaborate, enhance and develop new ingredient and food powder offerings,” Huffman said in a news release.

Bluegrass Ingredients has production facilities in Glasgow and Springfield. The company supplies such niche ingredients as custom dairy blends and specialty powders to food companies.

The company will be moving into a building with a rich history and a somewhat troubled recent past.

Completed in 1818, the Mariah Moore House was built for Elizabeth and Mariah Moore, widow and daughter, respectively, of Bowling Green pioneer George Moore, who died in 1819. According to the city of Bowling Green website, it is the oldest brick building in Bowling Green.

It was converted by local restaurateur Rick Kelley to Mariah’s restaurant in 1980, rebuilt after a fire in 1995, and closed in 2013 due to financial difficulties. After entrepreneur Jerry Katzoff bought the restaurant and moved it to Hitcents Park Plaza in 2014, Owensboro native Dale Augenstein bought the historic building and converted it to the Steamer Seafood eatery that opened in 2016.

Augenstein said in 2016 that he spent more than $1 million renovating the building. He faced a setback in 2018 when he had to rebuild after a lightning strike led to a fire in the building.

He reopened the restaurant, only to fall victim to a heavy load of debt. The building was bought by creditor Franklin Bank & Trust at a master commissioner’s sale last October.

The bank cast the only bid of $1.25 million for the building and had the lone bid of $197,500 for the restaurant’s personal property. That total of $1,447,500 was short of the $2.8 million in debts listed on the master commissioner’s website, but the sale gave Franklin Bank & Trust ownership of the real estate and its contents free of any debts.

Augenstein expressed hope after the sale that he could continue to operate the restaurant through a lease agreement with the bank, but now the building’s future will be in service to food companies instead of restaurant patrons.

Augenstein – a 1981 Western Kentucky University graduate and former WKU Alumni Association National Board of Directors president who is the namesake of the Augenstein Alumni Center on the WKU campus – continues to operate a Steamer Seafood restaurant in Hilton Head Island, S.C.

– Follow business reporter Don Sergent on Twitter @BGDNbusiness or visit bgdailynews.com.