A property tied to key events in Bowling Green’s history is on the market on Fairview Avenue, tucked away next to Royal Arms Apartments.

The larger of two white houses at 864 Fairview Ave., on 2.3 acres, was built around 1853 by Tobias Grider, grandson of Bowling Green founder Robert Moore. It passed to Grider’s daughter Hattie, who owned it until her death in 1937.

Just a decade after its construction, according to former owners and residents, it was pressed into service as a hospital during the Civil War.

Union troops used Bowling Green as an important train depot and hospital city after its brief stint as Confederate state capital. Hundreds of thousands of troops passed through town, staying – and frequently dying – in a network of impromptu hospitals.

“They commandeered a lot of buildings in town for hospitals,” said Jonathan Jeffrey, Special Collections librarian at the Kentucky Library.

Tony Juarbe lived in the house for four or five years, moving out about five years ago, he said. While redoing landscaping near the surrounding brick fence, he turned up a Civil War belt buckle and ammunition casings, he said.

“It’s a beautiful old house,” Juarbe said.

He said he showed them to Warren County Judge-Executive Mike Buchanon, whose family owns the houses, and Buchanon told him he’d found similar things.

Buchanon confirmed its use as a hospital.

“It is my understanding that it was indeed used as a Civil War hospital,” he said via e-mail.

The house has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1979, said county Historic Preservation planner Miranda Clements. She provided a 1981 copy of “Today’s Real Estate: Bowling Green and Warren County,” which calls the larger house Fairview, or Ten Gables.

Buchanon said the house is built of poplar wood, with original poplar floors and siding.

“My wife’s grandparents, Pete and Bess Deemer, purchased the house and 42 acres in the late 1930s, and restored it,” Buchanon said. “They lived there until their deaths in the mid 1960s. It has been owned by my father-in-law Paul Deemer since that time, until his death. It recently became the property of my wife Ellen and her two brothers, Paul and Roy Deemer.

“The smaller of the (two) two-story houses on the property was originally used as a smokehouse on the first floor. There were outside stairs that led to the second floor, which was used as a schoolhouse for the children who lived in the main house.”

The smaller building has been called the old spring house, he said.

“Ellen’s parents lived there with her two brothers … until the mid-1960s,” Buchanon said. “My brother-in-law Paul and his family lived there for a short time after they were married, and Ellen and I lived there for several years when our children were small, in the late ’70s and early ’80s. It is now rented to a friend of ours. She has lived there for several years.”

Buchanon’s in-laws Roy and Brenda Deemer lived in the small house and ran the GreenTree Frame Shop and Art Gallery from there, he said.

The houses are listed for lease with Buchanon’s son, Michael Buchanon, through Crye-Leike Realty.

“They would be open to a build-suit arrangement,” Mike Buchanon said. “It could possibly end up for sale in the future, if a suitable arrangement is not found.”

Paul Deemer Jr. noted that tax credits are available for anyone who would buy and restore the buildings. Both state and federal credits exist.

“My feeling is that the house should be saved, as it is part of Bowling Green and Warren County history,” he said in an e-mail.