FRANKLIN – A house that’s been linked to numerous duels is now open for regularly scheduled tours.

The Sandford Duncan Inn is one of the oldest buildings in Simpson County, constructed in 1819 or perhaps even earlier. Nowadays, it stands on the side of U.S. 31-W, two stories tall and protected from the elements with white wooden siding.

While the building was intended as a place for stagecoach travelers on the Louisville and Nashville Turnpike to stay the night, it was also frequently used by people who came to Kentucky for the express purpose of settling disputes with a duel, according to Dan Ware, director of the Simpson County Tourism Commission.

“The inn was significant as a stagecoach stop, it was significant as a place for dueling and because of Sandford Duncan’s prominence as a citizen, it’s significant to our history and the growth of Franklin. His (inn) put us on the map,” he said.

For more than a decade, dueling was legal in Kentucky but outlawed in Tennessee, which led some Tennesseans to cross the border to duel. A number of those people, including Sam Houston, then a U.S. senator, stayed at the Sandford Duncan Inn when he came to Kentucky to duel in 1826.

A document from the tourism commission said Houston, after attacking the character of Nashville’s postmaster general, received a challenge to duel from Gen. William A. White.

Houston and White met on the nearby dueling ground known as Limkumpinch, the exact location of which is unknown, on Sept. 22, 1826.

The duel ended with White wounded and Houston unscathed.

Duels were often fought at dawn, with the combatants sometimes staying up in the Sandford Duncan Inn the night before drinking rum.

“If the duel was going to be fought at dawn as they usually were, they would come the night before and I’m thinking if I knew I was going to get up first thing in the morning and someone was going to shoot at me, I probably wouldn’t sleep a lot. I think they probably sat in the tavern and had multiple drams of rum,” Ware said.

He speculated this might be why “fewer people than you might expect” were mortally wounded in duels.

“After they drank that much, their aim might not have been as good,” he said. “They had the liquid courage but not the aim.”

The inn itself looks much the way it did back when stagecoaches were stopping there regularly. Inside, the wooden walls are whitewashed, the stairs are narrow and each room is outfitted with tools and period furniture like beds with mattresses supported by a network of ropes.

The building has no air conditioning, electricity or plumbing.

The inn’s current layout resembles the one it had when the Duncan family still operated it, with the first floor divided into a tavern and the Duncan family’s living quarters separated by a “dog trot,” a central corridor that helped ventilate the building in the summer, according to tour guide Cathy Mohamed.

Sandford Duncan’s wife, Nancy Hammond Duncan, would often cook for the guests at the fireplace in the family’s living quarters, she said.

“They would actually live most of the time in here … near the fireplace,” she said.

The upper floors were divided into a sleeping area for men and one for women, Mohamed said.

On the men’s side, three thin mattresses lay on the ground, though the room may have contained a large bed supported by a bed frame in the inn’s heyday.

Since 2010, the inn has been available for tours by appointment only, Ware said. This year, the tourism commission will offer free half-hour tours on Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays from noon to 3 p.m.

“We’ll try to have these regular hours all this year,” he said. “In the summer, we’ll try to stage a duel re-enactment on the site. Then we’ll assess at the end of the year how many visitors we’ve had and … if there’s enough interest we would try to continue into the next year.”

Ware said the Sandford Duncan Inn has not drawn a great deal of tourists because he considers it to be the sort of place people visit on a whim after seeing a larger attraction like Old Friends, a stable for retired race horses on the grounds of Kentucky Downs, rather than the sort of place people typically make reservations for ahead of time.

By scheduling regular tours there, Ware hopes to make tours more easily available to tour groups that may be interested in seeing the site while in the area.

Either way, Ware considers the Sandford Duncan Inn an important part of local history that should be preserved.

“That has an intrinsic value regardless of whether it’s 100 people or 100,000 people. you need to preserve your history and the stories, some of which is fully documented, some of which is folklore,” he said. “In the grand scheme of things, the Sandford Duncan Inn is just a footnote to history, but sometimes the footnotes are the most interesting parts.”

– Follow Daily News reporter Jackson French on Twitter @Jackson_French or visit bgdailynews.com.