1808 - 1883
Dry Goods Merchant and Banker.
Henry Bell was born on March 28, 1808 in Georgetown, Delaware and came to Lexington in 1833 to establish a dry goods business. In 1852, he organized the Henry Clay Memorial Foundation (erectors of the Clay Monument in the Lexington Cemetery). Mr. Bell was serving as the President of the Lexington branch bank of the Bank of Kentucky in 1865, when its assets were assumed by the First National Bank.
Relocating to St. Louis after the Civil War, Mr. Bell accumulated a large fortune in the dry goods business. He returned to Lexington around 1878 and became a director of the Northern Bank of Kentucky, Lexington Cemetery Company and Sayre School. He died during 1883 in Jacksonville, Florida, where he had gone for health reasons.
His son, David D. Bell, married a daughter of Ephraim D. Sayre of D. A. Sayre & Company, was a director of the Northern Bank and owned the Bell Place Mansion on Bell Court.
