The Address: 260 Weaver Road

Getting back to nature in an unexpected place.
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Photograph by William Manning

The Oberhelman name has been a big one in Park Hills since the 1930s, when the family ran Chappie’s Tavern on Dixie Highway’s original “gourmet strip.” But William Oberhelman had dreams of starting a pay-to-fish lake instead of joining the family business. In 1950 he purchased a 30-acre tulip farm in Florence and built several lakes on the property, including local icon Chap’s Lake.

Photograph by William Manning

Thirty years later, William sold 10 acres to his son and daughter-in-law, Kenneth and Bobbie. The only structure on the property when Kenneth and Bobbie purchased it was a small cottage fronting Dixie Highway, so in 1985 the couple built the current home on a wooded, nine-acre lot. The transitional ranch home includes a floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace in the family room, walkout French doors to the pool in back, and a heavy-duty “speakeasy–style” front door. Bobbie and her daughter Amy Zern, now a Chicago-based interior designer, decorated it themselves. The real charmer here is the property, which includes a gated entry, a 50-foot-deep private lake, and a picnic shelter. Part of the Oberhelman family estate for more than 80 years, it went on the market for $1.1 million in 2012. Interestingly, it was also being pitched to potential industrial buyers. Though the house is sited in such a way to maximize privacy, its nearest neighbors are warehouses and light manufacturing companies.

Photograph by William Manning

But about that lake. Avid anglers will be interested to know this fish story: According to Bobbie, it’s inhabited by a 125-pound shovelhead catfish. “It was put in there in 1990,” she says. “It surfaces every once in a while…it’s coal-black-looking and I’d say it was at least six feet long.” Sounds like quite a fish tale to us.

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