House where Yablonski murders occurred has a rich history
Brad Hundt/Observer-Reporter
The three-story farmhouse once owned by the Yablonski family has a rich history dating back more than 200 years.
Observer-Reporter
Police and union officials gather at the home of Joseph “Jock” Yablonski in Clarksville on Jan. 5, 1970, when the bodies of Joseph, 59, his wife, Margaret, 57, and daughter, Charlotte, 24, were found.
CLARKSVILLE – George Washington might well have slept at the house at 5 Polly Ave., in Clarksville.
Really.
The three-story farmhouse was built in 1778 by Henry Enoch, a lieutenant colonel in the Revolutionary War, so it’s not out of the question that Washington might have rested at the imposing house that once was called Mount Pleasant and was at the center of a bustling plantation. When it was sold in 1814, an ad in The Washington Reporter called it “a valuable plantation … in view of the woolen manufactory of Clarksville” and noted that it contained “a large dairy, merchant grist and saw mills, fish aplenty in season (and) a large frame barn and out-buildings.”
There is the possibility that slaves might once have been kept there when slavery was allowed in this region. There are also potential links to Gen. George Armstrong Custer, notorious for leading his troops to their deaths at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876.
“It floors you when you go back through the history,” according to Mike Packrall, who co-owns the house with his wife, Kathy.
Despite a history that stretches back more than two centuries, it is now most widely known as the house where Jock Yablonski, his wife, Margaret, and his daughter, Charlotte, were killed on Dec. 31, 1969, by three hitmen at the behest of Tony Boyle, the president of the United Mine Workers of America. The Packralls prefer not to dwell on that aspect of the house’s history, arguing instead that the Yablonski murders are part of the house’s history, but not its whole history.
“There is a lot of history, Mike Packrall added. “We’re just trying to do the house right.”
Yablonski’s sons sold the house to Kathy’s father, Robert Luzier, in 1972. Luzier purchased some Clydesdale horses and asked Yablonski’s son, Kenneth, if he could use the barn on the property to house them. He agreed, and handed Luzier a house key so that he could keep an eye on the then-unoccupied house.
“I just fell in love with it,” Luzier explained. Unfazed by what happened there a few years before, he purchased the house and moved his family in a couple of years later. It’s been unoccupied since 1995, and Luzier put the property up for auction in 2003, but it failed to meet the reserve price.
The Packralls are now renovating the property, and would like to have members of all the families who once lived in the house have a look at it after they are done.
“We’re looking to be good stewards of this historic house,” Kathy Packrall said.