First Box of Cards

Posted on January 22, 2024 by admin

Nearly above freezing today, and icy rain this evening. A slushy week is ahead, more like late February or early March than late January, but each winter has its own rhythms. A relatively warm week this time of year is entirely welcome, except for the possibility of ice patches.

I’ve undertaken to sort my postcards, sometimes on the weekends, sometimes in the evenings, in short bursts. Note the choice of verb. Not organize. My goal isn’t so grand. I just want to separate the cards by who sent them, and store them in roughly chronological order, but not down to the granularity of an exact order – even if such a thing were possible, since not everyone dates every card, and USPS postmarks are often a smear of ink daring you to make sense of them.

Why bother? They’ll all be lost to time, of course. So what? It’s one of those things you do for your own satisfaction.

I’ve made my way through the first box out of 10 or so, but some other cards are stashed in folders and I’m not sure where else, down in the laundry room. This is going to take a while.

Most cards in this particular box are from the early to mid-2010s, though some as early as 2003 and as late as 2019. The tallest pile so far is from Ed Henderson, but I expect him to be overtaken eventually by cards from my brother Jay and Geof Huth, both of whom have known me longer, and both of whom have the advantage of being alive.

One from Jay, dated July 3, 2011.

No printed text on the reverse. “I can’t say that I have any idea what this card is about,” Jay wrote. Me either.

Getting Through Various Januaries

Posted on January 21, 2024 by admin

The near-zero and subzero days eased off late last week, enough that I completed the task that no one else wants, storing Christmas decorations in the garage. Also, moving snow out of the way on our sidewalks and driveway, though Yuriko did some of that as well. Deep chill was back on Saturday and some today, or at least it felt that way when I rolled the garbage cans out to the curb this evening.

Overcast skies meant there wasn’t even the consolation of constellations, bright in the clear winter night. Some other time, Orion.

Haven’t bothered taking many pictures lately. The bleak mid-winter doesn’t inspire camera-in-hand forays near or far. The back yard pretty much looks like this image from January 2015, except the dog isn’t nearly as vigorous in crossing the powdery flats as she used to be. In fact, just getting her out the door is a process that can take a few minutes, as is getting her back in.

Back even further, she romps through the snow of January 2014. As if there were that much difference.

On Saturday especially we cleaned house, especially in the kitchen the adjacent spaces – the food handling zones of the house. Always needs some attention. January has a way of pressing in on the walls of the house, focusing one’s attention on immediate surroundings. At least, that’s how I feel it.

I did such a January cleaning in 2014 – does that year really correspond to 10 years ago? There goes time, flying again, flapping its wings just a little louder every year. Ten years ago, ours was a house with children. Who spent a fair amount of time on the living room couch.

One day I moved the couch to clean behind it.

For some reason I decided to document it. Was I mad at my daughters? I don’t think I was, but I did show it to them. What with prying the couch from its position, this was a job for Dad.

In January 2006, we visited a showing of snow sculptures in the northwest suburbs.

Nice, but I don’t think I’ve had the urge to seek out any more snow sculpture events since then.

Mega Cavern

Posted on January 18, 2024 by admin

A message we saw in Louisville recently.

Not something you see that much, not put quite that way. Maybe that’s an unconscious acknowledgment that nowhere in Scripture is Jesus’ exact birthday ever mentioned. It reminded me of a scene from Full Metal Jacket.

The message was in lights, and there was a good reason for that. It was part of Lights Under Louisville, an annual display of Christmas lights by Mega Cavern. A lot of lights: at 7 million, said to be the largest such light display in the world.

Mega Cavern is an attraction south of downtown Louisville, and a fairly recent one at that, opening for tourists only in 2009. In the mid-20th century, miners extracted limestone from under the area’s hills, eventually creating 4 million square feet of space. In comparison, the Sears Tower totals 4.4 million square feet, so nearly a Sears Tower worth of space was excavated under a section of I-264 and the Louisville Zoo and a major city park. By the early ’90s, mining had ceased, and the voids were developed into warehouse space.

In that, the place naturally reminded me of SubTropolis in Kansas City, Mo., which I visited in ’99. Unlike that man-made cave, which is still all business, Mega Cavern started adding activities for visitors, at first tours through the cave. There is still underground warehouse space, and tenants for it.

But now the facility also has underground zip lines, an aerial ropes course, and walking and tram tours most of the year. Mega Cavern used to have an enormous dirt bike course, at 320,000 square feet said to the the world’s largest underground off-road bike facility, but that didn’t last (I suspect insurance issues).

Around Christmas, you can either drive through Mega Cavern to see the millions of lights, or pay a little more and ride on a wagon pulled by a Jeep, which is what we did on December 30. It was the only activity on this trip that I had to book in advance.

The public entrance to the cave doesn’t even hint at what’s below.

At the end of a short hall is a large room used to turn vehicles around, and as a waiting area for those riding trams.

Beyond that is a room with the service desk, a small snack shop, a gift shop and a view of some climbing equipment.

We’d come for the Christmas Express.

Of we went, exactly as scheduled. I was expecting the lights to be arrayed in tree-oriented abstractions. Or just to be artful strings of lights.

There was a lot of that. At the risk of sounding churlish, since we enjoyed riding through the lights thoroughly, the ride could have used more displays like these. Most of the displays had themes. Such as local themes. They were artful, too, just not quite as spectacular.

Patriotic themes. Many more than this.

Christian themes.

Movie franchises. More than pictured here, but I don’t remember all of them now. Many geared to children. I’d heard of almost all of them.

I remember a few omissions. Star Wars – more than one display, I think. But no Star Trek. Also, Barbie. Were pink Christmas trees in vogue over the holidays? Experts say yes. But what, no Oppenheimer? C’mon, they were peas in the same summer blockbuster pod.

I’m pretty sure a Manhattan Project display would have harshed everyone’s holiday buzz, so no go. But can you imagine? The centerpiece of the Oppenheimer display would, of course, be a mushroom cloud in holiday lights.

21c Hotel Museum, Louisville

Posted on January 17, 2024 by admin

Not quite the depth of cold today as the three days before. I think temps reached double digits, reckoned in Fahrenheit, and tomorrow we’ll enjoy a balmy 20 F. With a little more snow, and sliding temps for the weekend. Such is January.

One of our more interesting moments in Louisville at the end of ’23 came at the lower level of a downtown hotel. I took a moment to rest on a bench.

Soon, Yuriko joined me.

It’s a little hard to tell with still images, but the letters appeared to drift downward and then rest on your reflection. Up close, the letters looked like this.

We were looking at an art installation next to a bank of elevators.

Back in the 2000s, I wrote at least one article, already lost to time, about a new boutique hotel in Louisville, of all places. The redevelopment of a number of derelict downtown warehouses, joined for the purpose, created the 21c Hotel Museum. I brought my professional skepticism to the task. Saving warehouses is a good idea, and if the market can bear high-priced hotel rooms in downtown Louisville, fine.

But the hotel was supposed to be a contemporary art museum as well, as its founders were art collectors. I doubted that it was much of a museum, though without any evidence one way or the other. It just sounded like the sort of claim a new boutique hotel would make: put a few paintings in an empty room on the property, call yourself a museum, elevate your room rates.

That was in a time – before the panic of 2008 – of a number of boutique hotel rollouts, often smaller brands owned by very large hotel chains, each angling for something to make it stand out, at least superficially, from the sameness of the mainstream brands.

That all was in the back of my mind when, on December 30, we dropped by 21c Hotel Museum.

A gilded statue stands watch outside: “David (inspired by Michelangelo)” (2005), which is double the size of its inspiration and largely fiberglass, by Turkish artist Serkan Özkaya.

I hadn’t thought about the 21c in a number of years, so even as I entered, I wasn’t expecting much. I was wrong. As a museum, the place is fair-sized, its art in galleries on the hotel’s lower level, and it has an interesting collection.

I couldn’t find the description of the metal tornado near the ceiling, but I liked it.

Details of other works at the 21c. A series of faces.

All of the works are recent vintage, as in 21st century. Fitting the name. Though the Louisville redevelopment was the first of them, there are currently eight 21c Hotel Museums, owned by Accor, including others in Bentonville, Ark., Chicago, Cincinnati, Durham, NC, Kansas City, Mo., Lexington, Ky. and St. Louis. Each has exhibit space, collectively totaling 75,000 square feet.

Best of all, you can just wander in and look at it. No admission, no questions asked.

Down the hall from the “Text Rain” is a work tucked away in a utilitarian lower space outside a window, “Cloud Rings” by Ned Kahn (2006). Its sign says: A series of devices that continuously shoot rings of fog up into an exterior sunken courtyard space.

We spent a fair while watching it at work.

Cool. Black and white was just the thing for it.

Main Street, Louisville, But Not the World’s Largest Baseball Bat

Posted on January 16, 2024 by admin

Deep cold these last few days, so we passed the time, including the MLK holiday, in 21st-century central heated space, that is, home. Filed papers, hauled my boxes of postcards out of the closet for a look and a touch of reorganization – not to the point of being highly organized, though – and removed ornaments and lights from the Christmas tree and in one brief expedition into the frozen waste of our back yard, deposited the tree out there.

Should I burn it? Makes a glorious flame, if only for a few seconds. We shall see.

Wonder when the owner of this vehicle removed the Nativity.

Whenever that was, I have to say that I’d never seen that familiar display in this unusual location. For all I know, however, it could be the next big thing in honoring the First Christmas.

We spotted Bethlehem on wheels in east Louisville on the evening of December 29. The next morning we made our way to Main Street in downtown Louisville; and we returned to the area just before we left town on the morning of New Year’s Eve. Some blocks are exceptionally handsome.

The valuable facades of these pre-Great War vintage buildings look to be, in some cases, saved for later development behind them. Maybe mixed-use, largely residential but also specialty retail. I could imagine that outcome.

Not all of the street features refurbished leftovers from the late 19th century. Rising at W. Main and 5th Street is a behemoth occupied by a for-profit healthcare behemoth, the Humana Building. Designed by Michael Graves in 1985. Look up postmodern and I think you’d see an image of this building.

The structure is such a behemoth that it was impossible to get the building all within a shot, standing across the street from it. Still — something of a bird of prey vibe, seems like. Mecha-Owl?

It stands on the site of the Kenyon Building, pictured here in 1927.

The Kenyon itself no doubt replaced earlier, smaller structures. Louisville emerged as a city with rapidity in the early 19th century, with Main its first focus.

“West Main Street was the first street in the city,” Louisvilleky.gov notes. “The first businesses to line West Main Street included an attorney, grocer, boardinghouse, auctioneer, merchant, carpenter, tailor, shoemaker, tobacco inspector, blacksmith, engineer, physician, hatter, tallow chandler, barber, painter, upholsterer, insurance company, plasterer, druggist, and brewer.”

How many of those professions remain on Main Street? I’m not going to do anything like work to find out, but my guess would be attorneys and insurance companies, certainly, maybe an engineer or two, some physicians, and merchants, depending on how you define that. Very likely no blacksmiths, hatters or tallow chandlers.

In our time, Main is also a street of some curiosities. Such as Jane Fonda in microgravity.

Nightspot Barbarella apparently didn’t survive the pandemic. This is the entirety of the last note from Barbarella on Facebook (October 5, 2021): “Permanently closed bitches!!! Loved y’all. It was a wild ride. But the roller coaster has come to an end!”

That last image is the Metropolitan Sewer District 4th Street Flood Pump Station, since 2022 adorned with a mural called “Hope Springs – The Wishing Well” by local artist Whitney Olsen. The linked press release also makes mention of the recently completed, fully invisible tunnel under the city — the Waterway Protection Tunnel, four miles long and 18 stories below ground, to capture surges of storm water. I’m no engineer, but that sounds pretty impressive

A more-or-less empty plaza, formally called Riverfront Plaza/Belvedere, extends from Main to a view of the Ohio. Part of the plaza is built over I-64.

Off in the distance an outline of a statue is just barely visible from Main. I imagined that the statue honored Muhammad Ali. As long ago as 1978, the city renamed a major downtown street after him, though not without resistance that’s completely unimaginable now; and the sizable Muhammad Ali Center is also downtown.

But no: the 1973 work is much more traditional, honoring Louisville founder George Rogers Clark, who has, of course, a larger memorial elsewhere. (The Ali Center is in the distance behind him in my image.)

Felix de Weldon did the statue. He’s better known for the Marine Corps War Memorial (Iwo Jima Memorial) at Arlington National Cemetery and, interestingly, he also did the Malaysian National Monument (Tugu Negara) in Kuala Lumpur. I have a vague memory of seeing that, in wilting tropical heat. Weldon did much more over a long life. His partial listing of public sculpture on Wiki begins with King George V in 1935 and ends with another sort of king, Elvis Presley, in 1995.

The George Rogers Clark bronze dates from 1973, but there is another more recent statue on the plaza: York, the only black member of Lewis and Clark’s expedition and as such the first African-American known to cross the continent, in a 2003 work by Ed Hamilton.

Coming to the Corps of Discovery as Clark’s personal slave, York has quite a story, and an especially awful one after the expedition returned, only much recognized in recent decades (see 37:23 and after in this lecture). No doubt York would have preferred freedom after the trek to the Pacific and back was over, instead of honors 200 years later, but the former isn’t in anyone’s power these days, while the latter is.

The plaza also offers nice views of the Louisville skyline. The Galt House hotel is a whopper: at 1,310 rooms, reportedly the largest in Kentucky, plus 130,000 square feet of meeting space and six restaurants. Developed in the 1970s, the hotel bears a name that’s an homage to a series of earlier hotels called Galt, one with a particularly colorful history that was the site, in ’62, where one Union general offed another Union general with a pistol shot at close range.

THE MURDER OF GEN. NELSON. ON page 669 we publish an illustration of the ASSASSINATION OF GENERAL NELSON BY GENERAL J. C. DAVIS, which took place ten days since at Louisville. Our picture is from a sketch by our artist, Mr. Mosler, who visited the spot immediately after the affair.

Even more remarkably, the Galt is owned by a single family, not an transnational. A single, sometimes quarreling family, but there isn’t so much remarkable about that.

The 35-story 400 Market, with the domed top, is the tallest building in Louisville.

Look the other direction and spy the mighty Ohio.

Stairs lead from the plaza down to a riverfront park developed in the 1990s, but late December wasn’t a good time for such a stroll, even though the drizzle had abated by the last day of the year. Some other warmer time, perhaps. Whatever the merits of that park, I doubt that it can erase the fact that the Robert Moses gash that is I-64 largely cuts downtown Louisville off from the river – the very reason there is a city in the first place.

Main Street plaques, along with metal bats, honor baseball players along the way.

Roberto Clemente is one of 60 honorees in the Louisville Slugger Walk of Fame, which stretches on sidewalks from the Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory on Main St. to Louisville Slugger Field a little more than a mile away. We decided not to visit the baseball bat factory itself, which includes the world’s largest baseball bat (bigger than “Batcolumn in Chicago? Yes, by 19 feet.). Still, we walked by a few other bronze bats and home plates embedded in the sidewalk.

Is Chico Escuela is among the honored? I have to wonder. He should be. Considering that he’s fictional, the plaque wouldn’t have to bother with tedious stats. All it would have to say (naturally) is, “Baseball been barra, barra good to me!”

A Tale of Two Kentucky Distilleries

Posted on January 11, 2024 by admin

Oh, boy.

Winter’s been pretty easy on us so far, but that’s almost over. We’re headed for the pit of winter now, maybe a little earlier than it usual comes (end of January, beginning of February, I always thought). It might be a long narrow pit that will be hard to climb out of.

Even so, I will enjoy Monday off, including all professional and nonprofessional writing. Back to posting on January 16.

Though not a drinking couple, we figured we couldn’t visit Bardstown, Kentucky, and not drop in on a distillery. Think of all the marketing dollars spent by the Kentucky Distillers’ Association, and the distilleries themselves, that have gone into making this part of the commonwealth a bourbon destination. Toward that end, the KDA established a “Bourbon Trail” in 1999, focusing on Kentucky, but also including operations in Indiana, Ohio and Tennessee.

First we drove to the gates of the Barton 1792 Distillery, which is in town and had a most industrial aspect to it. Also, the gates had a sign saying the place was closed to the public, in spite of what other information had told us.

So we headed out to another distillery on the map, Heaven Hill, on the outskirts of town. It’s a big operation. Off in the distance from the visitor center parking lot are clusters of enormous HH buildings – rickhouses, they’re called, a term used industrywide – to store barrels of the distillery’s products while they’re aging.

“Heaven Hill’s main campus [in Bardstown] holds 499,973 barrels and was also the site of the famous 1996 fire,” the HH web site says. “Fueled by 75 mph winds, the fire ultimately destroyed seven rickhouses and over 90,000 barrels of Bourbon, which was two percent if the world’s Bourbon at the time.”

Bacchus wept. His wheelhouse is wine, but surely he takes an interest in hard liquor too.

Wonder why the HH rickhouse designers didn’t add space for 27 more barrels, so the total would come in at an even half-million. Anyway, that’s a lot of hooch. As for the fire, I must have heard about it at the time, but have no memory of it. I understand that occasionally rickhouses collapse, too. Bad luck for any poor fool inside, who’d be victim of a freak accident. Alcohol kills a lot of people, but not many that way.

Heaven Hill was swarming with visitors, and all tours were sold out on the drizzly afternoon of December 29. We spent a little time at the visitors center looking at some of the exhibits, including about the fire, but also about the family that has run the distillery for many years, the Shipiras – originally successful Jewish merchants in Kentucky – and the original master distiller, Joseph L. Beam, who was Jim Beam’s first cousin.

Soon we went to the Willett Distillery, up the road a piece from Heaven Hill. It isn’t as large an operation, but it too is a family-run business, by descendants of John David Willett (d. 1914) and a Norwegian who showed up in America in the 1960s at a young age and eventually married into the family. Importantly for our purposes, spots were available on the last tour of the day.

Our guide was a voluble woman in her 50s, who perhaps has a sign in her house that says It’s 5 O’Clock Somewhere. She was informative about distilled spirits, and herself, so we learned that she’s a widow with grown children and some grandchildren, and not originally from Kentucky. Or a bourbon drinker.

“I used to be a clear spirits gal, but since I’ve worked here, I’ve learned to love bourbon more,” she said.

I might not drink bourbon, but I appreciate the fact that distilleries have a lot of cool-looking equipment. Willett certainly does.

Best of all, we went into one of the Willett rickhouses.

Willett is small compared to Heaven Hill, with all of its barrels able to fit into one HH rickhouse, according to our guide. She said that more than once. But she also played it as a virtue, hinting — since it would be impolitic to say it outright — that the neighboring distillery was entirely too big for its britches.

Wickland, Home of Three Governors

Posted on January 10, 2024 by admin

From My Old Kentucky Home State Park, it’s a hop and skip, not even a jump, to another old Kentucky home, Wickland. Or as it is called on Google maps, Wickland, Home of Three Governors.

For good reason, it turns out. That wording is on the sign at the entrance.

Whatever else you can say about Google as a rapacious entity, you have to admire its maps. My affection for paper maps hasn’t dwindled, and I still use them, but sometimes things pop up on Google Maps that I instantly know I should visit, such as Wickland.

Though with a Bardstown address, it is a bit out of town.

Done in Georgian style, rather than Federal, Wickland is roughly a contemporary of Federal Hill (My Old Kentucky Home). We weren’t entirely sure it was open, but in we went, to be greeted by a woman perhaps 10 years younger than me whose name I forget, but who said she managed the place.

That meant taking taking down some of the Christmas decorations at that moment, but she paused that activity to tell us about the mansion for a few minutes, intimating that it was just as interesting as Federal Hill, but received much less attention. I’ll go along with that. She was the only other person there, and said that we were the only visitors so far that day.

Its original owner, one Charles A. Wickliffe, built the house in the 1810s from a design by a Baltimore architect named John Rogers, and later Wickliffe became governor of Kentucky. His son Robert C. Wickliffe grew up at Wickland but moved to Louisiana, where he was governor of that state just before the war. John Crepps Wickliffe Beckham, Charles’ grandson and John’s nephew, was also born at Wickland and he too was a governor of Kentucky, taking office in 1900 after the death of four-day Gov. William Goebel, who was assassinated. That’s an entirely different story, and one I won’t get into, but more about it is here.

John Rogers, incidentally, designed the Basilica of Saint Joseph Proto-Cathedral in Bardstown, which was locked when we came by the same day.

After our brief chat, the manager of Wickland turned us loose for a self-guided tour. That is, we wandered around the mansion’s three floors, completely unsupervised. Also, unlike at Federal Hill, we could take pictures, so I did.

Nice. Not all of the Christmas decorations were down yet.

Wickland doesn’t charge anything to visit, but we made a donation equal to what we paid to see the more ballyhooed My Old Kentucky Home. Seemed only right.

Return From Seattle

Posted on January 9, 2024 by admin

Ann’s back from Seattle, where she went last Thursday for a visit with her sister. I picked her up at O’Hare this evening. Heavy snow in the Chicago area today, the heaviest of the winter so far but which tapered off late in the afternoon, delayed her for a few hours at her layover point in Denver after an early start this morning.

She said she’d never been so glad to leave a place as the Denver airport. Just wait, I said, there will be even longer travel days eventually. At least I hope so; airport purgatory is one of the mild prices one pays to see distant things in the modern age.

While in Seattle, she enjoyed some of the cultural richness of that city.

That’s at a place called Archie McPhee’s Rubber Chicken Museum. Can’t believe I’d never heard of it. Only open since 2018, though. Like the Chihuly Museum, a place I must see next visit to Seattle. Of course, it’s really a novelty shop. Ann bought me some stickers there, sporting rubber chickens, and I was happy to get them.

My Old Kentucky Home State Park

Posted on January 8, 2024 by admin

When John Rowan began work on a house for his family in north-central Kentucky in the 1790s, he called it Federal Hill. Finally completed in 1818 largely by slave labor, it stands today as the centerpiece of My Old Kentucky Home State Park in the outskirts of Bardstown, a handsome structure in a pleasant setting.

Besides surviving an 1801 duel in which he killed the other fellow, and beating the rap, Rowan went on to be an important politico in early Kentucky, including a term in the U.S. Senate as an antagonist to Henry Clay and the Whigs, being a Jackson man. He died in 1843, missing the later unpleasantness, and even the war the Mexico.

We visited around noon on December 29. We were the only ones on the tour, in contrast (later that same day) to the distilleries we visited. I hadn’t read much about the place before the visit, and vaguely assumed that there was some good reason that the property’s current name evokes the famed Stephen Foster song. It inspired him in the composition in some way, perhaps.

The house museum doesn’t exactly discourage this line of thinking. At the visitors center is this portrait of Foster.

There he is, in a 1939 painting by Howard Chandler Christy, receiving the gift of composition from a muse – Euterpe, I suppose, muse of music and lyric poetry and, perhaps, the modern popular song. To the left of the muse’s wings (did muses have wings?) is the entrance of Federal Hill, and there are visual references to some of Foster’s other songs as well.

The Kentucky Colonels’ organization commissioned the painting for the world’s fair in New York that year, and “My Old Kentucky Home” had become the official state (commonwealth) song not too many years earlier. So I assume the Colonels wanted to emphasize a Kentucky connection with the famed song, aside from the fact that the name is in the title and opening lines.

An aside: I know that a Kentucky Colonelcy is an honor bestowed by the commonwealth, but I’m still a little surprised by some of the names on this list, such as Princess Anne, Bob Barker, Foster Brooks (well, he was from Louisville), Phyllis Diller, George Harrison (actually, all the Beatles, even Ringo), David Schwimmer, Red Skelton, and both Smothers brothers (RIP, Tom).

The museum (at least in our time) doesn’t explicitly claim that Federal Hill was an inspiration for the song, since the evidence for that seems to be gossamer thin. I’ve read conflicting reports about whether Stephen Foster, described as a “cousin” of the Rowan family – which could mean various levels of consanguinity in the loose definitions of 19th-century America – even visited Federal Hill from his home in Pittsburgh.

It is clear, however, that “My Kentucky Home” was inspired by Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and as such, sympathized with slaves separated from family members without pity or recourse. The song’s association with a particular mansion in Kentucky, namely this particular one, apparently came later – well after the Civil War. The idea seems to have been promoted by, among others, the last member of the Rowan family to own the mansion, an elderly granddaughter who managed to sell the property to the commonwealth in the early 1920s.

Can’t really blame her if she took a little creative liberty with the history of Federal Hill, since she probably wanted to live somewhere with less expensive upkeep. Also, such a thing would be firmly within the American (and entirely human) tradition of historical storytelling known as “making things up.”

Be that as it may, Federal Hill is well appointed inside with period items, and our guide, a young woman dressed antebellum style, knew her non-made-up stuff. She also sang the first verse of “My Old Kentucky Home” for us, in a pleasant and practiced voice, which I understand is part of all the tours. Of course, the first lines weren’t quite the Steven Foster original, being:

The sun shines bright in the old Kentucky home/
‘Tis summer, the people are gay.

The Kentucky legislature mandated the change, at least for official renditions, after an embarrassing incident in 1986 when a visiting group of Japanese students sang the song, original lyrics and all, to the legislature.

Our guide mentioned, almost in passing, an horrific incident from the time of John Rowan. In 1833, the family, or many of them, ate or drank something contaminated with Vibrio cholerae, and three of Rowan’s children (he had nine), a son- and daughter-in law, a granddaughter, and his sister and brother-in-law all died of cholera in short order, as did a similar number of slaves.

Many of these Rowans are buried within sight of the mansion, and the visitor center, for that matter.

Sen. Rowan himself joined them later, marked by the obelisk. The memorial behind his, with the grieving figure and lyre, is that of Madge Rowan Frost (d. 1925), the granddaughter who sold the property to the state.

The park, in the form of its guided tour, and written material on signs, doesn’t ignore the enslaved population, as no historic property of this kind would do any more, possibly following the lead of Monticello. Sen. Rowan owned as many as 39 people at one time. A sign near the Rowan cemetery details what is known about them.

But not their burial sites; that remains unknown. Likewise, their cabins, along with most of the other outbuildings, are long gone. Mostly what you’ll see at the state park is a picturesque mansion retroactively tied to an enduring song.

Bardstown Walkabout

Posted on January 7, 2024 by admin

For those who dreamed of a pink Christmas this year, there was this shop window in Bardstown, Kentucky.

Not only pink trees, but an entrance with a Fanny Brice sort of greeting.

For many years, the building on North Third Street housed Spalding & Sons, a dry goods store founded in the 1850s which later morphed into a small-town department store that finally closed for good only in 2013. A woman’s boutique, Peacock on Third, now occupies the space (the dark building on the right in the picture below).

These days a boutique of that kind fits right in on Third, which is Bardstown’s main street. Other nearby specialty shops include At Mary’s gift shop, the Tea Cozy, Shaq & Coco (furniture), Kaden Lake and Cactus Annie’s (both women’s clothes), and Pink Fine Consignments & Boutique and Gnarly Gnick Gnacks; eateries in the vicinity include Bardstown Burger, Cafe Primo, Pat’s Place and the Old Talbott Tavern.

We were out and about in Bardstown on December 29, the second day of our trip, an overcast and moderately chilly day, having driven the 30 miles or so from Louisville that morning. This part of Bardstown caters mostly to visitors, who were few that day, but the street wasn’t completely deserted.

The town has managed to preserve a nice collection of century-and-older buildings that are mostly still in use.

A few ghost signs.

A selection of pre-FDIC bank buildings.

The five-and-dime is also gone.

At the junction of Third and another major street, Stephen Foster Avenue – more about him later – is a roundabout, and in the roundabout is the imposing former courthouse, which these days houses the Bardstown Tourist & Convention Commission, the Nelson County Economic Development Agency and the Bardstown Nelson County C-of-C.

Another relic of the great age of courthouse building in the United States, designed by Mason Maury and completed in 1892. Most of Maury’s work was in Louisville, and in fact he designed Kentucky’s first skyscraper in that city, the Kenyon Building. Sadly, that structure didn’t survive the mid-century purge of old buildings.

At one corner Third and Stephen Foster is a building whose first floor is occupied by a drugstore: Hurst Discount Drugs.

We happened to be looking for lunch at that moment, and happened to notice that Hurst also includes a lunch counter. How many drugstores have lunch counters any more? How many did even 30 or 40 years ago? We instantly decided to eat there. I did, anyway, since I’m not sure Yuriko appreciated what a rara avis we’d found, but she was game.

We weren’t the only customers, though everyone else left before we did.

Speaking of rare birds: only one thing on the menu was more than $10, the double bacon cheese burger deluxe at $10.19. Order deluxe and you get mayo, ketchup, mustard, tomato, lettuce, pickle and grilled onions.

Besides burgers, other options included sandwiches and a few breakfast items. Even better, the flip side of the menu offered an array of ice cream products: scoops, shakes, malts, ice cream sodas, banana splits and sundaes, and floats — black cow (Coke), brown cow (root beer), and orange cow (orange sherbet and Sprite).

I had the more modest cheeseburger deluxe at $7.49, plus a chocolate shake for $6.29. Elevated compared to only a few years ago, certainly, but still reasonable, especially considering that the burger was good and the shake was really good.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling