In case you hadn't noticed, it didn't rain today in this part of Kentucky. Not this morning. Not this afternoon. Not anywhere we happened to be. The sky occasionally looked mildly disagreeable, but moments later it would look happy again. So we walked all over the place -- Concetta says about 9,500 steps worth. We walked to several museums. We walked to a liquor emporium and a whiskey distillery. We walked two historic farmsteads, and a state park. And just for good measure, we walked a plain old neighborhood in Bardstown just to see the neat old Victorian houses. And during all that time not a drop of rain fell on us. I think perhaps we're simply dreaming because yesterday enough water to fill the Panama Canal fell on us with scarcely any letup.
Okay, so it's not yesterday. I get that. But how in the heck can a state in this union have such capricious weather? Yesterday, incessant rain, hail stones enough to bury small animals, and your odd tornado to nail your attention when you get bored with the rain and hail. But today! Today bestowed sunshine and more sunshine from horizon to horizon. It was just unfathomable!
Speaking of today, I'll get on with it. Our plan for the first part of the day was to seek out some high-quality, Willett Distillery Family Estate Bottled Single Barrel Straight Rye Whiskey for our young son back in Nevada who is building a nice collection of such treasures for his home bar. So, after gasing up the rig in Louisville, we headed south on Interstate 65 and then branched off on state route 245 toward Bardstown. Of course finding Rye Whiskey was not our sole reason for heading toward Bardstown, I had seen on the map that there was the "Oscar Getz Museum of Whiskey History" in Bardstown as well, which promised to make the trip doubly interesting.
Our trip through the Kentucky countryside this morning was nothing short of fabulous, especially after we got on state route 245 and away from most of the 18-wheelers. We just love the two-lane roads, even if they are more tedious to drive, because the foliage hugging the narrow roads is so green and lush, the roadside geology is so right there in your face, and the small towns and farms that pop up beside the road are just so picturesque and idyllic looking.
Following the GPS instructions to the letter, we arrived at Bardstown around mid morning and proceeded to accidentally stumble over the Whiskey Museum (photo top left) almost immediately. As an added benefit, the museum was located right next door to a very large church which came with a very large parking lot, only about 10% of which had any cars parked there. So, without even having to search, we scored a perfect level place to park right next to our initial destination.
The whiskey museum didn't score very high on my "Favorite Places" list as I thought there was just way too much to take in. I photographed what I could, but the only thing I really remember was a neat old photograph they had in the office of a bunch of "label-sticker" girls from 1912 (photo below right) whose job it was to put the labels on the whiskey bottles. According to the museum attendant, women were most often given the label-sticking task because they were more precise and careful about getting the sticky squares on straight.
Other then that, I liked the Carrie Nation exhibit that dealt with National Prohibition (photo left above) since it had a cool ax that Carrie had used to bust open whiskey barrels that got in her way. Concetta says one of her favorite exhibits involved George Washington's stills. Good ol' George had as many as five or six stills in operation and his fields produced a number of different grains to facilitate the whiskey-making process. In 1797 Washington was noted for having the largest distillery in American with a production figure that topped 11,000 gallons of rye whiskey.
Another favorite of Concetta's was the display on how the word "Booz" came into the American Lexicon. From the web: "In the mid 1800s, E. G. Booz was a liqour dealer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. in the years 1858 through the 1860s and right on up to 1870. The Whitney glass works had a retail office in Philadelphia at 118 Walnut street and right next door to them Edmund G. Booz had his store front where he was selling his cabin-shaped Booz bottles to liquor merchants and tavern owners throughout the Delaware Valley." I guess Mr. Booz must have had some fine products to be remembered a century and a half later.
After the Whiskey Museum we paid a short visit to the History Museum next door, then we went in search of the Willett Distillery on the outskirts of town. Thanks to the GPS it was pretty easy to find, and though the distillery property was somewhat of a disappointment, as we were expecting something along the lines of what we'd encountered in 2014 at the Four Roses distillery a bit to the north and east of here, we did fulfill our mission and acquire Rob's limited edition rye whiskey. Once back in the RV we had some lunch right there in the parking lot with a long expanse of lawn out our dining room window. Four Roses seemed to put a much higher emphasis on landscaping their property, whereas Willett sort of decorated their large expanses of semi-kept lawn with barrel houses in the not so chic colors of dingy gray metal and rust. Still, the tour building is pretty (photo below left) and we're told the whiskey is top notch.
After lunch it was time to go looking for Abraham Lincoln again. We had become aware that the farmstead where Abraham Lincoln was born AND the farmstead some miles distant where Lincoln later grew up was to be seen just south along Rural Route 31e from Bardstown. Lincoln's birth town is called Hodgenville, and contains a rather decent museum, and, right next door, some nice folks at the Chamber of Commerce who went out of their way to direct us. Where they were directing us was the Lincoln Birthplace State Park just to the east of town that contains a huge marble shrine devoted to the Lincoln Family's log cabin (it's inside the marble edifice). The park is just beautiful and is built around a natural phenomena known as "Sinking Spring," a water source which was located on Thomas Lincoln's farmstead in the first decade of the 19th century. It was called "sinking" because it was at the bottom of a sink hole.
We learned that the Lincoln family would later lose the Sinking Spring property via a property dispute, and would have to move northeast to a place known as "Knob Creek," a piece of property that the Lincolns would also eventually lose in a property dispute. After losing two farms in Kentucky, the Lincolns then migrated across the Ohio River to Indiana, and eventually to Illinois.
What is interesting to me is that my mother's father's ancestors started out just north of the Lincolns, closer to Louisville, around the same time. They would also move across the Ohio to Illinois and would locate themselves very near the Lincolns. In the early part of the 1800s in Kentucky, property disputes, property fraud, and just a confusion of records sent many, many families across the Ohio, away from Kentucky, and into what had been Indian country for many generations before tribes were forced to move. It was a sad tale for native Americans, but the millions of acres of land gave generations of Americans a place to put down roots and grow the country.
We really stretched our day out as long as we could today, but by 4:30 p.m. the Sinking Spring State Park was asking us to please have our RV out of the park by 4:45 p.m. So, we asked the ranger to recommend a nearby RV camp, which he did, and we motored off toward Elizabethtown, some 15 miles away to the west. Although the day was long, we did manage to squeeze in our cocktail hour between the usual RV setup, two loads of laundry, some quiet reading time (for Concetta), and blog time (for me). Now, it's just about bedtime and I will have to wind this up.
So, when you hit the dusty trail and seek out your favorite places on the road of life, we wish you Happy Travels!
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