Every historic building has a story to tell
The allure of a snow day, especially in the Bluegrass where snowfall is fickle and fleeting, doesn’t subside with adulthood. Granted, my childhood experience of substantial snowfall was tempered by the impact the winter wonderland would have on the cattle, and if a late winter snow, the newborn calves. Feeding the cattle became even more (read more)
Categories: Bluegrass, Farming
Tags: Colonial Williamsburg, comfort food, hot brown, Kentucky, snow, snow day
I am easily seduced by sense of place. I’m a Kentuckian (sixth generation of a family with chronically long generations ), so part of that may be genetic. Plus, I’m a nerd for history, and the tantalizing mixture of building, feature, landscape and memory with which so many of our historic places seethe. My first (read more)
Categories: Bluegrass, Kentucky architecture, Shakers, Tourism
Tags: Historic architecture, Kentucky tourism, Mercer County, Shakers, Shakertown, Thomas Merton
I first visited the Handy House in Cynthiana, Kentucky, on a sunny and mild day in February 2005. It wasn’t, at first glance, a straightforward building. Like a frothy wedding cake, the house presented multiple layers of stories, people, and varying ideas of style and taste. My first rule of historic preservation? No historic building (read more)
Categories: Bluegrass, Harrison County, Historic Preservation
Tags: Cynthiana, Handy House, Harrison County KY, Preservation
I am a child of frame tobacco barns, heavily laden with burley tobacco, dust and dry bits of leaves dancing together in the air. These barns, with their straightforward appearance, clad in vertical boards, spread out across the farms of my childhood. Located on hills, to take advantage of the wind, they balanced on stone (read more)
Categories: Bluegrass, Farming, Historic Preservation, Kentucky architecture
Tags: #historicbarns, #tobaccobarns, barns, farming
When I began researching my thesis (ages ago), which focused on two antebellum farms and their landscape, I realized that my Kentucky was a state with many souls, and personalities. Her landscape, I discovered, was one of “enormous geographic contradictions.” These disparate elements, from east to west, and nestled in the bluegrass basin that cradled (read more)
Categories: Bluegrass, Crossroad communities, Vernacular
Tags: Country stores, crossroad communities, Stores, vernacular architecture
I grew up in a country house. To be more accurate, I grew up in a house in the country, as my family doesn’t have an urban townhouse to which we decamp for most of the year. Instead, I spent the first 18 years of life on a farm in the Outer Bluegrass of Kentucky, (read more)
Categories: Bluegrass, Country house, England
Tags: Attingham Summer School, Attingham Trust, English Country Houses
I went back to my first garden a few weeks ago, and over the span of a few hot, sweaty hours, finally said my goodbyes. The exertion of taming a landscape I had shaped and formed and had been absent from for three years kept any emotions at bay until long after the sun set (read more)
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