Every historic building has a story to tell
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
One of the significant historic aspects of Kentucky is its numerous crossroad communities and hamlets, located scant miles apart along a county’s road or waterway networks. This collection of buildings, surrounded by farmland, may indeed be located at the juncture of two roads, but could also be located near a ford in a river, or (read more)
Categories: Abandoned Kentucky, Crossroad communities, Kentucky architecture, Kentucky Places
Tags: KY, Livingston County, Lola, Western Kentucky
The Inns of Court in London have long fascinated me, and though their history, ritual, and shadowy recesses reveal something new every time I am in London – sometimes what catches my eye is much more pedestrian – and is simply there, along my route. That is the joy of the urban environment – there (read more)
Tags: Bridges, Holborn, Inns of Court, London, transportation, Victorian
Election season in Kentucky…barbs, innuendos and bluster hang as heavy in the air as does pollen during the spring and fall. And like the pollen, all of the posturing makes me want to sneeze repeatedly to clear my head and stop the onslaught of buzzwords. Sadly, allergies are easier to deal with, but despite the (read more)
Category: Kentucky architecture
Tags: Ahrens, Architecture, Harrodsburg KY, Louisville KY, Progressive Era
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
Popular culture teems with the notion that all young girls love horses. It makes for a good book and/or movie, I suppose – but I didn’t quite fit into that demographic. Granted, I liked horses, but since my daily chores involved cleaning out stalls, and my learning to ride odyssey was overseen by my eldest (read more)
There are no Roman emperors in Kentucky, even if we must endure politicians who act like ancient despots (or just idiots). We can, however, claim miles of beautiful drylaid stone fences and walls. Scots-Irish stone masons immigrating to the Americas brought their craft for drylaid masonry to Kentucky, constructing fences from quarried limestone, and shaping (read more)
Categories: Bluegrass drylaid stone fences, English Heritage, Hadrian's Wall
One of my favorite stories from my time spent in London during college was the day I was almost hit by a bus. Not that I relish the adrenaline rush of narrowly avoiding death from such an ignoble source, but that it was me hitting the bus, rather than the other way around. I was (read more)
Categories: Geffrye Museum, The Displaced Nation
Just in case anyone DOES look at this blog besides my dearest and nearest, and you don’t already arrive here from Smitten by Britain – you can find more stories of England, written by yours truly, here! My talents as a writer do not extend to composing blog posts as I am shepherded to three (read more)
Category: Uncategorized
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