Kentucky - Day 5 - south to cave country

Barren River Lake State Park, Lucas
Saturday, 5 October 2019

today's route

Louisville must be down in a sort of bowl at river level, because I'd noticed when I came to the area the other day that the road was taking a long slow drive downhill; now, leaving town, I was doing a long slow climb uphill.

I keep passing distilleries.  Near Louisville it was Makers Mark.  I'll take a tour of one of them before I leave the state.

The memorial to Abraham Lincoln's birthplace is located smack on my route to tonight's campground so of course I stopped to visit.

Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Park
As far as I can tell, all that's known about Lincoln's early life is what he's told himself, but the National Park Service did the best they could here with what they had.

This graphic shows to me more than the Park Service's point about how many famous relatives Lincoln had, and how some of those he worked with were related to him without him knowing it.  The graphic also demonstrates how mobile people were then, and Abe's own branch of the Lincoln family was plenty mobile.  His parents had lived in Elizabethtown before moving to the Sinking Spring cabin where Abe was born.

Lincoln was the first president born outside the original 13 colonies.

 

But as the exhibit at right shows, the family's stay at Sinking Spring was brief.  They moved not far away to a place at Knob Creek.






The Visitor Center's exhibit about Lincoln's family and early life - though mostly limited to items of the replica variety - does have one table that they're certain was made by Thomas, Abe's father, and it clearly demonstrates what a good woodworker he was.

The original cabin of Lincoln's birth is, of course, long long gone but, after his death, a replica was constructed and taken from town to town as part of the national mourning process.  It was then placed inside a memorial that's here on the park service site.  And what a memorial it is.

It was built just a few years after his death, and the architectural style undoubtedly made sense both for the time and for the sense of mourning and respect for the dead president.  But for me in this time it's too much.  I don't mind the style - Washington DC is full of buildings that look like this and it's one of my favorite cities in the world.  But it seems to me to be the antithesis of the sort of person Lincoln was.  And the idea of putting a replica cabin inside is way too much like a shrine.

For the first time I can see what is meant about the mythology surrounding Lincoln.  I never before felt like I was getting even as much myth as the George-chopping-down-the-cherry-tree stuff.  But for those who lived in that time, it must have seemed Lincoln was being made larger than life and more than a man.  I can see why a writer like Edgar Lee Masters, who didn't support Lincoln's policies anyway, would have wanted to puncture that myth that was building up.

Anyway, I didn't bother to go inside this memorial.  I didn't care about seeing a replica cabin, which would only tell me what I already knew: that it was a small and crude place to try to live.

I guess I'm glad I came here, because I learned a little more about Lincoln's family and his views on his early life.  But I found his Springfield home much more enlightening about the kind of man he was.  That's the home he and his wife built and raised a family in; that's the town where he spent most of his adult life.

What this site shows us, though, is how far he had to go to get there.  But here are his own words about that:

Back on the road
I passed mile after mile of cropland, with the crop - mostly corn - already harvested. 

I went through numerous villages and small towns, one of them named Uno, and I wish I knew who gave that name to the town.

On barns scattered along the way I saw large signs saying ___ County Cattleman's Association/Beef - It's What's For Dinner.  Fill in the blank with each county I passed through.  So as you can see, they raise beef cattle here, and I saw herds scattered along the way.

I also saw lots of houses and farms with signs saying I Stand For Life - about the size of campaign yard signs but in bright yellow with red letters - easy to spot.  Lots of them.

Throughout the drive today I saw yard sales.  Some of them were huge and caused traffic problems, and others were just a few items laid out on the grass by the road.

In several barns I saw what I'm guessing is tobacco hanging in the doorways like a curtain.  I'd passed several of these before I finally saw a few fields that had held what might have been tobacco.  Past harvest time, of course, so they were as picked over as the cornfields.

I turned off the highway to visit the American Cave Museum in the town of Horse Cave, but ended up deciding not to go inside.  It just looked weird from the outside and I'd seen online they'd charge me $8 for going in, so I just decided not to and hoped I'd learn what I was missing when I went to Mammoth Cave.

The museum is also how you go to visit the cave called Horse Cave, and I have no idea whether the town or the cave got named first.  But the entrance to the cave is right there on Main Street.

Apparently this whole section of the state is riddled with caves.  I'm sure they're different from the areas of subsidence that seem to keep opening up in places like Orlando, but I still wouldn't feel comfortable living on top of this cave.  You can't see in my photo but just above the entrance is a 3-story house, backed right up to the fence you can see a bit of above the entrance.  Brave people to live there.

I went back to the highway (it's just 1 lane each way with no shoulder, but it's designated a US highway, so it's a highway) and continued south.

North of the town of Glasgow I saw quite a few enormous single-family homes perched on a hill above town.  They were much bigger than your usual B&B and it seemed so odd to see so many like that in such a rural area.  Glasgow's got only about 14,000 residents and there aren't any metropolitan areas nearby.  Odd.

Glasgow is in Barren County and together they host the Kentucky annual Scottish Highland Games, much of them held at the nearby state park where I stayed.

I thought that name - Barren County, Barren River, Barren River Lake - was an odd name to choose, implying as it does a lack of resources.  The river is plenty big, very wide and carrying a lot of water.  And it seems a fertile place, given the number of farms I passed.  Maybe long ago settlers didn't think much of it?

As I got near the state park I saw a very large homemade sign saying Thou Shall Not Commit Adultery, with an accompanying Bible passage.  Made me wonder what the sign maker thought was going on in the area.

Even with this sign and all the I Stand For Life signs, I didn't see what I thought was an unusual number of churches or even particularly large ones or any unusual sects, so I suppose folks around here are religious without being fanatical church-goers.

We had pleasant weather today, plenty of sunshine.  Made for a nice drive.