The Beauty Around Us

As I write this post, we are home from our Kentucky vacation. We returned home today, in the mid-afternoon. We arrived home a day later than expected (the reason why is the material for another post :-)). I am SO FAR BEHIND in blogging about our Kentucky vacation. In the interest of uploading a post sooner rather than later, I decided to divide details of day 7 of our 10-day vacation into two blog posts.

On Friday, June 12th, Bob and I traveled by motorcycle west of Richmond to Loretto, Kentucky. According to the route that we mapped out at Google maps, Loretto was approximately 76 miles from our hotel. We traveled on winding country roads past inviting historic towns, hay fields, fields of corn and other crops, well-maintained horse farms, goats grazing in open pastures, and lots and lots and lots of cows … brown cows, white cows, black cows, brown and white cows, black and white cows. We stopped briefly in a few of those inviting towns while en route Loretto.

The first city in which we stopped was Lancaster, Kentucky. According to the KyHomeTown website, the city’s name “is said to be derived from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, from which many of the founders originally hailed”. Lancaster is the county seat of Gerrard County.

Gerrard County Courthouse in Lancaster, Kentucky

Our next stop was in the city of Danville, Kentucky. Danville is the county seat of Boyle County.

Boyle County Courthouse in Danville, Kentucky

According to Wikipedia, Danville is called the “City of Firsts”. The first courthouse in Kentucky was housed in Danville. Danville had the first U.S. post office west of the Allegheny Mountains. It hosted the first state-supported school for the deaf. In Danville, Ephraim McDowell became the first physician in the world to successfully remove an ovarian tumor. Danville is home to the oldest college administration building and campus west of the Allegheny Mountains. What caught my eye as we rode through Danville was this statue of two figures standing in a circle.

This statue is in Governor’s Square. Bronze plaques honoring every governor of Kentucky surround the statue.  An image similar to the bronze statue of the two figures is depicted on the flag of Kentucky, as shown below.

Kentucky flag obtained here 

Governor’s Square is part of Constitution Square State Historic Site, which is a 3-acre park that houses the courthouse that was the site of ten conventions that eventually produced the Constitution of Kentucky. There are several other buildings of interest as well.

This was the first post office west of the Alleghenies.
(exterior and interior views)

Replica of the original Meeting House
(exterior and interior views)

The Meeting House housed the first Presbyterians in Kentucky.

The Jail
(exterior and interior views)

The Courthouse housed the Supreme Court of Kentucky. The Constitution Conventions that led to Kentucky’s statehood were held in the Courthouse. (exterior and interior views)

Our last stop before arriving in Loretto was in Lebanon, Kentucky. The city of Lebanon is the county seat of Marion County. According to Wikipedia, the city was named for the Biblical Lebanon because of the abundant cedar trees.

Marion County Courthouse in Lebanon, Kentucky

Bob in downtown Lebanon, Kentucky

We left our hotel around 9:30AM. Approximately 3 hours later we finally arrive at our destination — Loretto, Kentucky. What, you might ask, was the purpose of our ride to Loretto. Maker’s Mark Distillery is located in Loretto. The purpose of riding to Maker’s Mark Distillery was to go on a tour of the distillery. I will write about our distillery tour in my next blog post.