My parents were born in Kentucky. We have Kentucky ancestry on every single line, with each line going back to the 18th or early 19th centuries, when Kentucky was a very young state. As a child, I visited relatives there every summer. Those are some of the best memories in my life. I still enjoy going to back to Kentucky, and I appreciate it on a different level now. There are so many historic homes and buildings there - you can point your camera in almost any direction and capture one. Here are a few.
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| Antebellum town home in downtown Lexington, Kentucky. |
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| Hunt-Morgan House, Lexington, Kentucky - home of John Hunt Morgan's mother. This beautiful Federal house was built in 1814. In the early 20th century, it was converted to an apartment building with tiny little rooms. In the 1960's, it served as student housing for a nearby college. It was in danger of being demolished, but was saved and restored to its original era by people who cared. I'm glad that they cared! It is now a museum. The tour was super interesting. |
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| Newport, Kentucky - old, abandoned house with graffiti. It looks like the Munster's house to me. There are old buildings like this everywhere in Newport. It is a small town, just south of the Ohio River and very close to Cincinnati, Ohio. |
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| Long Lick Baptist Church in Scott County, Kentucky - WAY out in the country. Under the large part, there are probably remains of the original log church that was built in the 1850's. My great grandmother and her family attended this church when she was a little girl. |
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| Antebellum mansion in the middle of rural Kentucky. It looks so strange sitting out there all alone. I wonder what stories it could tell. |
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| Barn for a tobacco farm in the beautiful bluegrass region of Kentucky. |
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| The older property fences for farms in the Lexington area are made of the native limestone. |
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| The Waveland Mansion was the home of a slave-owning hemp farmer outside of Lexington, Kentucky in the 1840's. Hemp was used for ropes in shipping and bags for cotton. The subsequent generation, post Civil War, bred race horses. There was once a race track right next to this mansion. It's called Waverly because the blowing hemp looked like waves in the wind. |
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| These were the slave quarters for the house slaves on Waverly Plantation. The field slaves lived in much harsher, rougher quarters. Currently, the University of Kentucky history department is researching exactly what happened to the slaves from this plantation after the Civil War. They have been able to track down several people, which is very hard to do because there is a very sparse paper trail for African American people. It's fascinating and exciting research. |
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| Waverly field with a little play cabin. |
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| This is hemp! |
