Every historic building has a story to tell
All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players… Architecture has long served as a platform for status and self-expression – even seemingly humble dwellings (vernacular architecture) reveal layers of information about where the builders and inhabitants came from, how they used the rooms in their house, and even how trendy (read more)
Categories: Historic Preservation, Ohio architecture, Other Places, Theaters
Tags: #CincinnatiOH, #cincinnnati, #historiccinema, #overtherhine, #theater
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
Americans love a holiday. The penchant for celebrating the mundane results in a calendar peppered with “National Cow Day,” “Be Late for Something Day,” or “National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day.” But I was wholly unprepared for “National Handwriting Day,” although the act of grasping writing utensil in hand shaped my formative years and has (read more)
Categories: Uncategorized, Writing
Tags: handwriting, letters
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
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)
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
Interested in a specific topic? Check out some popular categories below, or enter your search terms in the box.