Bardstown, KY
Opened 1779 on Court Square, the oldest western stagecoach stop in America, predating the Constitution; the town grew up around it. Abraham Lincoln stayed here as a boy while his parents fought the land dispute that, once lost, moved the family to Indiana; Audubon stayed; Jackson visited; and the exiled Louis-Philippe, future king of France, stopped through on October 17, 1797, a member of his entourage painting murals on an upstairs wall. The murals were found under wallpaper in 1927, bullet holes and all; legend credits Jesse James, in town visiting his uncle the county sheriff, with shooting at the birds he saw moving in the paint. What survived a 1998 fire is displayed in the second-floor Mural Room. Order the Kentucky Hot Brown and a flight at the bar the tavern bills as the oldest bourbon bar in the country. Closed Mondays in winter; call ahead off-season.
Bardstown is Kentucky's second-oldest city, founded in 1780, and the self-proclaimed Bourbon Capital of the World. Heaven Hill (founded 1935), Willett (1936), and Barton 1792 (continuous since 1879) all operate within ten miles of the field. The Old Talbott Tavern opened on Main Street in 1779, predating the Constitution. Federal Hill, the 1818 mansion that inspired Stephen Foster's 1853 song My Old Kentucky Home, sits two miles from the airport as a Kentucky state park. Samuels Field has a single 5,003-foot asphalt runway and serves bourbon-tourism traffic from across the country.
Two miles east of the Bardstown field stands Federal Hill, the 1818 mansion better known as My Old Kentucky Home. Stephen Foster is said to have been inspired here to write the ballad that became Kentucky's state song — the one the crowd sings every year before the Derby. It became Kentucky's first state-owned park in 1923, and "The Stephen Foster Story" has played its outdoor amphitheater every summer since 1959. Bardstown around it bills itself the Bourbon Capital of the World, so the black rickhouses of Heaven Hill are right next door on the same downwind.
Heaven Hill is the second-largest American whiskey producer and the largest independent family-owned distillery in the world — founded 1935 in Bardstown by the Shapira family and still owned by their descendants. The company operates 64 barrel warehouses (rickhouses) scattered across the Nelson County countryside, each holding roughly 20,000 oak barrels of aging bourbon. The rickhouses are seven-story timber-framed buildings painted black; the black coloring is partly tar paper and partly a wild fungus called Baudoinia compniacensis, which thrives on the ethanol vapor escaping the barrels — the so-called "angel's share." The fungus coats every surface within range of a working warehouse, including the rickhouses themselves and nearby trees, road signs, and houses.
The 110-acre farm where Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809. The Memorial Building (1911, designed by John Russell Pope) is a Beaux-Arts neoclassical temple containing a symbolic log cabin meant to evoke (though not actually be) the birth cabin. The 56 steps leading to the entrance represent the years of Lincoln's life. The Sinking Spring — the actual water source for the Lincoln family — still flows. Pair with Knob Creek Farm 10 miles away, where Lincoln spent ages 2-7 and his earliest memories were formed.
When you taxi into KLOU you're landing at Kentucky's first airport (1923) — and one of America's oldest continuously operating airfields. The 1929 Art Deco Administration Building still serves as the terminal. Charles Lindbergh visited months after his Paris flight. WWII saw the field become a major Army Air Forces training base — over 5,000 pilots earned wings here. The hangars and original ramp configuration largely survive intact. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Pair with dinner at Bistro Le Relais in the same historic building.