Ashland, KY
Ashland Regional Airport, also called Worthington Field, sits on a hilltop six miles northwest of Ashland in the eastern Kentucky tri-state corner where Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia meet. Ashland was a Carnegie-era steel town — Armco Steel ran the world's largest single coke battery here, and Ashland Oil (founded 1924, renamed Ashland Inc.) was for decades a Fortune 500 fixture. The town is the southern terminus of the Country Music Highway (US 23). Naomi Judd was born in Ashland in 1946 and raised her daughters Wynonna and Ashley here; Billy Ray Cyrus grew up across the river in Flatwoods, Kentucky; Loretta Lynn was born in Butcher Hollow, Van Lear, thirty miles south. The Highlands Museum in downtown Ashland holds a country music heritage wing covering all of them. The Paramount Theatre, opened 1931 as a movie palace, was where Billy Ray Cyrus shot the music video for Achy Breaky Heart in 1992.
Ashland anchors the south end of US-23, the stretch Kentucky named the Country Music Highway because no road on Earth has produced more million-selling country stars per mile — Loretta Lynn, the Judds, Billy Ray Cyrus, Chris Stapleton, Tyler Childers, Ricky Skaggs, Keith Whitley, Dwight Yoakam, Patty Loveless, Tom T. Hall, all from these counties. Ashland itself is the hometown of the Judds and Billy Ray Cyrus, and its 1931 Paramount Arts Center — a jewel-box movie palace — is where the "Achy Breaky Heart" video was filmed in 1992. The town sits in the corner where Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia meet on the Ohio River.
Where the Scioto meets the Ohio, Portsmouth turned its flood defenses into art. Along roughly 2,000 feet of concrete floodwall, muralist Robert Dafford painted some fifty panels — 2,000 years of Ohio Valley history, from the Hopewell mound builders and the Shawnee through the steamboat era — one of the largest single-artist mural projects anywhere. (Dafford is the same hand behind the floodwall murals down the river at Maysville and Paducah, Kentucky.) Behind the town rise the ridges of Shawnee State Forest, the "Little Smokies of Ohio" and one of the state's largest forests. Greater Portsmouth's airport sits up in Minford, northeast of the river.
A 1,348-foot earthwork in the shape of a serpent swallowing an egg, built by ancient Native Americans (Adena or Fort Ancient cultures, dating contested between 320 BC and 1070 AD). The largest serpent effigy in the world. The site sits on a meteorite impact crater, which may have inspired its location. Best viewed from the air or from the on-site observation tower. The effigy aligns with the summer solstice sunset and may have functioned as an astronomical calendar.
Maysville sits on the Ohio River north of the Fleming-Mason field, an old river-landing town once called Limestone where pioneers came ashore to reach the Bluegrass. It carries an outsized place in American history: this is the Maysville-to-Ripley crossing where the very term "Underground Railroad" is said to have been coined, after an enslaved man named Tice Davids swam the Ohio here in 1830 and his pursuer said he must have escaped on "an underground road." The 1837 Bierbower House holds the National Underground Railroad Museum. Just south, the Old Washington historic district was the first town in the nation named for George Washington — and where Harriet Beecher Stowe witnessed a slave auction in 1833 that fed Uncle Tom's Cabin. The blue Simon Kenton Memorial Bridge and a long painted floodwall mark the riverfront. Maysville is also the hometown of singer Rosemary Clooney.