Kentucky

Lake Barkley Lodge is the single largest building in the Kentucky state park system and one of the most visually impressive buildings in the Commonwealth. In the mid-1960s, the creation of Lake Barkley, a 134-mile long impoundment of the Cumberland River, sparked a surge of recreational development in Lyon, Trigg, and Caldwell counties. Anticipating strong demand for access to the new lake, the Kentucky General Assembly established a state park near Cadiz in 1964. Named for the prominent politician and Graves County-native Alben W.

The year 1904 marked the end of integrated education in Kentucky, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Day Law. Berea College, formerly the only integrated college in the state, immediately established the Lincoln Institute as a college for African Americans, focusing on manual arts and teacher training for a co-ed student body. With funds from Berea College, the Andrew Carnegie Foundation, and local benefactors, Lincoln Institute purchased 444 acres west of Simpsonville.

In August 1962, the Lincoln Income Life Insurance Company announced plans to build a new corporate headquarters in southeast Louisville, then on the leading edge of suburban growth. Corporate revenues had grown dramatically since World War II and the company had outgrown its offices on South Third Street in downtown Louisville. Lincoln President, John Acree, Jr., commissioned William Wesley Peters of Taliesin Associated Architects to design a building that would symbolize Lincoln’s rising stature and ambitions.

The legend of Thomas Jefferson’s involvement in the design of Farmington is tenuous yet persistent. After the death of his first wife, John Speed married Lucy Gilmore Fry whose grandfather, Doctor Thomas Walker of Albemarle County, Virginia, had been guardian to the young Thomas Jefferson. The Speeds purchased 554 acres of land east of Louisville in 1810 and named their hemp plantation Farmington, perhaps in honor of Lucy’s aunt and uncle’s home in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Keeneland is the quintessential Southern racecourse, set in the rolling hills of Kentucky’s Bluegrass Region. Opened to the public in the 1930s, Keeneland’s 441 acres are planted to come into color during the racing seasons in early spring and early autumn.

Floral Hall is a magnificent, multistoried octagonal building, purpose-built to house the horticultural displays of the Maxwell Springs Fair Company and Kentucky Agricultural and Mechanical Association. Kentucky architectural historian Clay Lancaster thought the architecture perfectly matched “the gay and lighthearted spirit that characterized those festive occasions in which neighbors competed in the most affable terms for prizes.”

The First African Baptist Church was built to serve the religious needs of the free and enslaved African Americans of Lexington in the then-slaveholding state of Kentucky. Theirs was the first African American Baptist congregation west of the Alleghenies and this was the first building the congregation designed and built for itself, having previously occupied existing structures. Neither conspicuously ostentatious nor overtly humble, the First African Baptist Church of 1856 is a visual marker of aspirational assimilation.

Kentucky bourbon distiller Isaac Wolfe Bernheim purchased 12,000 acres of land in Bullitt County in 1928, paying only $1 an acre because the land had been denuded and stripped for mining iron ore. Over the course of the next two decades, the Olmsted Brothers advised on how to rehabilitate the land, designing an arboretum that now encompasses 14,378 acres. Bernheim died in 1945 and the Bernheim Arboretum and Forest opened to the public in 1950; it is now the official state arboretum.

Cane Ridge Meeting House, built in 1791, is one of Kentucky’s largest spaces enclosed within log walls. A decade after its ambitious construction, it witnessed the birth of a new religious denomination, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). The site resonates with the possibilities that frontier Kentuckians imagined in the resources at hand. 

Webster County Courthouse was one of three Kentucky county courthouses designed by Lawrence Casner as part of the Works Progress Administration’s campaign for economic recovery during the Great Depression. Along with the United States Gold Bullion Reserve (KY-01-093-0030) at Fort Knox, Casner’s designs share the same vocabulary of stripped classicism frequently employed by the federal government in this period.