I grew up in Frankfort, Kentucky. My appreciation for Frankfort’s beauty and history grows with each passing year.
It’s such a small city that I would have a hard time ever living there again, but life can be pretty sweet there.
Frankfort is of course the state capital, which some of you might remember from some ridiculous civics or geography quiz in grade school.
On my trip over Thanksgiving, my folks, sister, and I went to Fort Hill, which looms above the oldest parts of the city. From the website:
In 1864 local militia soldiers repulsed an attack on Frankfort by the Confederate cavalry raiders. Fort Hill is a historic site and wilderness area on a high hill overlooking downtown Frankfort. During the 19th century, the hill was known as Blanton’s Hill for the family that owned the hilltop. After the Civil War, the Army quickly abandoned Fort Hill. By the middle of the 20th century efforts began to develop the site as a historic park. Many development plans were proposed but rejected, and the park did not open until 1999. Now the Leslie W. Morris Park on Fort Hill, named for the property owner from whom the city of Frankfort acquired the land, offers a historic area around the forts and many acres of wilderness forest and meadows right in the middle of Frankfort, Kentucky’s capital city. The park preserves the remains of two Civil War earthwork forts.
Here are a few photos of the remains of one of the earthen forts, the stone foundation of the magazine, some pretty outrageous osage apples, and a “dog trot” style house built elsewhere in the county around 1810 and moved to the park as a visitors center in 2000.
And we spent about an hour wandering through the two stories of the entertaining, rich, and quirky Capital City Museum. In the heart of downtown, it’s more of a cultural history of Frankfort than anything else. The exhibits aren’t arranged chronologically, and there are some pretty obvious omissions. But I left with a much deeper appreciation for the life of the city.
I posted a couple of images to Instagram while we were perusing the exhibits:
Sure, the museum has a lot of info about more official Frankfort history, but I especially appreciated cultural artifacts like those.
There’s also a fascinating exhibit about one of Frankfort’s earliest cemeteries, which was lost to memory at some point after the last burials in the mid-19th century. It was rediscovered when the state was putting up a new office building. Some of the graves were apparently moved to the beautiful cemetery on the hill, but at least 250 bodies remained. Some were poor, some not. Some black, some white. Some had more elaborate burials. It’s a fascinating exhibit.
The bodies were reinterred on Fort Hill, in a relatively poorly marked spot just off the main access road on the way to the visitors center:
And here I’ll repost a set of photos that I took over Thanksgiving 2012 in downtown Frankfort, and another from Thanksgiving 2011. I thought about shooting photos on this trip, but I would likely have ended up with the same images:
