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:

It’s a stunningly beautiful approach into Lexington’s Bluegrass Field, with horse farms spread across the gently rolling hills. After I landed on Sunday, my father and I drove to the Whole Foods Market in Lexington to buy some things for Christmas dinner, including parsnips, turnips, Brussels sprouts, and various kinds of dried fruit. But no luck with the fresh duck — the store was out.

Fortunately, Nancye and Erich were able to find a duck at the Whole Foods in Birmingham on their way north from New Orleans.

Kentucky’s a funny place — I guess all states are. Kentucky is among the most easily stereotyped, however, and it’s certainly true that the state’s major economic drivers include horse farms and distilleries.

But Kentucky’s current marketing tagline — Kentucky Unbridled Spirit — has always struck me as a little too lofty, while at the same time overemphasizing the importance of horses to the state as a whole. Kentucky Unbridled Spirit was chosen in 2004, with this “definition”:

“Kentucky is a place where spirits are free to soar and big dreams can be fulfilled. We relish competition and cherish our champions for their willingness to push beyond conventional boundaries to reach new heights of success.”

Huh?

So now there’s a movement, of sorts, afoot for a different tagline.

How about Kentucky Kicks Ass? Check out this really witty video (thanks to fellow Kentucky native Mary Prokop for sending this my way):

I actually went to the same elementary school that Johnny Depp briefly attended in Frankfort. I was a year behind him, but had the same first grade teacher that he had. And look where that has gotten us.

Kentucky Kicks Ass comes courtesy of Kentucky for Kentucky, which has the following mission statement:

Our mission is to engage and inform the world by promoting Kentucky people, places, and products. And to Kick Ass for the Commonwealth!

Kentuckians have been influencing and creating American and world culture for a long time. We were the first to sing Happy Birthday, fry chicken, and slap high-fives. We invented bourbon, bluegrass music, and the mother-freaking Kentucky Derby. We made cool cooler by birthing Clooney, Depp, and Hunter S. Thompson. We pushed the What-Are-Ladies-For-And-Good-At envelope with Loretta Lynn, all the Judds, and Diane Sawyer. We redefined sport with Ali, Sea Biscuit, and Rondo. We invented the gas mask, people.

We are the real deal. We are Kentucky.

From USA Today, today, Does Kentucky need a kick-ass makeover?:

The proposed slogan has a certain redneck swagger, unlike the considerably more demure “Kentucky — Unbridled Spirit,” which has been the state’s tagline since 2005. A group of advertising guys who dub themselves Kentucky for Kentucky coined the slogan — along with ad prototypes, a video and T-shirts — declaring it “unexpected and bold … coming from a state that’s considered to be fairly conservative.”

State officials have a different view.

“We certainly would not sanction or endorse that phraseology,” says state tourism department spokesman Pat Sipes. “These guys are Kentucky natives and they love the state. But they have a different constituency. Which is no one.”

With all due respect to Pat Sipes, in these days of public irony and of social media, Kentucky Kicks Ass has considerable cachet.

Here’s some of what we had for Christmas dinner:

Roasted root vegetables and a Danish duck

Brussels sprouts with bacon

I was certainly not surprised to see that Obama won just four counties in my home state of Kentucky. Two of them were predictable:
*Fayette: home to Lexington and the University of Kentucky, plus a sizable black population
*Jefferson: home to Louisville and the University of Kentucky, plus a sizable black population

But how about the other two:

Elliott County in Eastern Kentucky, which has less than 8,000 people and is over 99 percent white. Elliott has apparently voted for the Democrat in every presidential race since the county was founded in 1869. That’s the longest winning streak for any party in any county in the country. But it was close this year, with Obama beating Romney 1,186 to 1,126.

And Franklin County went for Obama. That’s where I grew up — the county seat is Frankfort, which is also the state capital. Here’s what the vote looked like in Franklin County in 2012 and 2008:

What a curious switch. Largely because of government employment, the economy in Frankfort seems to have held up pretty well — but certainly not extremely well. The county has less than 50,000 people, with a black population of less than 5,000. The city has a little bit of a funkier edge than it used to have — or so it seems to me on my visits every few months — but it’s hard to account for the shift in a year when Obama typically underperformed his results from four years ago.