Listing Through Life

On a trip across central Kentucky with my family, we stopped at the site of a 1862 Civil War battle. It cost us $9 to view the pathetic one-room museum and listen to some lady with perhaps half her teeth tell us what we were about to view. She didn’t give us any information that wasn’t in the museum — she just told us what was there.

“On that wall there are pictures of soldiers who fought here. Over in that corner is a cannon.”

We saw everything there was to see in about nine minutes — $1 a minute.

It was hot, humid and sunny outside, and I knew my family wasn’t interested in walking around the fields. There were several trails, the shortest a loop that was supposed to take an hour and 15 minutes to walk. I promised my family I’d do it quicker than that. I walked fast between stops and didn’t linger long when I did stop. I finished in 35 minutes and was very sweaty.

The battlefield is open country — grassy fields on a series of ridges with a few copses of trees. I saw quite a few birds and butterflies, but I didn’t stop. When I got back to the museum, I found my family sitting at a picnic table in the shade of a pavilion looking at magazines. There was a nice breeze blowing across the hill, and they were having a good time.

There were more Union soldiers than Confederates in the area on the day of the battle, but the Confederates had more men at the point of attack. They drove the Union army back from ridge to ridge until evening, then had to leave the field. It was a pretty area, and I wish I could have spent more time there.

On a drive from Lexington to Mammoth Cave, we passed right by Old Fort Harrod State Park and decided to stop. Fort Harrod was the first permanent settlement west of the Alleghenies. There’s a reproduction of the fort on the grounds, but oddly enough, the fort was where the parking lot now is. I couldn’t figure out why they didn’t build the reproduction fort where the parking lot is and the parking lot where the reproduction fort is.

We wandered around the fort a bit while the girls slept in the car. There wasn’t much to see and no interpretive signs. The one bit of information we did discover was from an old woman in period costume who was portraying a settler named Ann McGinty. Ann, we were told, is famous for bringing the first spinning wheel to Kentucky. I was surprised I’d never heard of her. I wonder who brought the first toaster.

Anyway, from the fort, we wandered about 100 yards to a small church. We had no idea what to expect. Imagine our surprise to find it was in fact the Lincoln Marriage Temple, an edifice built specifically to shelter the one-room log cabin where Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, Abraham’s parents, were supposedly married on June 12, 1806. It was moved to this site from its original location near Springfield, Kentucky.

A wire mesh was bolted across the door of the cabin, but there was nothing inside. I’m a Lincoln fan, but there was something sad about this level of adoration for a mere man — a church for the cabin where his parents were married? We didn’t stay long.

We spent the morning at the Kentucky Horse Park outside of town, then drove downtown to the Mary Todd Lincoln House. For the only time of the trip, we had to share our tour of a house with another family, a young couple with three young boys. The kids weren’t perfectly behaved, but they weren’t bad. The youngest, who was maybe three, was playing with a feather and kept rubbing it across our legs. The tour guide lady was very knowledgeable and interesting. While she wasn’t exactly an apologist for Mary, she did stress how smart and educated Lincoln’s wife was and encouraged us to read a biography that treats Mary with a bit more balance then is normally the case.

Mary’s father died intestate, so the family furniture had to be sold at auction. Some pieces have been recovered. For the rest, they have an inventory from the auction and so bought items as close as possible in appearance and age to the items that were sold. One original piece was a hair brush set that belonged to Mary. I found that intriguing — to think that Mary Todd Lincoln actually had that brush that was lying right there on the dresser in front of me. I crossed the street to get a picture of the front of the house.