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JESSAMINE COUNTY BUCKET LIST

Everything you should see and do in Jessamine County, Kentucky, before you kick the bucket.

Click "Learn More" below for directions and lots of historical detail.

1. DRIVE BY  CHAUMIERE DES PRAIRIES.

This architectural wonder on an idyllic country road hosted some of the young nation’s most prominent politicians, including four presidents and a participant in America’s most famous duel.

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2. EAT SOME FRIED CHICKEN IN HONOR OF FORMER RESIDENT COLONEL SANDERS.

Harland Sanders lived in Nicholasville before he got famous. He ran a downtown service station that became a liquor store and still later an insurance firm. After visiting the site, head north on Main Street to the local KFC. Or head west to Fitch’s IGA in Wilmore to fill up on some fried chicken. It’s rumored that Leonard Fitch makes it with Colonel Sanders’s original KFC recipe.

3. VISIT JANE MEAUX'S HOUSE.

In 1837 a feisty woman divorced her husband, grew her estate to “large wealth,” and purchased fifteen enslaved people. She gave them emancipation papers and sent them all to Liberia, Africa. The destiny of one of them will shock you.

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4. DRIVE ACROSS GLASS MILL BRIDGE.

From Wilmore, head down Glass Mill Road on one of the county’s most beautiful drives. After you descend to Jessamine Creek, slowly drive across the four-arch, European-style bridge. Built with no mortar, it holds together with just gravity and friction squeezing stones together. Some say it was built as a Works Progress Administration project during the New Deal. That’s not quite true. But the bridge is still beautiful.

5. WALK ON AN INDIGENOUS MOUND BURIED IN CONCRETE.

The Muir Site dates to the eleventh century in the Early Fort Ancient period. That’s a full millennium ago! University of Kentucky archaeologists dug it up in the mid-1980s before it was paved over to make way for the U.S. 27 bypass.

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6. Read Demon Copperhead.

​This 2023 Pulitzer Prize-winning book is not specifically set in Jessamine County. But it has two important connections to our community. First, author Barbara Kingsolver’s father lived in Nicholasville for many years. Second, we’re on the edge of Appalachia, and the opioid epidemic is ravaging our county too.

7. RECITE THE POEM "CAMP NELSON, KY." AT THE GRAVE OF JOSEPH MILLER.

On Thanksgiving weekend 1864, the U.S. Army expelled 400 African American refugees from Camp Nelson, a Union supply depot and emancipation center in the Civil War. Many died of exposure, a tragic story put into poetic form by former U.S. Poet Laureate of the United States Tracy K. Smith. The haunting poem comes from her 2018 collection Wade in the Water.

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More items coming soon . . . one each month for the next four years

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