a day on Kentucky’s Lincoln Heritage Trail with friends
Kentucky is known for the Bourbon Trail, which is a road trip well worth making. A lot of people don’t know there is another trail that makes for a great road trip: The Lincoln Heritage Trail. Follow the Lincoln Scenic Byway signs throughout central Kentucky to several interesting sites related to Abraham Lincoln’s life.
A couple of weekends ago, we took some friends on a day trip to some of the best sites on the Trail. We started our day off at a favorite spot of ours for brunch: The Bluebird in downtown Stanford. After eating our fill of French Toast, we got down to the actual business of the day.
Our first stop was the Lincoln Homestead State Park & Mordecai Lincoln House outside of Springfield, Kentucky. The Mordecai Lincoln House is off by itself and is the only remaining structure that was owned and occupied by the Lincoln family that still stands in its original location – remember this for the rest of the day, since everything else you’ll see has been moved and reconstructed. It was owned by an uncle, so it’s a bit less relevant to the president’s life and upbringing.
However, if you visit the house, you’ll learn that there is a family connection to Doctor Samuel Mudd. Mudd was the physician who set John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg after he leapt from the balcony where he assassinated Lincoln. Mudd’s involvement with Lincoln’s assassin is the source of the idiom, “his name is Mud(d).”
[Another fun fact, because I’m a National Park geek: after the assassination, Mudd was imprisoned at Fort Jefferson, which is located off the coast of Florida in what is now Dry Tortugas National Park. During his imprisonment, Doctor Mudd saved many inmates’ lives during an outbreak of yellow fever, and the inmates successfully convinced President Johnson that Doctor Mudd deserved to be pardoned. Will I tell you as much about Lincoln in this blog? Probably not, because you should visit the Lincoln trail to find out more; Doctor Mudd isn’t discussed in the signs on the Lincoln Trail, so I’m not giving away any spoilers. Now, after you’re finished reading the signs at the Mordecai Lincoln House, you can delight your companions with your knowledge of Doctor Samuel Mudd, as I did. It’s a real crowd-pleaser.]
The rest of the Lincoln Homestead State Park is lovely as well, tucked in an idyllic corner of a… golf course. No, really. If you stand near the restrooms behind Lincoln’s grandparents’ cabin, watch out for errant golf balls. One of the holes for the golf course is located just a few yards away. I’m not a huge fan of golf courses, so the location irks the nature lover in me. The Lincoln family cabins are really beautiful and deserve to be surrounded by deep forests so you can lose yourself in the park and the history. Instead, you’re constantly reminded of modernity and competition.
My favorite spot is the blacksmith’s shop. To find it, walk down the path towards the golf course and across the sweet little covered bridge. If you stand on the bridge and look towards the shop, the trickle of the stream almost drowns out the swoosh-thwock of the golf balls launching.
We stopped in Springfield to visit the Lincoln Legacy Museum, located in an active Fiscal Court courtroom, then headed on towards Bardstown. We were craving coffee, so we went to Fresh Coffee, Pastries, & More (a charming coffee shop with great coffee). Downtown Bardstown is really pleasant to walk around, so we did. There was a craft beer festival happening later that day, and every small town we went through seemed to have a car show going on so the streets were filled with vintage automobiles. Before we left, we popped into Shaq and Coco, which is a delightful eclectic store with gifts, clothing, jewelry, and beautifully curated furnishings.
The Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, in Trappist, KY
Moving on, our next stop in the mostly-Lincoln-Heritage-Trail-tour was the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Trappist, KY. The Abbey is beautiful, and if you’re not navigating there, entirely unexpected. In the middle of bourbon country, you round a bend, and there’s suddenly Hogwarts. It’s a beautiful building, well worth the stop just to admire it better. Go during business hours so you can visit the gift shop and get one of my favorite things about this whole trip: amazing fudge crafted by the Trappist monks at the Abbey.
Back on the Lincoln Heritage Trail, we stopped briefly at the Abraham Lincoln Boyhood Home. This site is fairly underwhelming. Only the exterior of the log structures is available to guests, and the gist of the signs there is simply: little Abe Lincoln played somewhere in these woods sometime during the 5 years his family lived here. It’s officially one unit of the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Site, so if you want to differentiate between the two, search for this one as the “Abraham Lincoln Boyhood Home.” If you search for the National Park Service site, this is probably where it will direct you.
After struggling with the Maps app, we finally convinced it that we wanted to go to the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace Memorial by typing “Abraham Lincoln Birthplace Visitor Center.” Almost every other variation gets you right back to his boyhood home at Knob Creek (Lincoln Farm Road).
The Lincoln Birthplace Memorial looks like it was transported from Washington, D.C. A nature trail cuts through a rolling, manicured lawn, and a massive set of stairs leads up to the memorial itself. The very elegant columned building houses the humble log cabin where Abraham Lincoln was definitely born definitely not born possibly born. There’s some debate about the provenance of the building. Still, it’s a lovely place to walk and reflect on our famed 16th president… as long as you get there before 4:30PM EST. We’d been there before, but our friends had not. Unfortunately, at 4:45PM on a Saturday, you can’t even peek inside to catch a glimpse of the cabin.
Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park, near Hodgenville, KY
Instead, we got our exercise in walking down the steps – well, hurrying down the steps, because while we were there, lamenting our inability to get inside the building, we heard the announcement that the park was about to close at 5:00PM. And when they say close, they mean close: a National Park Service employee is waiting at the gate to usher you out and close it behind you. Learn from our mistakes, and don’t spend quite as long dawdling at brunch if you want to end your day on the Lincoln Heritage Trail better than we did.
There are quite a few other stops on the Lincoln Heritage Trail (don’t forget to pick up an official Trail map when you stop at the Lincoln Legacy Museum in Springfield), but the rest are mostly either statues of Lincoln or Civil War sites rather than anything connected to Lincoln’s life. All in all, even with the closed memorial at the end, it made for a lovely day trip around the area with friends.
For more, check out my YouTube video of our day trip:
