Kentucky backroads (Continued)

I had a long talk with a most interesting and delightful local resident, well versed in the history of the area, who told me all about the town as well as some fascinating anecdotes and stories from its history. She also gave me some invaluable travel tips for the next day’s itinerary.

Greensburg has a number of buildings on the National Register of Historic Places, a qaint old downtown with interesting shops, and an 1812 Federalist style house that is now a bed and breakfast. Greensburg also is where the home of Union Gen. Edward H. Hobson sits on a hill a couple of blocks from downtown.

My guide for the town’s history also told me about the Green River Agricultural Conservation Program, which she participates in. On this morning’s front page of the Louisville Courier-Journal, what should I find but a big article on the program, which I have been reading this morning as I write this journal entry. Farmers and landowners in eight Kentucky counties are paid to take “some of their most fertile riverside or streamside bottomlands out of production and to restore trees and prairie grasses there,” according to the article.

The end of a long, but exhilerating day of discovery led me to the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Site near Hodgenville. There, lying in a large, marble-columned memorial with 56 steps leading up to it — one for each year of Lincoln’s life — is the log cabin that, purportedly, is the one in which Lincoln was born. It is fascinating to walk up those steps to such an imposing memorial built in the middle of a quiet, wooded setting. Nearby is Sinkhole Spring, still flowing, which was used by the Lincolns for their water supply in 1809, the year in which Abraham was born. Steps lead down into the ground where the spring flows over a small waterfall. It’s about 15 degrees cooler there than outside.

The quiet dignity of this hushed setting is a fitting tribute to the life of the great man born in that cabin on the site. A multitude of thoughts about history, life and mortality ran through my mind as I walked the grounds of the memorial.