Bardstown & Bourbon
Journal Entry #8
September 23, 2021
After leaving Indiana we headed south making a short overnight stop in Bardstown, Kentucky. Bardstown is well known for rolling bluegrass hills and for the production of Bourbon. Most of the brands you know (Four Roses, Jim Beam, Evan Williams, etc.) are all distilled in this area.
We stayed at a small state campground called, fittingly, My Old Kentucky Home. After doing our best to level the van on an RV slot with fairly steep incline (each time we do this we get better at it), we decided to walk into town.
First thing to note: outside of the immediate center of town, there are simply no sidewalks. No one walks. We counted exactly ZERO other pedestrians until we made it to the town center. The second thing to note: don’t go to Bardstown the day after a 4 day bourbon festival. The local bar and wait staff seemed absolutely exhausted. At the tavern where we ate the waitress told us that the entire bar staff and more than half the waitresses had called out to “recover” from the drunken crowds that descended on the town over the weekend.
In the morning we took an interesting hike in the Issac Bernheim Arboretum just outside of town. We were very curious about about this beautiful arboretum’s namesake: Issac Bernheim. Who was this man? I commented to Tom, that the name seemed incongruous for Kentucky… it sounded like a Jewish surname. We did a bit of research and stumbled upon a fascinating history that was a complete surprise to us. Much of the Kentucky distilling industry was run by Jewish families. That said, they were very shrewd to perpetuate the “myth story” of bourbon as a frontiersman’s drink and associate it with American expansion and patriotism. If you are interested, read this outstanding article from The Atlantic which paints a picture of the industry and tells Issac’s story.
In the end, we did get to try a few bourbons. Our favorite was the Weller Special Reserve. We walked back to our campground in the dark, this time using the rolling golf course path in order to avoid the sidewalk-less streets, getting to our van just before the rain.