Living Our Dream

Frankfort, KY Part I: Liberty Hall

Frankfort, KY - Events of Friday, August 3, 2012

After picking up the motor home from Bluegrass Trucks on Wednesday, we chose not to do anything except chill out around the motor home all day Thursday. By Friday, we felt like doing some sightseeing. Unfortunately, Friday turned out to be a cloudy, rainy day; but our time in Frankfort was winding down, so we pressed on with our sightseeing plans in spite of the weather.

There are numerous things to see and do in both Frankfort and nearby Lexington, but we decided to limit our sightseeing to Frankfort since our remaining time in the area was short. We zeroed in on Liberty Hall Historic Site, which is the location of two historic houses in the old section of downtown Frankfort. Since rain was threatening, we thought indoor house tours would be a good idea.

The first of the two houses is Liberty Hall, which was built by John Brown over a period of several years starting in 1797. John Brown was a politician and statesman who was instrumental in the creation of the state of Kentucky.

Liberty Hall

Since his older son Mason would inherit Liberty Hall, John Brown divided the property in 1835 and built a second house for the younger of his two sons, Orlando. We'll have a little more on the Orlando Brown House a little later in this post.

John Brown was born in 1757 in Virginia and was the son of a Presbyterian minister. Brown studied law at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), at the college of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA, and at the law office of Thomas Jefferson in Charlottesville, VA.

John Brown served in the Virginia State Senate from 1783 until 1788. He was also sent by Virginia as a delegate to the Continental Congress in 1787 and 1788. After the U. S. Constitution became effective, Virginia elected John Brown to the U. S. House of Representatives in 1789 where he introduced a petition for Kentucky statehood. Kentucky was originally a part of Virginia. After Kentucky became a state in 1792, Brown resigned as a representative to U. S. House from Virginia and was elected a U. S. Senator from Kentucky. While he was a senator, Brown moved to what was then the frontier town of Frankfort, KY.

John Brown was still a bachelor when he began building Liberty Hall in 1796. It was one of the earliest brick homes in Frankfort, and the bricks were fired locally from clay dug from the cellar. At the time, it must have seemed a very lavish house with most homes in the area being of log construction.

Brown married Margaretta Mason in 1799, and the couple moved into Liberty Hall even though the house did not yet have glass in the windows. The window openings were probably covered by something like translucent, oiled paper, plus there were shutters they could use for really inclement weather. Glass, which was manufactured in Pittsburgh, was finally installed in 1804. John and Margaretta had 5 children; but only two of them, Mason and Orlando, survived to adulthood.

Our tour guide was the Tour Administrator, so she really had a lot of knowledge and her enthusiasm was contagious. We started our tour under a gnarled catalpa tree in front of Liberty Hall. The tree was growing there when John Brown first purchased the property.

Catalpa tree in front of Liberty Hall was growing there when the house was built over 200 years ago.

A second catalpa was planted from a seed pod from the first in 1900 (to the left in the foreground in the photo below), and the branches of the two trees intertwine.

Second catalpa tree (foreground) was planted from a seed pod from the original catalpa.

As we entered the front door, our guide pointed out the original locks on the doors that were still in excellent operating condition.

Liberty Hall has its original locks.

Liberty Hall remained in the hands of descendants of John Brown until his great-grand- daughter passed away in 1934. The house was then sold to a group of concerned citizens who formed a non-profit organization called Liberty Hall, Inc., which opened the house as a museum in 1937.

The structure itself has been stabilized and restored, and the interior is early in the process of being renovated. Some original furniture has been donated to Liberty Hall by family members, but it is from various time periods throughout the home's history. Photography without flash is permitted, so you will see in the following several photos that furnishings are fairly sparse.

Entry Hall

Period wallpaper has been hung in the parlor. Carpeting and drapes will be next. In the photo below, a sample of the proposed carpet lies in front of the fireplace.

Parlor

The master bedroom was on the first floor.

Master bedroom

Also on the first floor was John Brown's office where his portable desk is displayed with copies of letters he sent to Thomas Jefferson. As we mentioned, Brown studied law with Jefferson, and Brown continued to correspond with Thomas Jefferson over the years. Thomas Jefferson advised John Brown on the construction of Liberty Hall, and may have actually done some of the design work himself.

Portable desk with a copy of a letter to Thomas Jefferson

We also got to see the ballroom, guest rooms and kids' rooms on the second floor.

The kitchen wasn't a totally separate building like it was in many homes of the time, but it was in a wing separated from the main house by a porch. Liberty Hall has cooking demonstrations in the kitchen once a month.

Liberty Hall kitchen

They had an interesting display on the table in the kitchen. The dark block with the embossed pattern to the left is pressed tea leaves. Pieces were broken off and added to hot water to steep. The blue-wrapped cones are sugar, and the item in front of the sugar is a sugar nipper. It was used to pinch off small pieces of sugar from the solid cones. Although the sugar cones were displayed with the tea, it is likely the tea would have been sweetened using honey.

Display of tea-making materials in the kitchen

There is a garden area behind Liberty Hall that extends a couple hundred yards to the Kentucky River. It had started to rain, so we didn't spend much time exploring the garden.

Liberty Hall garden

From the garden, we walked to the other end of the block to the Orlando Brown House. As we mentioned, John Brown divided his property and built this house so both his sons would have an equal inheritance, although the Orlando Brown House isn't built on quite as grand a scale as Liberty Hall.

Orlando Brown House

Descendants of Orlando Brown lived in the house until 1955. When his last remaining descendant passed away, she left the house to the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the Commonwealth of Kentucky (NSCDA-KY), and the Orlando Brown house was opened to the public the same year. The Orlando Brown house looks a bit more finished inside than Liberty Hall, although some restoration is needed and it is also sparsely furnished.

Parlor of the Orlando Brown House

We were the only ones on the tour and were able to ask lots of questions, so we got a lot of interesting information. Our tour lasted a lot longer than we thought, but we still had a couple of things we wanted to do before the day was over. We'll tell you about them in our next post.

Louisville, KY

Shepherdsville, KY - Events of Wednesday, Oct. 5 to Friday, Oct. 7, 2011

After 8 days at Caesar Creek State Park in Willmington, OH, we drove about three hours southwest to Grandma's RV Camping about 20 miles south of Louisville in Shepherdsville, KY. Grandma's has about half back-ins and half pull-throughs. Although they are a decent length, the sites (especially the pull-throughs) are quite close together. The roads are paved, as are the small patios; but the patios are a little too far toward the rear of the sites for motor homes. The sites themselves are all gravel (the gravel is fresh, clean and plentiful) with no grass. There are full hookups with 30/50-amp electric and free Wi-Fi. The utilities are also toward the rear of the site, which is not bad for 5th wheels, but we needed all 30 feet of our sewer hose for our motor home. The next photo, which was taken when the sites on either side of us were unoccupied, shows our site at Grandma's.

And below is a shot looking down the road from our site.

Grandma's is conveniently located right off I-65, and that means there is quite a bit of traffic noise. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), the traffic noise almost covers up the sound of the trains. Oh yeah, and if the wind is blowing the right direction, the campground is also on the glide path for the Louisville airport.

We complained about cool weather up north, and with a general warming trend across the eastern half of the country plus moving a little farther south, the 50 to 60º highs and 40º lows have given way to highs around 80º and lows in the mid 50s. Not only that, but the sun is out a lot more than it was up north. Ahhhh, that's more like it!

We continue to be in relaxation mode, but there were a few things we wanted to see in the Louisville area. One was the Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory. Louisville Slugger, whose official company name is the Hillerich & Bradsby Co., is the world's largest manufacturer of baseball and softball bats. Hillerich & Bradsby also makes sports and recreational gloves and golf clubs. The most distinguishing feature of the museum is the "Big Bat," which is the world's largest bat.

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The 120-foot tall bat is hollow and is made from steel. It weighs 68,000 pounds. It would take a real power hitter to swing that one!

The museum is loaded with baseball memorabilia, and it has several displays depicting the history of the company. J. F. Hillerich opened a woodworking shop in Louisville back in 1855. The shop made bed posts, stair railings, bowling pins and butter churns. Although the story is sometimes disputed, legend has it that Hillerich's 17-year old son, Bud, took off work one afternoon in 1884 to watch Louisville's professional baseball team play. Pete Browning, who was a star player for the Louisville Eclipse, broke his bat during that game.

As the story goes, young Bud offered to make Browning a new bat at his father's wood shop, and Browning got three hits with his new bat the next day.

With Browning's success, Bud got orders for more bats from Eclipse players. The elder Hillerich didn't want anything to do with baseball bats; but word of the success of players using bats made at the Hillerich shop spread, and he eventually relented and began to embrace the new addition to his business.

The bats were originally sold under the name "Falls City Slugger" because of the location of Louisville near a waterfall on the Ohio River. Bud changed the name to Louisville Slugger when he took over the business from his father in 1894.

In 1911, Frank Bradsby joined the company. Bradsby became a full partner in 1916, and the company name was changed to Hillerich & Bradsby Co.

A factory tour is included in the $10 museum admission fee ($9 for seniors), but photos are not permitted inside the factory itself. Therefore, Margery missed getting a picture of Paul swooning at the smell of fresh sawdust when we first entered the factory. He still misses his workshop.

There are, however, a couple of displays in the museum that relate to the manufacturing process that we could photograph. The logs in the next photo show how the blanks for the bats, called billets, are taken from the logs. The log to the left shows the more modern method where a boring machine extracts the billets from an intact log. This method maximizes the number of billets that can be obtained from each log. In the method shown on the right, the log is first split into wedges, then the wedges are turned on a lathe to form the billets.

Another display in the museum shows the process that turns the billets from wedges. Those are mannequins in the photo below, not real people. The display is very realistic right down to sawdust everywhere, including on the workers themselves.

On the factory tour, we learned how bats are made from the billets. Most bats are made from ash, but some are made from maple. Maple is more brittle and prone to breaking, but some players think maple gives them an advantage.

Minor league bats and bats for the general consumer market are made on tracer lathes. The cutting head on the lathe follows a stylus that traces a metal pattern of the bat's contour. The pattern can be changed to produce different sizes and styles of bats. It used to take 20 minutes for a skilled operator to hand turn a bat. A tracer lathe can turn a bat in 30 seconds.

Bats for professional players are made on CNC (computer numeric control) lathes because these lathes can programmed to produce an almost infinite combination of size, shape and weight characteristics. Of course, these characteristics must be kept within the limits of the rules. Professional players take thousands of swings a year, and they can feel subtle differences in their bat. Over their careers, they develop preferences for certain characteristics in a bat. The machine can remember each program, so changing from one style of bat to another is as easy as pushing a couple of buttons. A CNC lathe takes about 45 seconds to turn a bat.

After the bats are turned, they are sanded and branded. Some bats are flame tempered and some bats are dipped in color. The bats are then finished by dipping them in clear lacquer.

After we finished the factory tour, we had time to look around the museum a little more. Although Paul was somewhat of a baseball fan when he was a kid, neither one of us follows baseball today. If you are an avid fan, however, there are lots of things of interest. For example, you can don white gloves or batting gloves and handle bats used in actual games by well-known players such as Mickey Mantle and Johnny Bench.

Other historical bats like the one shown below belonging to Babe Ruth are much more rare and are housed under protective covers.

Babe Ruth, who played from 1914 to 1935, was the most prolific hitter of his time. In fact, his 1927 record of 60 home runs in one season stood for 34 years, and wasn't broken until 1961 by Roger Maris. He is regarded as one of the greatest sports heroes in American culture. There are several mannequins of famous players including one of Babe Ruth in a classic pose watching the ball go over the outfield wall.

There were numerous other bats on display including one belonging to Joltin' Joe DiMagio shown below partly out of the photo to the right. Paul was more interested in one of the bats in the drawer (the one just visible over the top of the drawer front) that belonged to Roberto Clemente.

Roberto Clemente, who was born in Puerto Rico, played his entire 18-season major league career with the Pittsburgh Pirates from 1955 to 1972. Clemente is considered by some to be the greatest right fielder to have ever played the game. His career was cut short in 1972 when he was tragically killed in a plane crash while helping in a relief effort to aid earthquake victims in Nicaragua. As we said, Paul did follow baseball back when he was a kid, and he was fortunate enough to have seen Roberto Clemente play in person several times.

Another famous Pittsburgh Pirate was Honus Wagner. Wagner played from 1897 to 1917, mostly for the Pirates. He is considered to be one of the best short stops ever, and he was an excellent all-round player. The photo below shows his jersey and one of his bats. Honus Wagner was the first baseball player to endorse the Louisville Slugger bat.

The museum also has a 20-minute movie about baseball. Since our parking meter was about to run out and since we don't follow baseball, we decided to skip the movie.

Everyone on the factory tour receives a miniature souvenir bat. Paul tried his out next to the "Big Bat" on our way out of the museum.

We found more to do and see in the Louisville area, so stay tuned.

Frankfort, KY

We stayed a week in Frankfort, and we planned a mixture of relaxing, visiting and sightseeing.

Frankfort, KY, was founded in the late 1700s and is named for Stephen Frank, who was a pioneer killed by Indians along the Kentucky River. The nearby river crossing became known as Frank's Ford, which was later changed to Frankfort.

Frankfort became the state capital shortly after Kentucky became a state in 1792. The current capitol building, shown in a side view from an overlook on U. S. Highway 60 in the photo below, was completed in 1910.

 

Our first full day in the area we stopped at Walmart and at Kroger, which is Margery's favorite grocery chain. She was most disappointed when Kroger pulled out of the Pittsburgh market in the early 1980s, and we stop at Kroger every chance we get as we travel.

Our next stop, which also involved food, was at Rebecca Ruth Candies.

In 1919, Rebecca Gooch and Ruth Hanly quit teaching and co-founded a candy-making business that they ran out of of the Frankfort Hotel. They rented the barroom, which had been closed by Prohibition.

in 1924, Ruth Hanly married Douglas Booe. Although Ruth and her husband moved away from Frankfort, Ruth continued to make candy. When her husband died only a few years later, Ruth moved back to Frankfort. In 1929, Rebecca decided to get married and sell her share of the business to Ruth.

Kentucky is bourbon country, and in the 1930s, Ruth perfected a recipe and a process to combine bourbon into her candy. Her bourbon balls became wildly popular.

We went to Rebecca Ruth Candies during the week hoping to take a tour; but unfortunately, there was nothing going on the morning we were there. We had to settle for a sample of their bourbon balls, which were yummy. You could definitely taste the bourbon, but it didn't overpower the richness of the chocolate.

Temptation got the better of us, and we bought a couple of pieces of chocolate candy. Paul had an orange jelly with dark chocolate, and Margery had a chocolate-covered cherry. We stopped on a bench outside the shop to enjoy our treats.

We also bought some bourbon/pecan brittle for the road. It was yummy, too.

North of Lexington and about 45 minutes over hill and dale to the east of where we were staying in Frankfort is Georgetown, KY, which is the location of a Toyota automobile plant. Officially known at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky (TMMK), this plant manufactures Camry sedans, Camry Hybrids, Avalon sedans, and Venza crossover SUVs. The plant was opened in 1988.

The Toyota plant has tours, so we headed over one morning for their 10:00 AM tour. Reservations for tours are required. The photo below shows the driveway to the visitor entrance.

 

And the next photo shows the tour entrance.

It's difficult to get a good view of the plant from the road, but with an area of about 7.2 million square feet the plant is immense. There is a scale model inside the visitor center where you can only get a small inkling of the sprawl.

At the beginning of the tour, everyone gets headsets so they can hear the tour guide and safety glasses before boarding trams. Photography is not permitted in the plant, so we'll try to give you a quick description of the manufacturing process.

There are two assembly lines in the plant that can turn out a combined total of almost 2,300 cars a day. Current output is about 1,900 cars, which is much better than their lowest point of less than 1,200 a day.

Each line has two shifts with several hours between shifts. The time between shifts allows for overtime should the shift not be able to make the required number of cars for the day's orders.

A trailer truck load of steel in the form of large coils comes into the plant about every 30 minutes. Huge sheers cut blanks for various body parts. Robots load the blanks into punch presses to form the body panels, and more robots perform thousands of welds to assemble car bodies in a shower of sparks.

It takes about 20 hours from the time the steel is first cut until a car manufactured from that piece of steel rolls out the door. The vehicle shell spends about 9 of those 20 hours in the paint department where is is washed, prepped, dipped, primed, sanded, painted, clear-coated and inspected. We got to see almost all parts of the manufacturing process except the engine plant, which is in a separate building, and the painting. Because the paint department must be kept free from dust and dirt, access is limited. Employees of the paint department must wear coveralls, hats, hairnets, etc. to keep the air as clean as possible.

The bodies, trunks, hoods and doors of each vehicle are all painted at the same time. After painting, the cars start down the assembly line. The doors are separated and go upstairs to have windows, speakers and locks installed. As the cars roll down the line, teams of four workers install dashboards, wiring, accessories, seats, brakes, engines and transmissions. Each team member can sound an alarm if he or she has a problem. The team leader will rush to assist, and if the problem can't be resolved, the team leader has the authority to shut down the line. Near the end of the assembly line the completed doors return to the bodies in exactly the same order and at precisely the right time to rejoin their original bodies.

TMMK practices "just-in-time" manufacturing, which was pioneered by Toyota. Just-in-time means raw materials and parts show up on the factory floor just as they are needed for the next step in the manufacturing process. No more than four hours worth of parts and materials are in the plant at any given time. This means every delivery from an outside supplier and each step of the assembly process must be carefully choreographed so shortages don't develop.

Paul, who has a manufacturing background, was very impressed by the Toyota operation. He has never toured an auto plant before, and the size and complexity of the operation really impressed him. Commitment to quality was stressed throughout the tour (they say quality is their most important product and safety is their most important process), and it's easy to see why Toyota vehicles are so popular.

After the tour, we watched a short movie that provided info on some of the areas we didn't get to see on the tour like the engine plant and the paint department. Back in the visitor center, we checked out some of the new cars on display like the Camry in the photo below.

 

We still have more to report from our stay in the Frankfort/Lexington area, including a review of another barbecue restaurant, so stay tuned.