Everything OddWay knows about. Narrow it down by what you're after, or where you're going.
Real events too strange to have made the textbook.
Bowling Green, KY
Built in 1921, this domestic-style filling station was Bowling Green's first dedicated gas station and operated until the 1950s. The city restored it in 2008 with replica glass-topped pumps, and the little station now serves as part of public Circus Square Park.
Hodgenville, KY
Inside a large neoclassical memorial building sits a small nineteenth-century log cabin once promoted as the actual birthplace cabin of Abraham Lincoln. Historians later determined the cabin was not the original, so the National Park Service now presents it as a symbolic reconstruction associated with the birthplace site.
Park City, KY
Bell's Tavern became a major nineteenth-century stop for travelers heading toward Mammoth Cave, but a fire gutted the inn shortly before the Civil War. Plans to rebuild in stone were abandoned when the war began, leaving massive limestone walls and arched openings standing as picturesque public ruins.
Louisville, KY
Built in 1914, the Belle of Louisville is a surviving Mississippi River-style sternwheel steamboat that still operates passenger cruises on the Ohio River. Its working steam machinery and extraordinary longevity make it a piece of living transportation history rather than a static museum ship.
Union, KY
For thousands of years, mineral-rich salt licks drew enormous Ice Age animals to this area, where many became trapped and left fossil remains behind. The park now interprets mammoths, mastodons and other prehistoric animals and maintains a modern bison herd near the visitor center.
Stearns, KY
Blue Heron was a remote coal camp operated by the Stearns Coal and Lumber Company before being abandoned in the early 1960s. The National Park Service reconstructed building outlines with open steel structures and audio exhibits, creating an eerie walk through the footprint of a vanished mining town.
Elizabethtown, KY
A Confederate artillery shell struck a downtown building during the Civil War fighting at Elizabethtown in 1862. When the original structure burned in 1887, the cannonball was recovered and deliberately placed into the replacement building near its approximate original impact point, where it remains visible from the square.
Carlisle, KY
The restored old Nicholas County jail retains a basement dungeon with stone foundations, earthen flooring and graffiti left by prisoners. Local tourism groups have also used the exceptionally grim cells as a seasonal haunted attraction, and visits outside events should be arranged rather than assumed.
Covington, KY
Covington's immense Gothic Revival cathedral contains elaborate stained glass and a reliquary chapel holding relics associated with Catholic saints. The combination of bones, ornate containers and cathedral architecture gives the active place of worship a distinctly unusual museum-like element; visitors should observe service schedules and church etiquette.
Burkesville, KY
Civil War veteran Captain Jack McClain's grave sits by itself on a small island in the parking lot of the Alpine resort. The burial predates the motel property and was preserved when the hilltop was developed, leaving a solitary nineteenth-century grave surrounded by asphalt and parked cars.
Lexington, KY
The Kentucky Fun Mall displays a taxidermied black bear presented as the animal that died after ingesting cocaine dropped by drug smuggler Andrew Thornton in Georgia in 1985. The bear's later provenance has accumulated its own mythology, so the shop's claim is best treated as part history and part modern roadside legend.
Louisville, KY
KFC founder Harland Sanders is buried in Cave Hill Cemetery beneath a monument featuring a sculpted bust with his unmistakable glasses, goatee and string tie. The cemetery marks the route to the grave with a colored road line for visitors.
Frankfort, KY
Kentucky says Daniel Boone was reinterred here in Frankfort Cemetery in 1845, but Missouri has long disputed whether all of his remains were actually moved from his original grave. The resulting two-state burial controversy makes Boone's elaborate Kentucky monument more unusual than a typical famous-person grave.
Carlisle, KY
A Kentucky historical marker identifies the area where Daniel and Rebecca Boone lived from 1795 until the family left Kentucky for Spanish Louisiana territory in 1799. The original cabin is not the attraction here; OddWay should route travelers to the official US 68 roadside marker.
Pikeville, KY
Dils Cemetery contains the graves of Randolph McCoy, his wife Sarah and several other people tied directly to the Hatfield-McCoy feud. The cemetery also has broader Civil War and local significance and can be reached from a designated parking area and stairway off Chloe Road.
Bowling Green, KY
Before his name became synonymous with boxed cake mix, Bowling Green native Duncan Hines was a traveling salesman and restaurant critic whose guidebooks helped motorists find dependable places to eat. A historical marker identifies his former home and office and explains the real man behind the supermarket brand.
Pikeville, KY
A Kentucky historical marker on the University of Pikeville campus identifies the site where Ellison "Cottontop" Mounts was hanged on February 18, 1890 for his role in the murder of Alifair McCoy. His execution is often treated as one of the final official acts of violence connected to the Hatfield-McCoy feud.
Mammoth Cave, KY
Cave explorer Floyd Collins became the center of a national media spectacle after becoming trapped in Sand Cave in 1925 and dying before rescuers could reach him. His remains had an equally strange afterlife, including years displayed in a glass-topped coffin and the theft of his body, before his eventual reburial at Mammoth Cave Baptist Church Cemetery.
Paducah, KY
Charles "Speedy" Atkins drowned in 1928, was embalmed and then remained unclaimed at a Paducah funeral home for an astonishing 66 years. The preserved body became a local celebrity before finally being buried in Maplelawn Park Cemetery in 1994; his modest marker records the bizarre delay between death and burial.
Greenup, KY
This unusually equipment-heavy veterans memorial surrounds its monuments with a full-size tank, fighter jet, helicopter and military boat. One of the Huey helicopter displays has held dog tags honoring veterans, turning the roadside park into a much more visually dramatic memorial than a conventional stone monument.
Louisville, KY
George Anne Sotsky's Cave Hill Cemetery monument takes the form of an enormous open stone hand with its palm facing upward. The gesture symbolizes generosity and creates one of the cemetery's strangest pieces of funerary sculpture.
Burnwell, KY
Roseanna McCoy and Johnse Hatfield's relationship produced a daughter, Sarah Elizabeth "Sally" McCoy, during the bitter Hatfield-McCoy feud. The infant died after only a few months, and a staircase from a small public parking area now climbs to the hillside cemetery containing her grave and interpretive markers.
Louisville, KY
Only the intricately carved stone facade remains from German immigrant Christian Heigold's nineteenth-century Louisville home. Covered in patriotic inscriptions and sculpted imagery created during a period of intense anti-immigrant sentiment, the facade was saved from demolition and relocated as a freestanding public monument.
Fairview, KY
A 351-foot concrete obelisk marks the Kentucky birthplace of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America. The enormous monument was constructed between 1917 and 1924; interpretation of the site should place Davis and the Confederacy within the history of slavery, secession and the Civil War rather than treating the monument as neutral commemoration.
