The ShoreXplorers: September 2015

Thursday, September 24, 2015

Kentucky Trip by the Numbers and a Wedding

Willett Distillery

Here are our numbers:

1,410 - miles traveled
       8 - nights on the road
       5 - places stayed (2 public, 2 private, 1 family member)
       2 - National Parks visited
   1.5- miles hiked underground in Mammoth Cave (3.25 hours)
   132 - photos taken in cave (good thing we don't use film anymore) - camera settings - F3.2 at 1/5 second
       6 - surface miles hiked at Mammoth Cave National Park
       1 - sprained/broken ankle (sigh)
more than enough - deer in Mammoth Cave National Park campsite
       2 - distilleries visited
       4 - types of bourbon tasted
$1.79 - cheapest gas seen
$1.99 - cheapest gas purchased
   1 - family wedding

We loved Kentucky and feel like we have just barely scratched the surface of wonderful things to do there.

Mammoth Cave - Frozen Niagara

We hurried back to Virginia for our jam-making nephew Daniel's wedding to his beautiful and resourceful bride, Rachel in a lovely barn outside of Charlottesville. We had a wonderful time being part of the wedding celebration and wish the newlyweds continued happiness.

Mammoth Cave Historic Entrance

Willett Distillery

Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill

The hole in the map has been filled... Still so many places to go!

Visiting the Shakers at Pleasant Hill, Kentucky [September 17, 2015]

The Centre Family Dwelling

Wooden Bowls - Kitchen- Centre Family Dwelling

One of the premises that this country was founded upon was religious freedom, and during its early years several interesting religious groups created communities around their faith here. The Shakers were one such group. The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing were also known as the Shakers because of their ecstatic behavior during worship services. They are known today for their simplicity of design in architecture, furniture and textiles.

One of the western Shaker communities has been partially restored as the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill. Pleasant Hill was a Shaker Community from 1805-1910. At its peak, 400 individuals lived there. What an industrious group! One of their early leaders, Mother Ann, had a saying "Do all your work as though you have thousand years to live and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow." And they did!

They quarried nearby limestone and built enormous, 4-story, communal living homes that housed 50+ people each. The walls are lined at eye level with pegs where they hung chairs, tables, sconces for lighting, and personal belongings so that the floors could be swept without obstruction.

They devised water sources for indoor plumbing before such conveniences were available in that region of Kentucky.

Storage Chests - Top Floor - Centre Family Dwelling

They grew and preserved massive quantities of food which not only fed the large community, but the excess was put on flatboats and floated down the Kentucky River to the Ohio and Mississippi and sold in New Orleans. With the money earned from these sales, the Shakers purchased sugar and other supplies they could not make for themselves.

Pump House on Left, Men's Bath House on Right

The Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill consists of over 40 wooden, limestone and brick buildings from the original community. The buildings that are open to tour have original Shaker furniture, textiles and household items. Throughout the museum, you can see demonstrations of Shaker woodworking, weaving and other crafts. Each hour an introductory tour starts at the crossroads where a guide tells you about the Shaker way of life and the history of the community after the Shakers left it. There is a restaurant in the Trustee’s Office building that provides yummy lunches and dinners, and the folks at the front ticket booth will be happy to make a reservation for you if you didn’t call ahead.

Trustee's Office

Meeting House

We were impressed by the museum and the Shakers that had lived in the community. The large meeting hall is supported by 12 limestone pillars underneath (because there was a whole lot of shakin’ goin’ on there) and had massive roof beams, joists and rafters that are held together with tongue and groove construction. No nails, no pegs. You can go into the attic and look at them. The high ceiling rooms in the communal living houses are well ventilated with large glass windows in every room. The large, cool basements held food stores.

Tongue and Grooved Rafters - Meeting House

What we learned about the Shakers was also impressive. They institutionalized women in leadership roles. They were pacifists and did not practice slavery. During the Civil War they tended the wounded and fed both Union and Confederate troops as they passed through. Children who were brought into the sect were taught up to an 8^th grade education and then taught a trade. If at 21 the young adults chose to leave the community, they left with tools of their trade and money to start a new life in “The World”. The sect had some rigid views, including practicing celibacy, so two thirds of the children did leave. Perhaps that is why the Shakers eventually died out at Pleasant Hill. Also, the Shaker way of life was primarily agricultural and didn’t fare well in an industrial world. We were told that there are still 4 Shakers today at a community in New York.

If you still have the time, for a few dollars more you can take a ride on the Dixie Belle stern paddle riverboat down the Kentucky River for an hour. The captain narrates the voyage with information about the geologic and natural history of the river, and how the Shakers and present day people use the Kentucky River. It was very interesting, and restful to be chugging down the river for an hour. The drive down to the wharf is a narrow, windy, one-lane road with a limestone cliff on one side and a drop-off on the other. We were told that school and tour buses make the trip down. It was tricky in our 30 foot motor home, so we aren’t sure how they did it. AND we met a car coming up the hill who had to back down until it got to a “wide spot” in the road so we could pass. On the trip back up the hill after the boat ride, one of the deck hands drove to the top and stopped descending traffic until we could all get up the hill.

Aboard the Dixie Belle

Limestone Palisades, Kentucky River

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey, Bardstown KY [September 16, 2015]

Willett Distillery

Folks from Kentucky are proud of their Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey, and understandably so, many, many barrels of whiskey are distilled between Louisville and Bardstown (the Bourbon Capital of the World). They say the water filtered through limestone here has a sweet quality that give their bourbon its wonderful flavor.

Grain Combinations and Their Mashes

To find out more about how bourbon is distilled we visited the Willett Distillery in Bardstown. You might not have heard of Willett, it is a craft operation that produces a few bourbons and rye whiskeys that aren’t sold in too many places outside of Kentucky. As one returning visitor on our tour said “You need to buy it here, you won’t find it when you get home.”

Fermentation Tank

The whiskey starts from grain. To be bourbon it must be at least 51% corn. The other 49% or less could be wheat, rye or other grains. The grain combinations are hammered into a powdery mash that is mixed with water. In Willett’s case, the water comes from a spring fed, limestone lined lake on their property. Yeast is added to this mash which is then pumped into large tanks where it ferments and bubbles. These tanks are emptied into a larger mixing tank and then goes through filtering screens to the still itself. Willett’s still is copper and as pretty as a work of art. The alcohol that comes out of the still is clear in color. It is pumped into oak barrels that are charred on the inside. The barrels are rolled into a 5-story galvanized steel building called a rick-house and put on racks where the whiskey inside ages and takes on its brown color. From there it is bottled and labeled and sold.

Tasting the Fermenting Mash

We loved the Willett Distillery tour. We saw all the steps up to bottling, and could touch and smell and learn as we went. Afterwards we went ¼ mile down the road to the Heaven Hill Distillery, home of the Bourbon Heritage Center. Heaven Hill produces many widely known brands of bourbon. In fact, Wikipedia calls it the second largest holder of bourbon whiskey in the world. We opted not to go on their tour, but spent time in their very glossy and commercially produced exhibit on the history of bourbon.

Look at that Fermenting Mash Bubble

To encourage settlement of the wilderness area of then Virginia, the Virginia legislature enacted the “corn patch and cabin rights” policy. Anyone who could build a cabin and harvest a corn crop by January 1, 1778 could get 400 acres of Kentucky land. Corn grew well here, and sometimes there was corn left over that the settlers could not eat or sell. So rather than waste it, they fermented and distilled it. As time progressed, this whiskey became the currency of exchange in this wilderness area and was shipped around the world.

So why is it called Bourbon? The part of Kentucky where the whiskey is made was once part of Bourbon County Virginia. Even after new counties were created, people continued to refer to the region as Old Bourbon. The whiskey produced there took on that name as well.

Mixing Batches

We love learning how things are made and going on factory tours. The Willett Distillery was small and very, very clean. It is housed in a lovely building. After the tour you get to taste 2 of their bourbons and then (of course) buy some and buy other souvenirs as well.

Such a Pretty Still

Filling Oak Barrels

Rolling the Barrels to the Rickhouse

Inside the Rickhouse

Tasting the Finished Product

Mammoth Cave is (Well) Just Mammoth – Kentucky [September 13-15, 2015]

Part of Frozen Niagara - Domes and Dripstones Tour

280 Stairs Down - Domes and Dripstones Tour

Leaving a Large Dome Area - Domes and Dripstones Tour

Mammoth Cave is the longest cave system in the world at over 400 miles, with what some believe over 600 more miles not yet discovered. Don’t think of those miles as linear miles. Think of them as a plate of spaghetti with tunnels above and below and crossing each other.

Rugged Passageway - Domes and Dripstones Tour

Some of the cave tunnels are huge, smooth sided passageways the size of a large subway station. Others are many-stories-tall, rounded chambers like inside a monument. Still others are narrow, jagged passageways that you bend and stoop to pass through. In the areas that are not open to the public, there are passageways you can only crawl through.

Much of the cave is dry where the river that carved it out of the stone has been gone for millennia. Others are damp and drippy and filled with artistic stalactites and stalagmites. There is an underground river with eyeless fish and crustaceans that have never seen the sun.

Domes and Dripstones Tour

How was this cave and others like it in the area formed? Millennia ago Kentucky was covered by a shallow sea. The creatures living there died and settled to the bottom, and the calcium in their bones or carapaces created what would become 600 feet of limestone. Then as the continents drifted, Kentucky was under the delta of a rich river that laid down a sediment that became sandstone and shale. When the continents drifted some more and Kentucky moved inland, rain water would seep through cracks in the sandstone and shale cap rock and erode the softer limestone forming tunnels for rivers of water trying to flow downhill to the Green River. The sandstone and shale cap rock forms a hard roof over the caves and keeps them from collapsing in on themselves.

Domes and Dripstones Tour

Curtain of Limestone - Domes and Dripstones Tour

We went on 2 cave tours led by wonderfully informative and engaging National Park Rangers. For the Domes and Dripstones Tour, you take a bus to an entrance to the cave in the middle of an old sink hole. You descend a narrow tube that was carved by water long ago to drain water out of a sinkhole. The Park Service has installed a winding staircase with 280 stairs down through the channel. Then you walk through narrow tunnels to reach large domed open areas. The tour ends at the Frozen Niagara area, which are gorgeous formations still growing from dripping water. The walking is a little uneven at times, and there are many, many stairs. There are areas with benches where you can rest and learn about the cave. The trip takes 2 hours and is definitely worth it..

Interesting Stalactite Formations - Domes and Dripstones Tour

The Mammoth Passage Tour starts at the historic opening of the cave and takes you through cavernous, dry tunnels into the Rotunda, one of the largest rooms of the cave. The narrative of this cave focuses on ways the cave was used in history. The earliest explorers of the caves, pre-historic Native Americans, explored 12 miles back into the cave from 4,000 to 2,000 years ago. They left behind charred river cane bundles they burned to light their way, grass shoes that wore out walking over rocks, and bowls made from ghourds used for mining minerals in the cave. This part of the cave also has the remains of saltpeter mining from the War of 1812. The wood from the operation has been preserved in the constant 54 degree climate of the cave. Most of the walkways traversed in this tour are lined with paving stones, with gentle inclines. This trip takes 1.5 hours and gave a very different view of the cave than our first trip, though still wonderful.

Limestone Formations - Domes and Dripstones Tour

Carnation on the Ceiling? - Domes and Dripstones Tour

We also took the Heritage Walk above ground where another knowledgeable and helpful Ranger tells you more about the early uses of the cave and focuses on a group of enslaved African Americans who were the first explorers of many parts of the cave and who served as guides to the wealthy guests who came to Kentucky just to see the Mammoth Cave. Stephen Bishop was so well respected that his owner gave him credit for a map that Bishop drew of the cave showing almost 10 miles of tunnels, half of which had been discovered by him. Visitors to the cave in the 1830's to 1850's were so impressed with Stephen Bishop that they would write about him in letters about their trips. During this time the cave was also used as a sanatorium for patients with TB. Another slave family, the Bransfords, served as guides with Stephen Bishop. Their descendents continued guiding in the cave for over 100 years to today with Ranger Bransford who currently gives cave tours.

The Visitors Center is wonderful with great and informative exhibits about the geology of the cave, how it was formed, cave exploration (both pre-historic and present day), the history of how the cave was used, creatures that live in the cave and other topics.

Can a cave look any more dramatic?- Domes and Dripstones Tour

We camped in the park campground and had deer roam through our campsite. Wild turkeys wander through the park seemingly oblivious to visitors. When the land in the area was being bought up to create a National Park in the 1930s, it was farmland. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), part of the New Deal, tore down farm buildings, and planted trees. Later the Park Service re-introduced deer and wild turkeys to the area. They are thriving now is this protected, forested haven.

By the way, kudos to Russ for taking these dramatic photos in very low light!