The Bluegrass and Beyond

Like most male baby boomers, I’m feeling sad and little old because of the death of Fess Parker on Thursday at the age of 85.

Older boomers remember him most for his portrayal of Tennessee frontiersman Davy Crockett in the 1950s Walt Disney TV shows and movie. Kentucky boys my age, though, knew him best as Daniel Boone.

From 1964 to 1970, Parker starred as Boone in what was then one of NBC’s highest-rated TV shows. Boone was, according to the theme song, “The rippin’est, roarin’est, fightin’est man the frontier ever knew.”

After rising to stardom in buckskin, Parker, like Boone, went into real estate, but with much more success. Parker also started making wine, although I imagine Boone would have preferred corn liquor. (Boone never wore a coonskin cap, by the way.)

Through modern, adult eyes, the Daniel Boone series seems corny, historically inaccurate and more than a little racist. At the time, though, it was high adventure. I had my own coon-skin cap and toy long rifle, and I insisted on carrying a new Daniel Boone lunchbox on my first day of first grade at Maxwell School.

When my family moved out to what was then the country in 1966, I thought it was pretty cool that we could look out the back window and see an early 1800s house that once belonged to relatives of Boone’s wife, Rebecca Bryan. (It’s now the Firebook subdivision clubhouse.)

The Daniel Boone TV show helped interest me in Kentucky history, which I’ve come to discover was much more colorful and exciting than the plots those TV writers came up with.

The TV show was filmed in the mountains out West. Still, it was something my friends and I could relate to, because it was supposed to be taking place in Kentucky, not far from where we lived. Fess Parker made our little corner of flyover country famous, even if TV viewers got an image of a long-ago Kentucky wilderness covered in aspen trees and Ponderosa pines.

RIP, Fess Parker.

Everybody’s Irish on St. Patrick’s Day, but what about the other 364 days a year?

Irish people are Irish. And when they live an ocean away from home, they miss a lot of things, especially when they’re hungry: rashers, black and white puddings, Irish beans, biscuits, special chocolates and a whole lot more.

For many of the several hundred Irish immigrants living in Central Kentucky, that means a trip to Fáilte Irish Imports shop, where owner Liza Hendley Betz can provide them with the tastes of home.

Betz left her native Dublin in 1996 to follow a boyfriend to Lexington. That relationship didn’t last, but she fell in love with Kentucky. It’s a lot like Ireland: horses, green fields and stone fences. Sure, there’s no sea coast, but the weather is a lot better. The food, however, is just not the same.

While working at McCarthy’s Irish Bar, Betz decided there was a business opportunity in importing Irish food, especially the meats and other products that expats couldn’t legally bring back on the plane when they traveled home.

In December 2001, she opened Fáilte (pronounced FALL cha) Irish Imports on South Limestone. Fáilte — which means “welcome” in the traditional Irish language — moved earlier this month to South Upper Street, two doors down from McCarthy’s.

One reason for the move was the Limestone reconstruction project, which has closed the street since July.

“Every time you opened the door, there was dust and gravel,” she said. “We had a bad Christmas, and with St. Patrick’s Day coming up, I knew I had to do something.”

Betz also saw advantages to moving into the circa-1860 building with McCarthy’s, which is renovating the space on the other side of her shop to serve Irish food. “McCarthy’s is a better location because that’s where a lot of my customers go,” she said.

To broaden the shop’s appeal, Betz has added all kinds of Irish products and souvenirs, including tweed caps, Celtic jewelry, Guinness T-shirts and Belleek china. “We get a lot of people coming in talking about their Irish ancestors,” she said.

Still, Irish food and soft drinks account for more than half of her sales. Betz stocks brown bread mix, Bewley’s and Barry’s teas, and Chef and HP steak sauces, which many Irish use like ketchup.

“I sell a lot of Irish beans; they’re totally different from American beans,” probably because they are canned without sugar and meat, she said. The most popular items are Irish rashers (bacon), sausages, mince meat pies and “puddings” — black, made with animal blood, and white, made without blood.

“It’s a lifeline,” said Catherina McDonnell, another Dublin native, who has lived in Lexington since 1988. “It’s a great resource for the community; you can go in there and get the things you miss from home.”

Avena Kiely Joyce, a native of County Waterford, who has owned Harvey’s Bar for five of her 10 years in Lexington, can’t live without her Irish chocolate. “There’s just some difference in the chocolate from Ireland and what you get here,” she said.

“I like to have an Irish breakfast every Sunday, and her shop is the only place you can get everything for it,” Joyce said. The fresh eggs are local, but everything else comes from Ireland: rashers, sausages, black and white pudding, and even Brennans white bread, which Fáilte sells in frozen loaves. “That’s the toast I grew up with.”

Betz cherishes her Irish heritage, but she’s developing deep Kentucky roots. In December 2006, she married Michael Betz, who is finishing a horse veterinary residency in Ocala, Fla., and will soon be moving back to Lexington. His father, Bill Betz, was one of the breeders of last year’s Kentucky Derby winner, Mine That Bird.

Other Lexington groceries — even some of the supermarkets — are catching on, Betz said. They are beginning to stock some Irish foods, especially cheeses and tins of biscuits that Americans would call cookies.

“But I have a lot more variety, and I’m a one-stop shop,” she said.

Besides, in her new location, Betz hopes Fáilte will become even more closely tied to the Irish community.

Now, on the first Thursday of each month, when Lexington Celtic Association members gather at McCarthy’s for traditional dancing with the band Liam’s Fancy, they can grab some groceries on the way home.

Joe Riley is an evangelist for historic preservation, good urban design and proven strategies for making cities more livable and economically successful.

He founded the national Mayors’ Institute for City Design. The Joseph P. Riley Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Studies at the College of Charleston is named for him. But Riley’s best credential is his day job: since 1975, for an unprecedented nine terms, he has been the mayor of Charleston, S.C.

People who know Charleston often remark on what a great city it is — the beautiful waterfront, the Spoleto arts festival and the colorfully painted historic homes. Those old enough to remember what the city used to be like talk about how much it has improved.

During Riley’s tenure, Charleston’s annual tourist trade has increased from 1.7 million to 4.4 million visitors. At the same time, the city has often made lists of the best places to live and do business.

Riley was in Lexington last Wednesday to speak to an overflow crowd at the Downtown Public Library. Many civic leaders were there, as well as all four candidates for mayor.

With a rapid-fire PowerPoint presentation that lasted for more than an hour, Riley flashed slide after slide showing Charleston’s transformation from the time when “our downtown almost died.”

The pictures showed dozens of dilapidated buildings restored to elegance and commercial success; modest but well-designed public housing so attractive that expensive condos were later built across the street; neighborhoods and commercial streets rescued from neglect by city leaders who demanded and got high-quality private development; an elegant public park on what was once a waterfront eyesore.

“A big challenge was this vacant lot right in the middle of downtown,” Riley said at one point, prompting the crowd to erupt in laughter. “Oh, you have one of those, too?”

A key factor in Charleston’s success has been historic preservation. “We work hard to keep the bulldozers out,” he said.

Historic preservation hasn’t been so much about preserving the past — “we’re not a movie set or a theme park,” Riley said — but about creating an authentic, irreplaceable and human-scaled environment where people naturally want to be. The city also insists that new development be well-designed, well-built and, well, worthy of being in Charleston.

That means having effective laws and regulations, but also the kind of professional architectural review processes Lexington lacks. Such a process helps ensure that new development is appropriate, well-designed and in the best interests of the entire city and not just an individual developer or property owner.

“Try not to plop things down,” Riley said of new development. “Make it work. Make it fit.”

Excellence is often achieved with that last 5 percent of effort, the mayor noted. He repeatedly gave examples of using his political skills to make sure old buildings were saved, money was found to restore them and proposed new construction added to rather than detracted from the rest of the city. Riley said he once called then-President Bill Clinton to insist that a new federal building respect Charleston’s downtown esthetic.

“There’s never an excuse to build anything that doesn’t add to the beauty of a city,” Riley said, acknowledging that “the political land mines are all over the place.”

Successful cities put a lot of emphasis on beautiful public space that attracts people. “The things of value are increasingly the things we own together,” he said. “When you build a great public realm, the private money and development will follow.”

Riley’s strong leadership is controversial; he has always had a re-election opponent, and last time he had three. But Riley’s approach has clearly worked for Charleston and most of its citizens. He was re-elected for an eighth time in 2007 with 64 percent of the vote.

City-building is a complicated stew, but the principles Riley outlined are simple: vision, leadership, and a commitment to long-term value for the entire city rather than just short-term profit for individuals.

When Lexington has followed those principles, it has enjoyed some of its greatest success: creating the Urban Services Boundary in 1958; restricting rural lot sizes in 1964 and 1999; starting the Purchase of Development Rights program in 2000; and creating historic districts over the past 50 years (often, though, after significant damage was already done.)

Lexington has failed when it ignored those principles and allowed tacky, vinyl-box housing, commercial sprawl, haphazard architecture and, since the 1950s, the destruction of classic downtown buildings to make way for parking lots, drab concrete boxes and ego-driven glass towers.

“Our success as a culture, economic and otherwise, will depend on our cities,” Riley said. “We must treat them as precious heirlooms that we inherit and hold in trust for future generations.”

Want to explore the latest ideas for making cities successful? Plan to attend the Creative Cities Summit in Lexington, April 7-9.

Want to discuss how those ideas could be applied to Lexington? Mark April 17 on your calendar.

That’s when a companion session called Now What, Lexington? will be held at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning.

Unlike the Creative Cities Summit, there are no big-name speakers and no admission charge. Everyone is welcome to attend — or to lead a session, if they wish, on any topic that interests others enough to participate.

Now What, Lexington? isn’t a conference; it’s an “un-conference,” said Ben Self, a Lexington technology entrepreneur who is helping to organize the event. To sign up, go to www.nowwhatlexington.org.

“Our goal is to take the excitement, ideas and momentum from the Creative Cities Summit and spark some action from it,” Self said.

There is no agenda for Now What, Lexington?, just five or six rooms available for breakout discussions during seven 45-minute blocks between 9 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. The only request of session leaders is that the groups discuss action steps, not just ideas.

For example, Self wants to lead a discussion on what citizens and neighborhoods could do to self-organize and take up some of the slack of cuts — and possible future cuts — in city government services.

Now What, Lexington? is being organized by a new group called ProgressLex, which hopes to advocate for a variety of urban Lexington issues the way The Fayette Alliance does for land-use issues, said the group’s chairman, Dan Rowland, a University of Kentucky history professor.

Rowland said Lexington has many organizations that do good work, and ProgressLex hopes to bring them together to be more effective. He envisions a bipartisan online community of as many as 30,000 people focusing on issues ranging from good urban design and historic preservation to ­social justice and government transparency.

He said Now What, Lexington? seemed like the perfect launch event for ProgressLex, because it is focused on putting new ideas into action to improve Lexington’s quality of life.

Phil Holoubek, a downtown developer who is one of the main organizers of the Creative Cities Summit, said Now What, Lexington? is a perfect companion event. That’s because the summit is aimed toward ideas for cities generally — and attracting attention to Lexington as a place where good ideas are discussed. Now What, Lexington? could help get some of those ideas put into action.

“We really need both types of events to move ­Lexington forward,” ­Holoubek said.

This two-step approach — gathering ideas, then discussing an action plan for Lexington — offers a good model for Commerce Lexington’s annual Leadership Visit.

Each May, more than 200 local business and civic leaders spend three days together in another city, networking and gathering ideas to bring home to Lexington. This year’s trip, to Pittsburgh, promises to be one of the most useful of these visits, because it is being taken with Greater Louisville Inc.

Kentucky’s two largest cities need a closer working relationship, and this is a good step in that direction.

Although past ­Commerce Lexington trips have eventually led to some action in Lexington, a frequent criticism is that more could be done. In a letter to the editor recently, former Urban County Council member Dick DeCamp suggested that Commerce Lexington’s trips be scaled back to every two or three years, with time in between devoted to meetings focused on applying ideas already gathered.

That’s a sensible approach. At the least, Commerce Lexington could take a cue from the Creative Cities Summit and Now What, Lexington? and schedule public follow-up sessions after the Pittsburgh trip. Those sessions would be good places to discuss how ideas generated in Pittsburgh — and relationships made with Louisvillians — could be put to good use.

Speaking of ideas: One of America’s most successful mayors — Joseph P. Riley Jr. of Charleston, S.C. — speaks Wednesday at 6 p.m. in the Downtown Public Library. Riley, Charleston’s mayor since 1975, has been a key player in growing the city’s economy while preserving its historic buildings and decreasing crime. The free program is sponsored by The Fayette Alliance and UK’s Gaines Center for the Humanities.

Conservative politicians love to rail against government regulation of business, and voters lap it up.

After all, nobody likes being told what to do. This is a free country, isn’t it?

Almost any small business owner can point to examples of what he or she considers to be excessive government regulation, and many of those complaints are valid.

But to say that they show government regulation is bad is like saying the earth is flat because it looks that way from your window.

During the eight-year presidency of George W. Bush, the nation went from a strong economy and federal budget surplus to a deep recession and huge deficit. Much of that was the result of big tax cuts and two wars waged on credit.

The financial crisis that severely damaged our economy was largely the result of a lack of government regulation of investment banks and mortgage lenders. That included the repeal of regulations enacted during the Great Depression to prevent it from happening again.

Congress is now trying to re-regulate the financial services industry to prevent future crises. Still, conservative politicians are whipping up anxious voters by railing against government regulation. Go figure.

One especially troubling example comes from Bill Johnson, a Todd County businessman seeking the GOP nomination to replace retiring U.S. Sen. Jim Bunning of Kentucky. I heard Johnson and eight of the other 10 Senate candidates speak last month at the annual meeting of county judge-executives.

Johnson declared that several federal agencies should be abolished, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior. And he said it with a straight face.

The Interior Department, created in 1849, does a variety of things from overseeing the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Geological Survey to managing federal land, including the national parks. It also regulates surface mining, which may be what has Johnson steamed.

Congress created the EPA in 1970 at the urging of Republican President Richard Nixon because businesses and cities were poisoning the air and turning the nation’s lakes and rivers into sewers.

So, if we abolish the Interior Department, do we open more government land, including national parks, to oil drilling and coal mining? More logging and development? Or do we simply sell off federal lands to private interests and let them do as they please?

If we abolish the EPA, do we let mines, refineries, factories and cities pollute at will? Or do we rely on states for environmental regulation, which is often weak?

When the first white settlers came to Kentucky, they found a land that had been inhabited by Native Americans for thousands of years, yet remained an almost virgin wilderness. Less than 250 years later, Kentucky is covered with sprawling development, scarred by poorly reclaimed surface mines and challenged by air and water pollution. Without government regulation — indeed, better regulation than we’ve had up to now — what will Kentucky be like in another 250 years? Or 2,500 years?

American free enterprise is a wonderful thing. But business needs good government regulation to save it — and the rest of us — from greed, exploitation and excess. That’s especially true now that corporate vision rarely extends beyond the next year’s earnings forecasts and executive bonus plans.

Like most Americans, I don’t want government to be either too big or too small. I just want government that works in the best interests of the nation as a whole, for my grandchildren and their grandchildren’s grandchildren. In the long run, that’s also good for business.

When I moved back to Lexington in 1998, I realized just how much my hometown had sprawled in the 22 years I was away.

It wasn’t a complete surprise, of course. I had visited Lexington several times each year and watched things change around my parents’ home in a once-rural part of southern Fayette County. Farm after farm was carved up into subdivisions, shopping centers and estate lots.

Any healthy city needs to grow, and Lexington has managed growth better than most. Sprawl was limited by the Urban Services Boundary, created in 1958 and expanded a few times since then, as well as by minimum lot sizes for rural homes — 10 acres from 1964 to 1999, when they were increased to 40 acres.

Still, it was clear more than a decade ago that unless more was done, Lexington could eventually lose the rural landscape and unique agricultural soils that made it famous as the Horse Capital of the World. The World Monuments Fund has declared the Inner Bluegrass Region one of the planet’s 100 most endangered environments.

So, in 2000, the Urban County Council created the Purchase of Development Rights program. The goal was to permanently protect 50,000 acres of Fayette County’s most sensitive rural land — 27 percent of the county’s total land — with voluntary conservation easements by 2020.

So far, 24,126 acres have been protected, and program manager Billy Van Pelt expects to reach the halfway goal of 25,000 acres later this year. Landowners have either donated easements or sold them for an average of $2,500 per acre.

Conservation easements lower property taxes for landowners, because the cash value of their land is much less if it can’t be developed. “But nobody is getting rich off this,” Van Pelt said. If anything, it costs landowners in long-term economic benefit.

So far, the PDR program has cost $57.6 million — $31.5 million of which has come from state and federal grants. Van Pelt said the PDR program currently has applications from landowners wishing to sell about $8 million worth of conservation easements.

“The sooner we get to our goal, the sooner we’ll know when, how and where we’ll grow,” he said. “We need to preserve our farmland and plan for growth in the future.”

This year’s PDR program budget is $1.1 million, or about $4 for each Fayette County resident. That’s a pretty small amount in the grand scheme of things. But I’ve seen a few letters to the editor recently questioning the program’s value. And a couple of council members have made offhand suggestions that maybe PDR money should be diverted to other needs.

That would be a big mistake. While balancing the city budget won’t be easy this year — and perhaps for several years to come — Lexington must guard against the temptation to shortchange investments in long-term prosperity. Few of those investments are more important than protecting Fayette County’s unique landscape and environment.

Everyone knows Fayette County contains Kentucky’s second-biggest city, but many people don’t realize that it also has the state’s second-most valuable agricultural economy. Much of that comes from horse breeding, which provides 6,300 jobs. The horse industry also gives Lexington its global brand and is the anchor of its tourism industry.

Protecting Fayette County’s farmland is a good short-term deal for taxpayers. That’s because, unlike homeowners, the owners of farms and open land pay more in taxes than they use in taxpayer-funded city services.

But preserving farmland and open space is also an important long-term investment. In addition to preserving a large agricultural economy, it protects the environment from pollution. And it provides the open space and scenic beauty that are important factors in the hard-to-quantify “quality of life” attribute that makes people want to live in and around Lexington.

It also hedges Lexington’s bets for the future. For example, locally grown food could become increasingly important as rising oil prices make long-distance transportation of food more expensive.

“In our minds, PDR plays a critical role in Lexington’s economic future,” said Knox van Nagell, executive director of The Fayette Alliance, a non-profit organization that focuses on land-use issues and sustainable development policy.

“If we’re going to preserve this rural land, we can’t leave it up to chance and politics,” said van Nagell, whose own family has donated conservation easements for the Fayette County land where they have raised cattle and row crops for 200 years. “We need to preserve this land in perpetuity.”

For more information

To learn more about Lexington’s Purchase of Development Rights program, visit the city’s Web site by clicking here.

To see PDR easements donated and granted as of September 2009, click here to see a searchable database.

There was unease among some journalists, mayoral candidates and their staffers about the format for the first public forum of the Lexington mayor’s race. That’s because the candidates were to be questioned by three community bloggers as well as four journalists.

The concern was this: would the bloggers act professionally?

As it turned out, the bloggers were fine, and they asked some excellent questions.

It was one of the mayoral candidates, Clarence “Skip” Horine, who went off the deep end.

Horine is a businessman who ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 1993. He was last to join this race, which also includes Mayor Jim Newberry; the mayor he defeated four years ago, Teresa Isaac; and Vice Mayor Jim Gray.

Many of Horine’s responses to questions were fine, although they included a lot of generic conservative “free enterprise will solve everything” language. Then he started making vague and confusing allegations about police corruption and bid-rigging on city projects, prompting Newberry at one point to say that if Horine has evidence of wrongdoing he should give it to prosecutors.

Then, when it was time for the candidates’ closing statements, Horine began with what he (accurately) described as a convoluted story about alleged police wrongdoing. Then he accused a police officer by name of vague impropriety and mentioned that his mother was murdered in Lexington years ago.

As I surveyed the crowd at the Main Street business incubator Awesome Inc., people were glancing at each other with “what the …. ?” looks. Whatever credibility Horine had as a serious candidate evaporated. He seemed more motivated by his own issues than Lexington’s issues.

Aside from the Skip Horine sideshow, the forum offered good discussion on a variety of issues, but few surprises. The three major candidates said jobs and economic development are the biggest issues Lexington faces. Horine said the biggest issue is “trust” of city government (see above).

Newberry had good answers to many questions, but was defensive and aggressive for an incumbent.  Gray made good points about his business expertise and the need for more visionary leadership, but some of his answers were rambling. Isaac answered many questions well, but portrayed her administration as much more successful than most others remember it. (She was voted out of office four years ago by a wide margin.)

The panel’s journalists were me, Bill Bryant of WKYT-TV, Erik Carlson of Business Lexington and Kenny Colston of the Kentucky Kernel, UK’s student newspaper. The bloggers were Bianca Spriggs, Joe Sonka and Steve Smith of UK College Republicans. The forum was organized by Kakie Urch, assistant professor of new media at the University of Kentucky’s School of Journalism and Telecommunications. It was sponsored by the Scripps Howard First Amendment Center at UK.

I was too busy asking questions, listening to answers and condensing them into dozens of 140-character Twitter posts to take notes. But Herald-Leader Andy Mead has a well-done news story summarizing the forum. Read it here.

If this forum was any indication, the 2010 Lexington mayor’s race will be interesting. Let’s hope that amidst the bragging, blaming, posturing and Twilight Zone moments the candidates will give voters some clear information about who would do the best job of helping make a fine city even better.

The four candidates for Lexington mayor will answer questions from a panel of journalists and community bloggers tonight from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. in the first major forum of the campaign.

The forum at Awesome Inc., a business incubator space at 348 East Main Street, will feature Mayor Jim Newberry, former Mayor Teresa Isaac, Vice Mayor Jim Gray and businessman Skip Horine. Seating — and standing room — is very limited, so here are the best ways to follow the action:

• Watch streaming video at www.wkyt.com.
• I’m one of the panelists, and I will be sending Twitter updates at twitter.com/tomeblen. (While you’re there, click “follow”.) You can follow everyone’s Twitter feeds on the forum by using the hashtag #lexmayor.  I’ll also post assessments of the forum afterward on this blog.
• Live blogging at www.kykernel.com.
• Reporter Andy Mead will write a news story for www.kentucky.com and Thursday’s Herald-Leader.
• Read and watch what other panelists have to say about the forum.

Other journalists on the panel are WKYT’s Bill Bryant, Business Lexington’s Erik Carlson and the Kentucky Kernel’s Kenny Colston. Community bloggers are Joe Sonka, Bianca Spriggs and Steve Smith of UK College Republicans.

In addition to presenting the mayoral candidates’ views, the forum is an effort to show the variety of ways voters now get political news, information and commentary. The forum is being organized by Kakie Urch, a veteran journalist and assistant professor of new media at the University of Kentucky’s School of Journalism and Telecommunications. It is sponsored by the Scripps Howard First Amendment Center at UK.

Central Kentucky is known as a center for horses, bourbon and basketball. As a center for creative technology people? Not so much.

Yet, technology employment in the Lexington area has grown at a rate that is more than four times the national average in the past decade. More than 6,000 people are now employed by technology and software companies, including Lexmark, Belcan Engineering, ACS/Xerox, Hewlett-Packard and Mersive Technologies.

“I don’t think people realize how pervasive technology is here,” said Ben Askren, a Lexmark engineer. And that makes it difficult for technology companies to attract and retain the best employees so they can keep growing.

Askren is part of a volunteer group called In2Lex that has worked to help Lexington’s creative technology workers get to know each other through events such as Geek’s Night Out and Pecha-Kucha, an idea-generation program in which speakers make presentations of no more than six minutes and 40 seconds each.

Now the group wants to raise Lexington’s national profile as a place where creative technology people can find career opportunities and a pleasant, interesting lifestyle.

In2Lex is promoting “April Is …” to focus attention on more than 20 events being sponsored by several organizations that month. They include the Creative Cities Summit and a “TedX” seminar — a local version of the Technology, Entertainment, Design events that feature big-name speakers with “ideas worth spreading.”

Several technology gatherings are planned: the Kentucky Innovation & Technology Conference, the Kentucky Space Conference, and seminars related to electronic health information, mobile devices, government information systems, social entrepreneurship and business development.

And then there’s the geeky, fun stuff.

Mechanalia is an interactive game in which small teams drive electric rovers with robotic arms and try to accomplish tasks while opponents shoot at them with tennis-ball cannons; Tinker is a combination jazz festival and science fair for adults; and at the No Mercy Full-Blown Gamers’ Party, attendees can play unreleased video games.

All this will be going on during one of Lexington’s traditionally interesting months: the horses are running at Keeneland and competing in the Rolex Kentucky Three Day Event. And then there is the Best of the Bluegrass festival.

“We really want to promote Lexington as a lifestyle, career and education destination for people in creative technology,” Askren said.

OK, I can already hear some of you snickering. But, if you think about it, this economic development strategy makes a lot of sense. Digital technology increasingly allows creative workers to live wherever they want. And they usually want to live near a city with a lot of professional opportunities.

Competing with Austin, Texas, and Seattle is a challenge, but Central Kentucky has some advantages that it can exploit. “Once people see what’s here, it changes their perception of Kentucky,” said Gina Greathouse, Commerce Lexington’s senior vice president for economic development.

Those advantages include a laid-back, affordable lifestyle; a beautiful landscape; more arts and cultural offerings than many people realize; and a central location not far from Cincinnati and Louisville. Plus, Lexington has one of the nation’s best-educated labor forces: 38 percent of people older than 25 have college degrees, and there are 15 colleges and universities in the area.

Those attributes regularly put Lexington high on national rankings of places to raise a family or start a business.

In2Lex hopes to make its “April Is …” an annual event, and it is looking for new ways to market the region’s creative technology potential. “It really comes down to how do we make Lexington a better place,” Askren said.

• If you go

  For more information about In2Lex and a schedule of events planned in April, go to www.in2lex.com.

The Rev. London Ferrill spent much of his life serving as a bridge between Lexington’s black and white communities. Now, almost 156 years after his death, he is doing it again.

Ferrill may have been the most famous man in Lexington you’ve probably never heard of. Born into slavery in Virginia in 1789 and later freed, he was an influential preacher in the black community here. His funeral procession of nearly 5,000 people was the second-largest the city had ever seen, after Henry Clay’s two years earlier.

The Episcopal Church has invited First African Baptist Church to services Saturday honoring the memory of Ferrill, the only black man buried in the Old Episcopal Burying Ground on East Third Street.

The Most Rev. Katherine Jefferts Schori, the presiding bishop of the national Episcopal Church, will be among the speakers at the 1:30 p.m. service at Christ Church Cathedral on Market Street.

Choirs from local Episcopal churches and First African Baptist will perform, and the program will include a new composition that John Linker, Good Shepherd Episcopal Church’s organist and choirmaster, wrote to accompany the text of a prayer attributed to Ferrill.

Ministers will dedicate the plaque for a monument honoring Ferrill that will be placed in the cemetery later this year. And Ferrill’s broken tombstone formally will be given to First African Baptist, where it has been on display for two decades.

These and other efforts to commemorate Ferrill are an attempt at reconciliation, said Robert Voll, a member of Christ Church who oversees the cemetery.

“I commend the Episcopal Church for doing this,” said the Rev. Nathl Moore, pastor of First African Baptist. “Whenever we can build bridges, it’s a positive thing.”

When he was 9, the woman who owned Ferrill died and he was sold to Col. Samuel Overton for $600. At age 11, Ferrill (sometimes spelled Ferrell) almost drowned in a river, and that was said to have led to a religious conversion. He gained his freedom after Overton’s death and moved with his wife Rodah in about 1815 to Lexington, where Overton had relatives.

Ferrill was trained as a carpenter and, despite little formal education, developed a reputation as a fine preacher. He assisted and later succeeded Peter Durrett, known as “Old Captain,” who in 1790 had started the first African church west of the Allegheny Mountains.

Shortly before Durrett died in 1823, Lexington’s city trustees appointed Ferrill as the official preacher to the black community. Soon afterward, the Elkhorn Baptist Association, a group of Southern Baptist churches in central Kentucky, admitted First African Church into its fold.

White leaders were nervous about Lexington’s growing black population, most of whom were slaves, and they apparently saw Ferrill as someone they could trust. When a rival black preacher tried to force him out of state under a law that prohibited free blacks born outside Kentucky from staying here for more than 30 days, Lexington leaders persuaded the General Assembly to give Ferrill an exemption.

In June 1833, a few months after the Episcopal cemetery was created, a cholera epidemic swept Lexington. The disease killed 500 of the city’s 7,000 residents, including Ferrill’s wife. He was one of three ministers who stayed in town to bury the dead and comfort survivors, black and white.

After the epidemic, Ferrill’s stature in Lexington grew with his church. First African Baptist was the largest church in Kentucky by 1850, with more than 1,800 members. From 1833 until it moved to Price Road in 1987, the church occupied a sanctuary that still stands at the corner of Short and Dewees streets.

Ferrill is said to have baptized 5,000 people and performed hundreds of marriages, using the vows “until death or distance do us part” in the case of slaves who might be separated by sale.

Ferrill died of a heart attack in 1854 and was buried in the all-white Episcopal cemetery.

The Rev. L.H. McIntyre, retired pastor of First African Baptist, said he has done a lot of research on Ferrill and suspects that his father was white, which could help explain his acceptance by white leaders. No images or descriptions of him are known to exist.

“London Ferrill was a force for unity, a force for connecting the black and white communities of Lexington,” Voll said. But amid the intense racism that swept Kentucky in the decades after the Civil War, his role was largely forgotten.

After The Lexington Cemetery was established in 1849, the Old Episcopal Burying Ground with its Victorian groundskeeper’s cottage was neglected. The cemetery became an island, separated from the predominantly black neighborhood that surrounded it by a tall iron fence and locked gates.

Nobody knows exactly where in the cemetery Ferrill was buried. His grave and headstone were separated by the time a portion of the cemetery thought to have been unused was sold to the city in the 1980s for the widening and extension of Rose Street, now Elm Tree Lane.

McIntyre said a groundskeeper let him take Ferrill’s tombstone from a pile of broken, misplaced stones. “I wasn’t trying to steal it, just keep it from being lost,” he said. Christ Church didn’t seek the tombstone’s return.

“They’ve taken better care of it than we ever have,” Voll said.

Voll, a retired Ashland Inc. human resources executive, began overseeing the old cemetery four years ago. One of his goals has been to improve the church’s relationship with both the neighborhood and the African American community.

That led to the planned monument to Ferrill as well as a state historic marker for the cemetery.

It also led Christ Church to allow adjacent land it acquired in 2000 to become a community vegetable garden in 2008.

Moore, the pastor of First African Baptist, said his congregation appreciates the Episcopal Church’s initiative. And he is even more impressed by the church allowing its land to become the London Ferrill Community Garden.

“It’s good we can worship together,” Moore said. “But the community needs us to do more than worship together. It needs us to work together.”

It never fails: Gerald Smith goes to a community to speak about the Kentucky African American Encyclopedia project, and he leaves having learned something unexpected.

People bring old photographs, documents and newspaper clippings to show him. They tell him tales about local history. They even drive him to hidden slave cemeteries and show him little museums, public library archives and memorabilia collections he never knew existed.

“There is a tremendous amount of interest and enthusiasm for this project,” said Smith, below right, a University of Kentucky history professor and one of the encyclopedia’s three general editors.

Along with famous people such as Muhammad Ali and many African-American firsts, the encyclopedia will document fascinating lives that few people know about.

For example, Margaret Garner, a slave born in Boone County in 1833, was the inspiration for Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved. And Joe Simons, a Fleming County slave, was known for his ability to read the Bible upside down. (The woman who owned him read the Bible aloud while he stood at her feet fanning flies; that’s how he taught himself to read.)

Although slavery and the civil rights movement have been well documented, little has been written about many aspects of the parallel universe of black life in Kentucky before integration.

Owensboro’s black citizens organized the Negro Chautauqua in 1907 to provide intellectual stimulation and religious education. There were black newspapers such as the Baptist Monitor, and baseball teams such as the Owingsville Giants of the 1920s and Lawrenceburg Athletic Club of the 1950s.

“African-Americans had their own world,” Smith said. “There were people, places and events of distinction that shaped not only their lives, but the history of Kentucky.”

The encyclopedia is an effort to verify and record much of that history — and to serve as a springboard for further research and writing that will lead to greater cultural understanding.

But like many worthwhile projects in this economic downturn, the encyclopedia is threatened by lack of funding. As Black History Month began, the encyclopedia’s publication date was pushed from 2011 to 2013, and “if we don’t have $30,000 by Aug. 1, it’s pretty much over,” Smith said.

Since the project began two years ago, it has received strong support from University of Kentucky President Lee T. Todd Jr. and smaller contributions from several other Kentucky colleges, universities and foundations, said Stephen Wrinn, director of University Press of Kentucky, which is publishing the encyclopedia. Smith said that, after giving speeches about the project, he often receives small donations from people in the audience.

Like the Encyclopedia of Northern Kentucky, published last year, this book will cost about $700,000 in cash and in-kind support to produce. Only about half of that has been raised.

Wrinn said the project needs a private individual or two to step up and champion a fund-raising campaign, as Mike Hammons and Alice Sparks did for the Northern Kentucky book.

“Gerald and the others have done a good job of getting it up and running,” Wrinn said, and the fund-raising is being co ordinated by the press’s Thomas D. Clark Foundation. “I’m confident we’re going to do it.”

Wrinn said he isn’t aware of an African-American encyclopedia for any other state. The Kentucky Encyclopedia, published in 1992, was a pioneer, too; many states have since done their own. “This is an opportunity for Kentucky to again be a leader,” he said.

So far, 1,271 entries have been chosen for the Kentucky African American Encyclopedia, and 242 have been completed. Several hundred more have been assigned, and Smith is looking for volunteers to join the approximately 80 writers on the project. For more information, go to www.uky.edu/kaae.

Editing the book with Smith are history professors Karen C. McDaniel of Eastern Kentucky University and John A. Hardin of Western Kentucky University. They and other historians are writing 14 topical essays on issues including civil rights, education, religion and women.

Graduate students in history are doing much of the research and verification, and most of the project’s funds go to pay them.

“It will fill many of the gaps in Kentucky history, and in the history of the South as well,” Smith said of the encyclopedia. “I have met some of the nicest people around the state. One thing I’ve learned about Kentuckians is that they love and appreciate their history.”

It’s hard to imagine our nation’s early presidents as real people. We know them only as images of stern-faced men in funny clothes, staring back at us from history books, paintings, money - and newspaper ads for President’s Day sales.

But to Horace Holley, they were friends and pen pals. Holley was himself a president, of Transylvania University, from 1818 until a few months before his death in 1827.

I didn’t know much about Holley until recently, when I got an excited call from my older daughter, Mollie, who works in Transylvania’s public relations office.

“I held letters today written by John Adams and James Monroe!” she said.

She had been in Transylvania’s Special Collections department, doing research for a university Web site feature she writes called Transy Trivia. It sounded so interesting, I went over and spent an afternoon looking through Holley’s papers.

The carefully preserved documents reveal what a well-connected man Holley was, and they offer revealing glimpses of some early American presidents and their wives - warts and all.

Holley came to Lexington from Boston, where he knew Adams and his son, John Quincy Adams. His wife, Mary Austin Holley, was a cousin of Stephen F. Austin, a Transy alum for whom Austin, Texas, was later named. Holley was a Unitarian minister and admired educator who helped burnish Lexington’s image as the “Athens of the West.”

There are faded letters from the second president, hard to read except for the end: “… and real affection, your friend and humble servant, John Adams.”

Adams gave Holley a glowing letter of introduction to the third president, Thomas Jefferson. In September, 1824, Holley spent two days visiting Jefferson at his Monticello estate near Charlottesville, Va.

“Mr. Jefferson is a plain looking old gentleman, draped in a blue coat with yellow buttons, a buff jacket, a pair of snuff colored corduroy pantaloons, blue and white cotton stockings and black slippers up at the heels,” Holley wrote to his wife.

“He is grey, tall, square shouldered, takes long steps, and has not now a clear voice. His muscles are not vigorous, but his hand trembles little, and is not observed to tremble at all as he uses at table. He rides on horseback daily in fair weather, but walks out seldom. … He talked easily still, though 82, and preserves the faculties of his mind in vigorous operation. His memory fails of course in regard to names and more recent events, but his judgment is unimpaired.”

Holley wrote a Kentucky friend that Jefferson questioned him closely about Transylvania. At the time, Jefferson was lobbying Virginian officials for support of the new University of Virginia. He argued that if Virginia didn’t invest in a first-class university, the state’s brightest young men would leave for either Transylvania or Harvard. Of the two, Jefferson said, he preferred Transylvania.

That may have been because Jefferson had high expectations for Kentucky’s future. “The time is not distant … when we shall be but a secondary people to them,” Jefferson wrote to Adams in May 1818.

Holley’s papers include several letters from James Monroe. Holley wrote to his wife from Washington in April 1818, describing visits to Monroe’s White House, which only recently had been rebuilt after British troops burned it during the War of 1812.

Holley bragged that Monroe wrote him a letter of introduction to the governor of Virginia: “He voluntarily gave it, and the offer of it took me by surprise.” But he devoted most of the letter to detailed descriptions of what Mrs. Monroe and other ladies were like and were wearing.

“Mrs. Monroe … appeared so much handsomer to me in full dress than she did the evening before in common dress and a cap that was not becoming,” he wrote. “She is … 52 years old, and I never saw a woman of that age appear so young.”

Monroe and Andrew Jackson visited Lexington on July 4, 1819, and heard Holley preach. In 1823, the Holleys went to Nashville, Tenn., where they spent several days at The Hermitage as guests of future President Jackson and his controversial wife, Rachel.

In a letter to his father, Holley described Jackson as “one of the most hospitable men” in Tennessee. “The general gave me many anecdotes of his wars with the Indians. … He is a prompt, practical man with very correct moral feelings.”

Holley added: “Mrs. Jackson is not a woman of cultivation, but has seen a great many people, has fine spirits, entertains well and is benevolent. She is short in her person and quite fat.”

At the end of several such letters, Holley asks that his observations be treated with discretion. Nearly two centuries later, the letters are more enlightening than embarrassing. They show that American icons were people, too.

Augustana will perform April 8 at Buster’s in Lexington — but only for the first 1,000 people who volunteer at least 10 hours before March 31 for a Central Kentucky nonprofit agency.

The United Way of the Bluegrass announced Wednesday that the  California-based band would headline its 10,000 Hours Show. The show, which has been planned since last May, was designed as a reward to encourage young adults to volunteer their time for good causes.

United Way said Augustana was a popular choice in a survey it did in January to help select a band for the concert. Augustana’s songs include Boston, which hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Top 40.

The concert is free to anyone in Central Kentucky who volunteers 10 hours or more between April 1, 2009 and  March 31, 2010. To participate, go to www.10KHoursShow.com, create a free account, and log your volunteer hours, which will be verified by participating nonprofit agencies. There will be 1,000 tickets for the show. (One thousand people volunteering 10 hours each equals 10,000 hours. But feel free to volunteer more… )

The show’s main sponsors are United Way of the Bluegrass and W. Rogers Company. Other sponsors include Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers, Buster’s Billiards and Backroom, 100.1 WKQQ-FM and 104.5 The Cat.

When the Lexington Film League announced a contest last September for short videos about “do-ers” in Kentucky, organizers didn’t know what to expect.

Kiley Lane and several other filmmakers had formed the all-volunteer league last year to promote and showcase what has become an increasingly popular form of storytelling and self-expression.

Almost anyone these days can make a short video and post it online. The league promotes film arts through classes at the Carnegie Center, with lectures at the Lexington Art League and through its Web site: www.lexingtonfilmleague.org.

While discussing a film project with a friend at a Lexington non-profit group, Lane said, “We thought it would be great if we had a contest that got people who are doing these things in the community involved with filmmakers. It could show off both what the filmmaker and the organization can do.”

So the league sent out e-mail, posted information on its Web site and even called non-profit organizations to suggest that a staffer or volunteer might have the video skills to tell their story.

Then contest organizers waited. And waited.

As the deadline approached, only two or three entries had been posted to the league’s YouTube channel. Then, suddenly, entries began flooding in. They came from experienced filmmakers, photojournalists, lawyers and even high school students.

“It was really exciting,” Lane said. “The number that came in really surprised us, and thrilled us.”

Twenty-two videos are vying for two awards, which will be announced at a free public event beginning at 6 p.m. Feb. 26 at Natasha’s Bistro on Esplanade Avenue, where the top 10 videos will be screened.

The best video award, selected by the league’s judges, comes with a $400 prize, to be split between the filmmaker and a non-profit organization of his or her choice. The prize money comes from the Lexington-based clothing company Make Yourself Necessary, which helps charities raise money.

Judging criteria include storytelling, production quality, use of images and interviews, editing and overall artistic impression, Lane said.

Then there is the people’s choice award, with a prize that has yet to be determined. Online viewers can see the 22 entries at the league’s YouTube channel, www.youtube.com/user/lexfilmleague, and e-mail their votes to lexfilmleague@gmail.com.

Several organizations have mobilized supporters for “people’s choice” votes, Lane said. One video has more than 150 votes. You can vote only once.

What kind of videos was the league looking for?

Lane said organizers purposely left contest criteria vague. Should film subjects be people or organizations doing “good” in their communities? “Good is such a relative term,” she said. “In the end, we decided we wanted to be open-ended. We wanted different people’s takes on what a do-er is.”

Many of the videos profile non-profit organizations, including Central Kentucky Radio Eye, which records periodicals for the blind; the Backside Learning Center in Louisville, which teaches immigrant horse workers English and computer skills; the Bluegrass Miracle League, which organizes baseball games for handicapped children; and Wholesome Table, which teaches immigrants to prepare locally available foods.

Angela Shoemaker used audio interviews and black-and-white photographs to tell about a family helped by Louisville’s Volunteers of America Family Shelter. Jennifer Miller’s video profiled Lexington’s zany March Madness Marching Band.

And there are several individual profiles: a photographer who produced a popular calendar of female mechanics while riding her motorcycle across the country; a woman who spent 21 days living in a window at the 21C Museum Hotel in Louisville; and a man who reads aloud in downtown Lexington parks.

At the Feb. 26 event, the league will announce details of its next video contest. Lane wouldn’t divulge the subject, but she said it would involve music and culminate in an event at Buster’s Billiards & Backroom in May. The winning video, she said, would be shown at the Louisville Film Society’s annual Flyover Film Festival in June.

The league plans to repeat this contest next year in the hope of getting entries from beyond Lexington and Louisville, Lane said. She thinks it’s fertile territory.

“Most people have their day jobs but they’re also interested in something else,” she said.

“Organizations and people across the state are doing some amazing things in their communities, and they are passionate about community support. You see that through the videos.”

A century ago, farm-to-market roads were the new infrastructure Kentucky needed to move its economy forward. A half-century ago, it was interstates and parkways.

Now, it’s the information superhighway.

As the federal government begins taking applications Feb. 15 for $7.2 billion in second-round stimulus money to expand broadband, it’s a good time to check in on a Kentucky program that has become a model for other states.

ConnectKentucky was launched as a public-private partnership in 2004 to map high-speed Internet access in Kentucky, find gaps in coverage and work county-by-county with citizens, local officials and service providers to fill them. Much of the work focused on rural areas and the mountains.

From 2004 to 2007, broadband availability grew from 58 percent of Kentucky households to 95 percent, ConnectKentucky says.

The organization’s newest initiative uses money from coal severance taxes and the Appalachian Regional Commission to expand broadband access in Breathitt, Powell, Estill and Lee counties.

ConnectKentucky also works to teach people how to use computers and to promote broadband as a way to improve economic and community development, education and health care.

That’s because broadband availability and affordability aren’t the only issues, said René True, executive director of ConnectKentucky. “Sometimes there’s a lack of understanding of the value that broadband can bring to a household or an individual,” he said.

ConnectKentucky’s Computers 4 Kids program has distributed 3,203 computers to low-income families and non-profit organizations. Many of those were older models refurbished by state inmates, who in the process learned skills they can use to get jobs when they leave prison.

The organization’s Web site — www.connectkentucky.org — includes county-by-county information and broadband speed-testing software.

ConnectKentucky has become a national model for broadband expansion. After Ohio and Tennessee wanted to copy ConnectKentucky’s approach, a national non-profit, Connected Nation, was formed as an umbrella organization. Connected Nation also now works with 10 other states and Puerto Rico.

ConnectKentucky and Connected Nation haven’t escaped controversy. Critics complain that the public-private partnership favors major telephone and cable companies at the expense of small providers and public broadband solutions.

The organizations dispute that, saying they work with all providers in a given area. Nationally, 19 big corporations now provide 93 percent of all broadband services, according to Leichtman Research Group, an industry consultant.

They also have been caught up in a larger debate about national broadband policy. Critics say America needs a more ambitious national broadband strategy than simply supporting the individual business strategies of private providers.

Connected Nation has attracted bipartisan political support, as has ConnectKentucky, which was launched by then-Gov. Ernie Fletcher, a Republican, but built on work begun by his predecessor, Gov. Paul Patton, a Democrat.

Still, in the scramble to balance the two-year state budget in 2008, Gov. Steve Beshear vetoed $1.2 million in annual funding for ConnectKentucky, which surprised some lawmakers. True said the organization hasn’t asked for state funding for the next budget cycle.

ConnectKentucky is being kept afloat now by Connected Nation, $100,000 in corporate support and other revenue from grants and consulting work, True said. Rather than statewide projects, it is focusing on local efforts where it can secure grants and other funding.

One such project begins in April, when ConnectKentucky will use a $134,000 Kentucky Housing Corp. grant to provide computers, broadband connectivity and training to low-income residents in the redeveloped Equestrian View neighborhood of Lexington’s East End. Lexmark is donating printers.

True said ConnectKentucky plans to apply for some of the new federal stimulus money to expand that kind of program to other public housing in Kentucky.

“It’s a key component for participating in the 21st-century economy,” he said of computer knowledge and broadband access. “Without it, we’re going to be left behind.”

I don’t usually go out to the Lexington Cemetery this time of year; it’s much nicer in the spring or fall.

But I thought Henry might want to talk.

Henry Clay is remembered as one of America’s greatest statesmen. During the first half of the 19th century, he was a powerful speaker of the House, a senator of great influence, secretary of state and a frequent candidate for president.

As leader of what became the Republican party, he could be as partisan as anybody. But time after time, when the nation was in a jam, he put ideology and partisanship aside and convinced other politicians to do what was best for the country.

Clay became a model for diplomacy, conciliation and conflict resolution. He negotiated an end to the War of 1812, which he helped start, and brokered compromises over taxes and slavery that delayed the Civil War three times.

Clay died in 1852. His tomb is at the Lexington Cemetery, and a marble statue of him stands atop a 120-foot column overlooking the city.

Whenever I drive by, I wonder what Clay would think of the institution he once led — a Congress that seems gridlocked by partisanship and perverted by special-interest money.

So I decided to stop and ask him.

“I have a pretty good view from up here,” Clay said when I asked if he follows current affairs. “And I catch wind of a lot of things.”

He didn’t want to discuss individuals, such as his successor, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. “After all,” Clay said, “he’s the leader of my party, and he has sat at my old desk in the Senate chamber.”

Clay blamed both Republicans and Democrats for the sorry state of American governance. He also complained about ideologues who pressure the reasonable people on both sides, making it almost impossible for them to find middle ground.

“There are few principles so important that there can be no compromise,” Clay said. “For example, preservation of the Union.”

What about slavery?

“OK, you got me on that one,” he said. “In hindsight, I should have had the courage of cousin Cassius. Alas, every man is a product of his time.

“But my point is this,” he said, quickly changing the subject, “I always said we should govern with the spirit of brothers. Brothers will disagree, even fight. But when the family is threatened, they band together.

“I was right about a lot of things, such as trade protection to strengthen American industry and federal spending to build roads,” he said. “But I wasn’t right about everything. Nobody is. Leadership isn’t about always winning; it’s about figuring out what’s best for the nation. If the nation isn’t strong, none of the rest matters.”

That may be good leadership, but is it good politics?

“Of course not,” Clay said. “I famously said that I would rather be right than president. Well, I ran for president five times and was never elected. I’ll tell you this, though: I’m more highly regarded now than some of the men who defeated me.”

I asked Clay what he thought of McConnell’s strategy of filibustering almost everything Democrats try to do in the Senate, and of House Democrats’ strategy of pushing through major legislation without even consulting Republicans.

“I told you I don’t want to discuss individuals,” he said. “But it’s no wonder that public opinion of both parties in Congress could hardly be lower. From a purely political standpoint, what will happen when the shoe is on the other foot? What will happen when the other party is in power? Or in the minority? Will revenge and pettiness never end?”

I asked Clay about all of the millions of dollars that corporations and other special interests spend on campaign contributions, attack ads and lobbying Congress. Does he think it perverts government?

“What do you think?” he replied. “Campaigns weren’t so expensive in my day. There was no television or talk radio. We just had newspapers, and they were vile enough.

“But it seems obvious,” he continued. “If wealthy and powerful interests are spending millions of dollars to make you wealthy and powerful, are you going to do what’s best for their interests or what’s best for the public interest? In my day we called it bribery.”

So you don’t think money is simply free speech?

“I told you,” Clay replied with a cold, marble stare, “I don’t want to discuss individuals.”

Reading Wendell Berry is like having a conversation with a friend — an old friend whose wisdom makes you want to do nothing more than hush and listen.

That’s how I felt, snowbound last weekend, reading Berry’s new collection of essays, Imagination in Place. Berry reflects on writers he has known or admired and the role that a sense of place played in their lives and work.

Place has special significance to Berry, as he explains in the book. After sojourns on each coast, Berry and his wife, Tanya, and their two children returned to his native Henry County in 1964. They bought a farm along the Kentucky River near Port Royal, which became the Port William of his fiction.

“I believe I can say properly that my fiction originates in part in actual experience of an actual place: its topography, weather, plants, and animals; its language, voice and stories,” Berry writes.

He has farmed and written in that place for 45 years. Along the way, he has become perhaps the nation’s most eloquent advocate for time-honored agrarian values that are attracting new appreciation in the 21st century after being dismissed during much of the 20th.

These 15 essays, written from 1993 to 2009, have been published previously, most in The Sewanee Review. Berry fans might appreciate them most for the insights they offer into his own development as a writer.

Berry writes about being a graduate student at Stanford under Wallace Stegner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 30 books, most of which were set in the American West.

“The fact is that at the time I did not understand him as an influence, and the reason was that at the time I did not know what kind of influence I was going to need,” he writes. “At the time I wanted only to be a writer; beyond that, I had little self- knowledge, and not an inkling of what I wanted to do or where I wanted to do it.”

In other essays, Berry writes of Donald Hall and his New England; of James Still and Gurney Norman and their Eastern Kentucky; and of Hayden Carruth, whose poetry was rooted in Vermont, where he lived for many years.

There are essays of literary criticism, and remembrances of departed literary friends, including James Baker Hall, a classmate of Berry at the University of Kentucky and later a colleague when they both taught English there.

These pieces include the flashes of wisdom that Berry’s fans cherish, such as this description of his first visit to an Eastern Kentucky strip mine in 1964 with Norman, who was then a newspaper reporter in Hazard: “It had never occurred to me that people could destroy land with an indifference that perfectly matched the capability of their technology.”

And then there is this wonderful critique of literary “realism” that focuses only on the dark side of life: “Why should one read a book that is programmatically more depressing than the news?”

Although much in these essays celebrates the warmth and humanness of life, Berry also does some of what he does best: hold up a mirror to modern society and make observations of blinding moral clarity.

“We have pretty much made a virtue of selfishness as the mainstay of our economy, and we have provided an abundance of good excuses for dishonesty,” he writes. “Most of us give no thought to the state of nature as the context of our lives, because we conventionally disbelieve in natural limits.”

Imagination in Place is the latest example of why Wendell Berry is not only a Kentucky treasure, but an American treasure.

Jamie Millard, president of the Lexington History Museum, had a video camera running as workers moved the statue of former Vice President John Cabell Breckinridge across Cheapside to make way for construction of the new market house. Pretty cool. (Note Herald-Leader chief photographer Charles Bertram shooting photos the whole time.)

By the way, the museum today opened a new exhibit, which looks at the Lexington of 1810. It includes historic documents and a map showing Lexington’s surviving 200-year-old structures. The display is within the permanent exhibit, Lexington: Athens of the West.

Located in the old Fayette County Courthouse, 215 W. Main St., The Lexington History Museum is open Friday through Monday, Noon to 4 p.m, and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is free. For more information, call (859) 254-0530, or visit www.LexingtonHistoryMuseum.org.