The Bluegrass and Beyond

Julie Warren Conn uses a grinder to carve a piece of Minnesota limestone in her studio near downtown Winchester. Her fork lift often doubles as a work table.  Photos by Tom Eblen

WINCHESTER — When Julie Warren Conn was a student at the University of Tennessee, she hoped to be a French major, but couldn’t speak the language. She became an art major instead, but continued to struggle with some basics.

“I couldn’t paint, couldn’t draw, but I loved working with my hands,” said Conn, who in 1965 became the UT School of Art’s first sculpture graduate.

Over the next dozen years, Conn mastered steel welding. Then she took up stone carving. Since 1977, the artist formerly known as Julie Warren Martin has developed a national reputation as a stone sculptor, with dozens of pieces in prestigious museums and collections.

Her work is in places ranging from the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., to the Holiday Inn headquarters in Stamford, Conn. Her largest piece is a 30-ton installation of New Mexico travertine outside what is now GlaxoSmithKline’s U.S. headquarters in Research Triangle Park, N.C.

After her husband of 12 years, Philip Conn, retired as president of Western Oregon University in 2005, they moved to Lexington and she opened a small studio and gallery in Winchester (Juliewarrenconn.com). But she has shown little work in Kentucky, until now.

A collection of Conn’s sculptures, titled Stories in Stone, will be featured during Gallery Hop, 5 to 8 p.m. Friday, at the Central Library Gallery, 140 E. Main St. The free exhibit opened June 15 will remain up through Aug. 11.

Conn, 70, grew up in Knoxville, where her father, Millard Warren, owned a specialty concrete business and had an interest in design. Access to his company’s heavy equipment made it easier for her to begin carving and polishing stone.

Knoxville has had a significant marble processing industry since the early 1900s, thanks to East Tennessee’s quarries of pink marble. Conn said she learned cutting and shaping techniques from marble mill employees who let her work in their shop.

“I became their resident artist,” she said. “One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about my work is the opportunities to become connected with people.”

Marble remains a favorite medium for Conn, although her gallery also includes pieces made of travertine, granite, onyx, alabaster and various volcanic and fossilized rocks.

Conn’s typical day at the office involves driving a fork lift. It doubles as a workbench for large hunks of stone, such as the column of Minnesota limestone she was grinding down the day I visited her studio. Her tools include grinders, saws, chisels and a big exhaust fan to clear out clouds of gritty stone dust. There’s a good reason her studio is zoned industrial.

The most time-consuming part of Conn’s work is polishing her sculptures, which can take three-times longer than cutting the basic shapes. After progressing through sandpaper between 80 and 1,000 grit, she finishes each piece with paste wax.

The petite Conn said she has never been intimidated by the physicality needed to work with hard and heavy slabs of stone. While careful to avoid injury, she said she has fallen off ladders and scaffolding and once had a grinder disk fly apart and send her to the ground.

Some of Conn’s work is representational, but most pieces are abstracts dictated by the stone she is working with. That often includes openings and holes, which give the sculpture a lighter feel — and can be useful for securing belts to move it.

“I let the rock guide me,” she said. “I love to take a volume of stone and begin carving. I won’t have a clue what it will be. Then it will start to look like something to me, or somebody will come in and interpret it.”

Conn said she sometimes likes to see how far she can push a piece of stone without breaking it. She also enjoys experimenting with new and different kinds of rock, such as the small sculpture she made from a chunk of common Kentucky limestone she found outside her studio. Once highly polished, it was unrecognizable.

Conn has recently started making bronze sculptures cast from her stone pieces, as well as bas relief stone drawings inspired by ancient Egyptian ruins.

On one side of Conn’s studio are a dozen large wooden boxes filled with rocks awaiting her attention, including a few her husband found and suggested she might want to experiment with.

“When Philip starts toward me with a rock, I run,” she said with a laugh. “Because it usually means trouble.”

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Cynthia Bohn started Equus Run Vineyards in Woodford County 15 years ago as a retirement business for when she was ready to end her 30-year career with IBM as a computer engineer and marketing executive. The business now makes 15 varieties of wine and has a successful event business at the 48-acre winery. Photos by Tom Eblen

MIDWAY — Cynthia Bohn lived all over the country, as well as in England and the Netherlands, during her 30-year career as an IBM computer engineer and executive. Collecting wine became her hobby.

So, when she began planning for a retirement career, Bohn thought it might be fun to start a winery in Kentucky, where she had grown up in Louisville and on a Hart County tobacco farm.

“It was like a hobby that became a passion that became a business,” said Bohn, whose Equus Run Vineyards just celebrated 15 years in business and is about to launch a major expansion.

Although Kentucky had the nation’s first commercial winery in 1799, there were only three wineries operating in the bourbon state when Bohn started planning her business in the mid-1990s. Now, Kentucky has 67 operating wineries, with more on the way.

“It’s a very viable business model if you run it as a business,” she said.

Bohn said that after three flat years during and after the Great Recession, her revenues were up 17 percent in 2012 and 23 percent this year.

Equus Run now produces about 9,100 cases a year of 15 varieties of wine. The grapes come from her own eight acres of vineyards, and from contract growers in Western Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio and California.

“There’s no way I could grow everything I need,” she said, noting that some grape varieties don’t do well in Kentucky’s soil and climate. Plus, having growers elsewhere is “sort of like an insurance policy” against unpredictable Kentucky weather, she said.

But Bohn has discovered that it takes more than grapes and good wine to make a successful winery of her size.

“The key thing with us is we diversified,” Bohn said as we sat on a deck outside her tasting room overlooking her vineyards — and gardens and sculptures and a putting green and an amphitheater. Coming soon: bike trails.

“We are in the hospitality and tourism industry; we just happen to sell wine,” she said. “It’s all about the experience. It’s about a day in the Bluegrass. It’s about a lifestyle, not just wine.”

In addition to the recreation facilities and places for hosting weddings, receptions and corporate events, Equus Run schedules programs where visitors can enjoy art, music and even learn to fly fish.

An equine artists’ group will be coming to the winery this summer to paint. Several “foodie” events are scheduled, including a shrimp boil and a “pizza and pinot” evening. There is a dinner theater series built around murder mysteries.

Several non-profit groups use Equus Run’s facilities for fundraisers. The winery donates the facilities and keeps only the revenues from alcohol sales, Bohn said.

“It’s been a great model,” she said. “It has worked for them and it has worked for us.”

Equus Run’s biggest annual event is this weekend: the 10th annual Francisco’s Farm Arts Festival, produced in conjunction with the Lexington Art League and Midway Renaissance. This is the third year Equus Run has hosted the regionally acclaimed arts festival, which was formerly at Midway College. Bohn expects as many as 10,000 people to attend.

She is looking for more ways to expand Equus Run, which now has 16 employees. She recently bought 10 acres across Moore’s Mill Road to add to her 38-acre property.

Until now, Bohn has been the winery’s sole owner. But she said she is partnering with local investors to build new hospitality venues and wine-production facilities to replace the ones in a former tobacco barn she has outgrown. Other future plans include finding a partner to offer regular food service.

Equus Run is surrounded by several horse farms, and Bohn said she tries to be a good neighbor by doing such things as ending concerts at 9 p.m., rather than the required 11 p.m.

“I love my neighbors; they are wonderful,” she said. “We could have easily been shoved aside. Instead, they embraced us. I think that speaks highly of the community.”

Bohn thinks businesses such as Equus Run can play a valuable role in increasing tourism in the Bluegrass, as well as just making this a more fun and interesting place to live. Personally, it is not only a good retirement business, but a lot of fun.

“You’ve got to love people, and you’ve got to love dealing with Mother Nature and her erratic weather patterns,” said Bohn, who added that tending grapes isn’t nearly as hard work as the tobacco-stripping she did as a teenager. “I very affectionately say I started with dirt and I have now retired with dirt.”

If you go

Francisco’s Farm Arts Festival

When: 10 a.m.-6 p.m. June 22, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. June 23

Where: Equus Run Vineyards, 1280 Moores Mill Rd., Midway

Admission: $10 per vehicle.

More information: Lexingtonartleague.org, Equusrunvineyards.com

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Many people go through school hating history. All of those dates to remember! Besides, people from the past are usually portrayed as one-dimensional heroes or villains, their claims to fame reduced to a sound bite.

A good example is John Bradford, who published the state’s first newspaper, the Kentucky Gazette. That’s all I remember about him from Kentucky History class.

Then my daughter, Mollie, and I wrote a chapter for the book Bluegrass Renaissance: The History and Culture of Central Kentucky, 1792-1852. We told the story of Transylvania University’s dramatic rise and fall in the 1820s under President Horace Holley. In our research, we discovered that the man behind the scenes of that “rise” was Bradford, the longtime chairman of Transy’s Board of Trustees.

John Bradford portrait in the collection of the Bodley-Bullock House, Lexington Junior League. Image courtesy of University of Kentucky Special Collections.

I learned much more when the Cardome Center in Georgetown asked me to research and write an essay about Bradford for a symposium last month. The symposium, which featured a dozen prominent Kentucky journalists, was about the history and future of the news media.

The city of Georgetown owns Cardome, a former Catholic girls’ school. A non-profit association has a long-term lease and ambitious plans to create the Center for the Written Word, a writers’ retreat and museum.

The symposium, Words in a Changing World: From Bradford to Bloggers, opened the museum’s first exhibit, a display of original and facsimile copies of the Kentucky Gazette, which Bradford published off and on from 1787 until his death in 1830. The free exhibit runs through July 5.

The old Gazette copies make for some interesting reading. But they reveal little about their publisher, who was a Renaissance man of the Kentucky frontier. Bradford’s legacy continues to shape Lexington in ways that might surprise you.

Bradford was born in 1749 near Warrenton, Va. A surveyor like his father, he came to Kentucky to seek his fortune. In the 1780s he and his brother, Fielding, laid claim to 6,000 acres, mostly along Cane Run Creek between Lexington and Georgetown.

Kentucky leaders who wanted to break away from Virginia and form a new state decided they needed a newspaper to publicize their cause, but they were unable to attract a printer from back East. So, on the promise of future state printing work, Bradford and his brother bought a press in Pennsylvania and brought it down the Ohio River on a flatboat and overland from Maysville on pack horses.

During its early years, the Gazette was the only newspaper within 500 miles of Lexington. It published weeks-old reports of national and international news and a smattering of local happenings. There was special emphasis on reports of Indian attacks on settlers. Bradford himself participated in attacks on Native American settlements in what is now Ohio.

Like most small-town publishers, Bradford became involved in many aspects of civic and business life. He chaired the town trustees for many years and was a legislator and sheriff. But he was more businessman than politician.

In addition to running newspapers in Lexington and Frankfort, Bradford was the state’s first book publisher and owner of an early bookstore. In 1796, he was a founder of the Lexington Public Library. He started the first mail service between Central Kentucky towns as part of newspaper delivery.

Bradford promoted emigration to Kentucky and helped start the Kentucky Vineyard Society to try to develop a local wine industry. He owned a tavern, a warehouse and a steam-powered flour mill and cotton factory on Vine Street. A mechanic and mathematician, he designed much of the machinery.

Bradford lived at the corner of Second and Mill streets in a house he bought from Henry Clay’s father-in-law, Thomas Hart. The house was torn down in 1955, 125 years after Bradford’s death, to create a parking lot. Public outrage over the demolition led to creation of the Blue Grass Trust for Historic Preservation.

To read the full essay on Bradford, click here.

If you go

John Bradford’s Kentucky Gazette

Where: Cardome Center, 800 Cincinnati Rd., Georgetown

When: 9 a.m. — 5 p.m., Tues.— Sat. through July 5.

Admission: Free

More information: (502) 863-1575, Cardomecenter.com.

This essay was originally written for the May 22 symposium, Words in a Changing World: from Bradford to Bloggers, at the Center for the Written Word at Cardome Center in Georgetown.

On August 11, 1787, the first newspaper to be published west of Pittsburgh hit the streets of Lexington, Kentucky.  It was a modest thing, printed on a four-page fold about the size of letter sheets. The Kentucke Gazette carried a few news items from elsewhere, an advertisement and an apology from its publisher. The 38-year-old publisher had little or no training as a printer, reporter, writer or editor. But he did understand deadlines.  “My customers will excuse my first publication,” he wrote, “as I am much hurried to get an impression by the time appointed.”  The rookie journalist then offered excuses.  Most of his type had been jumbled on its way to Lexington, he wrote.  His brother had purchased the type and a printing press in Pennsylvania and accompanied it down the Ohio River on a flatboat. The equipment made the final leg of its journey to Lexington over a rough road from what is now Maysville. If jumbled type were not bad enough, the publisher complained that his “only assistant” —his brother — had been sick for 10 days and was of no help whatsoever.

The Kentucke Gazette may have had an rough start 225 years ago, but it began a long and illustrious newspaper tradition in Kentucky. The Gazette’s publisher was Kentucky’s first journalist — and so much more.  John Bradford was a Renaissance man of the early Western frontier: a land surveyor, Indian fighter, politician, moral philosopher,  tavern owner, sheriff, civic host, community booster, postal service entrepreneur, real estate speculator, subdivision developer, mechanic and mathematician. And all of that was in addition to his primary work, which made seminal contributions to development of the written word in Kentucky.  In addition to writing and publishing the state’s first newspaper, Bradford produced Kentucky’s first books, was an organizer of the first public library and operated one of the first bookstores. He also was one of the first historians of Kentucky’s pioneer era and the chief advocate for, and longtime chairman of, Kentucky’s first institution of higher learning, Transylvania University.

So, it seems fitting that as we gather at Cardome today to reflect on the past, present and future of journalism and the written word in Kentucky, we begin by remembering John Bradford. For 45 of this state’s most formative years, he was in the middle of everything.

John Bradford was born in June 1749 near Warrenton in Northern Virginia, the second child and eldest son of Daniel Bradford and Alice Morgan. At the age of 21, he married Eliza James, the daughter of a respected Virginia planter. They had five sons and four daughters. Like his father, Bradford became a land surveyor. He practiced his trade in Virginia for eight years, except for possible brief service in the Revolutionary War in 1776. Like many Virginians, he was hungry for land and he had heard about the bounty that lay across the Appalachian mountains. So, in the fall of 1779, Bradford left his family and went to the western reaches of Virginia — then called Kentucke with an “e” at the end — where he worked as a surveyor. During this time, he also became an Indian fighter, taking part in the campaign against the Native American towns of Chillicothe and Piqua in what is now Ohio.

While in Kentucky, Bradford and his younger brother, Fielding, made claims on 6,000 acres of rich Bluegrass land along Cane Run and North Elkhorn creeks in what is now Fayette and Scott counties. That land is said to have included what is now the campus of Cardome. Bradford then returned home, and, in the spring of 1785, moved his family west. They lived in a cabin, and later a handsome brick home, near the corner of what is now Russell Cave Road and Ironworks Pike north of Lexington. But John Bradford wasn’t cut out to be a farmer. He soon sought out a new business opportunity — something he would do frequently for the rest of his life.

John Bradford portrait in the collection of the Bodley-Bullock House, Lexington Junior League. Image courtesy of University of Kentucky Special Collections.

Kentuckians have always loved to complain about the government. Many prominent pioneers of the 1780s thought that Virginia’s government was ignoring their needs, especially when it came to security from Indian attacks. Meeting in convention at Danville on December 30, 1784, these settlers decided it would be in their best interests to begin the process of separating from Virginia and forming their own state.  They also decided that, to be successful, they needed public opinion in Kentucky on their side. They needed information. They needed publicity. They needed a newspaper.

A year later, the convention appointed Gen. James Wilkinson, future governor Christopher Greenup and John Cobern to form a committee to find a printer from the East willing to move to Kentucky.  The committee tried to recruit printers John Dunlap in Philadelphia and Miles Hunter in Richmond, Va., but both declined. It was at this point that John Bradford stepped forward and offered to do the job if the convention could promise him public printing work. With this assurance, the Bradford brothers went to Philadelphia to buy a printing press. On their way home, they stopped in Pittsburgh and bought some type from John Scull, who had recently established the Pittsburgh Gazette, the first newspaper west of the Allegheny Mountains. John Bradford then headed home, leaving his brother in Pittsburgh for three months to learn the basics of printing. (It may not surprise you to learn that, after a couple of years, Fielding Bradford decided he no longer wanted to work for big brother and left the business.)

Some statehood convention delegates assumed that Bradford would set up his printing shop in Danville, where they met each year. But in what we now would call an economic-development incentive, the trustees of Lexington promised to give Bradford the use of a prime piece of downtown real estate for as long as he operated his press and newspaper in their town. Bradford accepted the offer, and, as there was no building on the promised property, also accepted the town’s offer to set up his print shop in the back room of the log courthouse at the corner of Main Street and Broadway, where Victorian Square now stands.

The Kentucke Gazette began publication in August 1787 with 180 subscribers. Bradford charged 18 shilling per year for a subscription and three shillings for an advertisement of moderate length. Because hard cash was scarce on the Kentucky frontier, Bradford wrote that he also would take the following goods as payment: “corn, wheat, country-made linen, linsey, sugar, whiskey, ash flooring and cured bacon.”  The Kentucke Gazette patterned itself after the Pittsburgh newspaper, with three columns of type on its small page.  The newspaper changed the spelling of Kentucky on its masthead — ending it with a “y” instead than an “e” — in 1789 after the Virginia General Assembly officially did so.

Early on, the Gazette was the only newspaper within 500 miles of Lexington, which made it a must-read, at least for those who could read. A year before the government provided postal service in Kentucky, Bradford employed a small network of “post riders” to deliver the Gazette to Limestone (now Maysville), Harrodsburg, Danville and other Central Kentucky towns. The post riders also carried letters and small packages as their saddle bags allowed. Bradford kept a letter box at his Lexington office where correspondence carried by the post riders could be picked up by the intended recipients.

The Gazette was first published weekly, then twice and later three times a week. Paper was scarce, since it had to be imported from the East during the newspaper’s early years. But by 1793, the Gazette’s paper was made in Georgetown by another early Kentucky entrepreneur, Elijah Craig, whose other claims to fame were as a Baptist minister — and as an early distiller of bourbon whiskey.

Historians who have studied the surviving issues of Bradford’s Gazette have often remarked on the lack of what we would now call local news. There was little in the way of information about everyday life and happenings in Lexington and around the Bluegrass frontier. Perhaps, some historians have speculated, that was because the place was so small and sparsely populated at the time that everybody already knew the local news by the time the paper came out.  The Gazette’s pages were filled instead with weeks-old, and sometimes months-old, accounts of national and international happenings, as well as with stenographic accounts of local and state government activities.  Unfortunately, Bradford’s coverage of Kentucky’s quest for statehood mostly consisted of publishing the official resolutions of the separation conventions. While the Gazette’s pages occasionally included philosophic discussions about Kentucky’s political needs, historians have noted that Bradford provided little journalistic detail or insight into the process of seeking statehood or personalities who were involved in the movement.

Bradford was a Democrat in the mold of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, and the Gazette reflected his political views. An Episcopalian, he also was a man of liberal religious views. He refused to allow the Gazette to be drawn into the sectarian theological disputes that raged among Protestant Christian denominations in early Kentucky. Bradford, whose nickname in later years was “Old Wisdom”, would occasionally offer bits of moral philosophy in print, a la Benjamin Franklin. Here is one example: “Narrow minds are like crooked bottles; the less they have in them, the more noise they make in pouring it out.”

Bradford had his pet issues, as every editor does, and they were given considerable coverage: He was very interested in horses. He hated the federal government’s excise tax on whiskey. He was outraged by John Jay’s proposed treaty that would have given Spain navigational control of the Mississippi River. And, most of all, he was obsessed with Indians and the threat they posed to settlement of Kentucky. This was the era of Manifest Destiny, and nobody embraced that philosophy more than John Bradford.

The Gazette also served as a valuable forum for public notices, some of which could be quite humorous, such as the one from Jan. 29, 1791, in which a Charles Bland wrote that he would not pay a note given to William Turner for three second-rate cows until Turner returned a rifle, blanket and tomahawk he had borrowed. My favorite public notice is this one from April 6, 1793: “Taken up by the subscriber, on Clear Creek Fayette County, a dunn mare two years old last spring; her mane and tail black with a black list along her back, a natural trotter, 13 hands 1 inch high, apprised at £3.10. Hawkins Kearby.”  Unlike the other notice, this one is not humorous, or of any importance except to the owner of the lost horse. But it is my favorite because Hawkins Kearby was my great-, great-, great-, great-, great-grandfather and this Kentucke Gazette notice is the only written record I have of him.

After a couple of moves, the Gazette’s offices came in July 1795 to spacious quarters in a two-story brick building on Main Street that had been Kentucky’s first statehouse. At this location, where it would remain for 40 years, Bradford published Kentucky’s first books. After a compilation of state laws, he produced many other books, including an annual Kentucky Almanac and the work of Kentucky’s first poet, Thomas Johnson. Bradford’s offices also included a bookstore, which became a popular gathering place for white men to discuss news, politics and public affairs.

The Gazette’s first newspaper competitor appeared in 1795, when Bradford’s former employee, Thomas H. Stewart, started the Kentucky Herald. (And in the first example of monopoly newspaper consolidation in Kentucky, Bradford bought out Stewart in 1802 and shut down the Herald.) As Kentucky grew in the late 1700s, four more newspapers opened in Frankfort and the town of Washington, near Maysville. By the end of 1811, some 30 newspapers had been established in Kentucky. In addition to Lexington, Frankfort and Washington, their locations included Bardstown, Shelbyville, Danville, Russellville, Louisville, Paris, Lancaster, Stanford, Richmond and Georgetown.

Bradford trained several of his five sons as printers and journalists, and the family holdings expanded. Son Daniel took over the Gazette from April 1802 until it was operated by others between late 1809 and 1814. Bradford’s eldest son, Benjamin, bought the Kentucky Journal in Frankfort in 1795. Bradford and son James operated the Guardian of Freedom in Frankfort from 1798 until 1806. Both of those Frankfort newspapers essentially republished the Gazette’s content, but may have given the Bradford family a measure of influence in the state capital.

After several changes in management and ownership at the Kentucky Gazette, Bradford returned as editor and publisher late in his life, from April 1825 until June 1827. Perhaps that was because he had one last job to do.  Between August 1826 and January 1829, Bradford published 66 essays in the Gazette that he simply called “Notes on Kentucky.”  These articles were Bradford’s journalistic memoirs, his chronicle of a pioneer era that was slipping away from Kentucky’s collective memory as others of his generation died off.

The historical value of Bradford’s “Notes” was realized immediately. George Washington Stipp got to know Bradford while living in Lexington as a medical student at Transylvania University. Stipp was so impressed with Bradford’s essays that, after returning home to Xenia, Ohio, in 1827, he published the first 23 of them in a small book he called: The Western Miscellany, or, Accounts Historical, Biographical, and Amusing. The full “Notes” were edited by historian Thomas D. Clark and published in 1993 by the University Press of Kentucky in a book titled: The Voice of the Frontier: John Bradford’s Notes on Kentucky.

Bradford’s “Notes” still make interesting reading, especially his tales of early exploration and the settlers’ battles with Indians. As I mentioned, Bradford had always been obsessed with the threat Native Americans posed to the settlers who came in and took their land. In his book, Clark takes a shot at Bradford’s journalistic objectivity on this subject, noting that Indian atrocities against settlers were always portrayed as heinous, criminal acts. But when it came to the atrocities settlers committed against the Indians — of which there were many — the same value judgments never applied. “One can only speculate,” Clark wrote, “on what a literate ‘Indian Bradford’ might have written had he published a series of notes on settler-Indian relations in the last quarter of the 18^th century. In reality, they had more to fear from the ‘Long Knives’ than the ‘Long Knives had to fear from the ‘Braves.’”

John Bradford packed a lot more than journalism into his long career. He spent many years as the equivalent of Lexington’s mayor. As the longtime chairman of the town trustees, Bradford was the official host to visiting dignitaries, such as in 1792, when Isaac Shelby was sworn in as Kentucky’s first governor, and in 1825, when President James Monroe and the Marquis de Lafayette, the French hero of the American Revolution, visited Lexington.  Bradford also served as a state legislator from Lexington and as the High Sheriff of Fayette County.

Bradford had many business interests beyond publishing. He was an active land speculator — and, like many early Kentucky land speculators, was often involved in lawsuits over claims and titles. He also was an entrepreneur with broad interests. In 1801, he purchased a tavern in Frankfort that he owned for several years. He developed a subdivision off North Limestone Street in 1812. The next year, he built a steam-operated flour mill and cotton factory on Vine Street in Lexington, just west of Broadway.  One account says that Bradford, a talented mechanic and mathematician, designed and built the machinery himself.  In 1816, Bradford partnered with Robert Wickliffe to build a large public warehouse on Broadway, between Vine and Main streets, leasing the land from the town trustees.

Throughout his career, Bradford was a tireless booster of Lexington. In 1796, he was one of the founders of the Lexington Public Library. The next year, he called a meeting to organize the Lexington Society for the Promotion of Emigration. Bradford enticed John James Dufour to come to Lexington to set up the Kentucky Vineyard Society, of which he was one of the incorporators in 1799, in the hope of developing a local wine industry. Bradford also was an early advocate for the emancipation of slaves — a very unpopular idea among white men in Lexington at that time and for several decades to come. Even so, Bradford was also a slave owner.

Of all Bradford’s public roles beyond journalism, perhaps none was more influential than his longtime positions as trustee and chairman of Transylvania University.  In the book, Bluegrass Renaissance: The History and Culture of Central Kentucky, 1792-1852, which was published last year by the University Press of Kentucky, my daughter, Mollie, and I wrote a chapter about Transylvania — its meteoric rise under President Horace Holley and its subsequent fall after he left Kentucky. Who was the man behind the scenes of Holley’s success story? John Bradford.

After the steamboat’s invention made two-way river navigation possible, Lexington lost its economic edge to the river cities of Louisville and Cincinnati. Desperate for economic development, Bradford championed making Lexington the “Athens of the West” by investing in education and culture. The key to doing that, he believed, was turning tiny Transylvania into the great university of western America. That would require an outstanding president with vision, he believed. The man Bradford wanted was Horace Holley, a Yale graduate and up-and-coming minister in Boston. Against all odds, including a bitterly divided Transylvania Board of Trustees, Bradford convinced Holley to move to Lexington in 1818. Within a few years, Holley transformed Transylvania into one of America’s most acclaimed universities. When, late in life, Thomas Jefferson was seeking models for his new University of Virginia, he looked to Holley’s Transylvania. Despite this success, though, Holley was run out of Kentucky by religious conservatives, anti-intellectualism and a governor, Joseph Desha, who wanted to spend state money on roads rather than higher education. Bradford’s success and failure with Horace Holley would echo through Kentucky history for nearly two centuries.

Although Bradford kept his rural home “Fairfield” until the year before his death, he spent most of his years as publisher living in a handsome house on the corner of Second and Market Streets in Lexington. He bought the house from Thomas Harte, a prosperous early settler and father-in-law of Henry Clay. It was in that house that John Bradford died on March 22, 1830. His burial place is uncertain.

I mention Bradford’s downtown home, because it would play an important role in Lexington’s modern history 125 years after the publisher’s death. In 1955, Bradford’s house was demolished for a parking lot. The ensuing outrage led to the creation of the Blue Grass Trust for Historic Preservation.

The Kentucky Gazette was sold out of the Bradford family in 1840, a decade after the pioneer publisher’s death. It ceased publication in 1848 after its fortunes and influence declined under an owner from Louisville.

Unfortunately, no complete file of John Bradford’s Kentucky Gazette remains. The Lexington Public Library has perhaps the best collection of original copies, although it does not include the first one. The last known first issue was destroyed in a fire more than a century ago at the Cheapside office of H. Howard Gratz, who revived the Kentucky Gazette after the Civil War and published a newspaper by that name for nearly 50 years. Thanks to modern digital technology, you can read the surviving copies of John Bradford’s Kentucky Gazette on your computer at the Kentucky Digital Library site.

SOURCES

The Voice of the Frontier: John Bradford’s Notes on Kentucky, Thomas D. Clark (University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, 1993)

The Pioneer Press of Kentucky, William Henry Perrin (J.P. Morton & Co., Louisville, 1888)

John Bradford Bicentennial, C. Frank Dunn (The Filson Club History Quarterly, Louisville, 1947)

John Bradford and the Kentucky Gazette, J. Winston Coleman (The Filson Club History Quarterly, Louisville, 1960)

The History of Pioneer Lexington, 1779-1806, Charles R. Staples (University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, 1939, republished with a foreward by Thomas D. Clark, 1996)

Liberal Kentucky, 1780-1828, Niels Henry Sonne (Columbia University Press, New York, 1939)

Bluegrass Renaissance: The History and Culture of Central Kentucky, 1792-1852, edited by James C. Klotter and Daniel Rowland. Chapter 9: Horace Holley and the Struggle for Kentucky’s Mind and Soul, by Tom Eblen and Mollie Eblen. (University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, 2012)

Kentucky Settlement and Statehood, 1750-1800, George Morgan Chinn (Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort, 1975)

Stories of Kentucky from the Life and Works of John Wilson Townsend, Dorothy Edwards Townsend, The Keystone Printery, Lexington, 1972

The Kentucky Encyclopedia, John E. Kleber, editor (University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, 1992)

Tommy and Candy Hicks, center, whose family has owned Sonny’s Cleaners in Chevy Chase for nearly 50 years, introduced the new owner, Perry Carrico, left, to longtime customer Mary Reynolds. Photo by Tom Eblen

Some of Tommy Hicks’ earliest memories are of watching the construction of his late father Sonny’s dry cleaning shop in Chevy Chase Shopping Center off South Ashland Avenue in 1964.

Hicks grew up working part-time at Sonny’s One-Hour Cleaners. When he graduated from Lexington Catholic High School in 1976, he switched to full-time. His wife, Candy, a 1976 Lafayette grad, joined the business after their three children were born.

It was a good life and living for many years, Candy Hicks said, “But when it became apparent that none of the kids was interested in taking over, we knew we had to do something.”

So, on May 31, the Hickses signed papers to sell their nearly 50-year-old family business.

“This has been the hardest thing we’ve ever done,” she said. “But as hard as it has been, at least we were able to pass it on to another family. We didn’t want to sell out to a big chain.”

The new owner is the Carrico family, which has owned and operated Springfield Laundry in Washington County since 1939. The two families already were well acquainted. The Hickses have always done dry cleaning and repairs in-house, but Springfield Laundry has done their washing for the past seven years.

All of the work will now be done in Springfield, with the Chevy Chase store functioning as a drop-off and pick-up location. Perry Carrico said he plans to continue calling the place Sonny’s Cleaners, although the “one-hour” will have to go.

Most importantly, Carrico said, he plans to continue the high level of personal service the Hickses have always provided.

“I just want their customers to know they’re going from good hands to good hands,” said Carrico, who has a similar location in Danville. “We’re small-town people.”

The Hickses spent last week helping the Carricos get settled and saying tearful goodbyes to their customers, some of whom have been bringing clothes here for decades to be cleaned and mended. The Hickses have even set up an email account for people to keep in touch with them: formerlysonnys@gmail.com.

The Hickses, who both turn 55 this year, said they will miss the daily interaction with customers, including several generations of some families. Those customers have come from all over Central Kentucky and as far away as Barbourville.

“I’ve gotten to know every one of them — their kids, where they work, where they go to church,” Candy Hicks said. “I like to be around people. This has been such a blessing.”

“We just always wanted to treat people like family,” Tommy Hicks added. “I guess it pays off to be nice.”

The Hickses will not miss their 60-hour-plus work weeks. Nor will they have to worry any more that customers might be inconvenienced if they take more than a long weekend for vacation.

“This has been a major blessing, but also a major commitment of work,” Candy Hicks said.

“Neither of us has had much leisure time since 1976,” Tommy Hicks added. “We just got out of high school and went to work.”

As with many family businesses, Sonny’s Cleaners has been integral to family life. The Hickses’ three children grew up working in the business, learning people skills and the value of hard work. But they have moved away from Lexington to pursue their own ambitions.

Matthew works in management for the London Eye, the giant ferris wheel on the banks of the Thames River in England. Nicki and her husband live in Hamilton, Ohio. Ben works in insurance in St. Louis with his wife and their two young sons.

The Hickses’ immediate retirement plans include trips to Arizona and England and more visits to their grandsons in St. Louis.

“I hope to be Mamaw more often,” she said.

Tommy Hicks likes computers, so he said he might keep busy doing information technology work.

Candy Hicks isn’t sure what she will do with her time, but she has one part-time job offer: Carrico wants her to come back and work the desk at Sonny’s Cleaners, her home away from home for more than three decades.

She’s thinking about it.

A city task force created 15 months ago to consider zoning-law changes to allow more recreation and tourism opportunities in rural Fayette County recently made its report to the Urban County Council.

The Zoning Ordinance Text Amendment Work Group did some good work, but a broader public discussion is needed before council takes action. Plus, there is an elephant in the room that must be dealt with.

Here is the central question: what are the best ways to protect, preserve and enhance Lexington’s unique rural landscape and the economic models needed to sustain it in the future?

Lexington adopted a rural land management plan in 1999 to keep suburban sprawl from pushing out agriculture and damaging sensitive natural areas along the Kentucky River and its tributaries.

The work group thought more specificity was needed, and it has proposed a detailed list of dos, don’ts and maybes regarding rural land use. But some of its recommendations would further re- strict recreation and tourism rather than expand them.

In deciding what should and should not be allowed, the work group made subjective judgments that went beyond whether a use or activity would harm the land or neighbors. If state law allowed the city to regulate agriculture as closely as this plan regulates everything else, farmers would howl.

Agriculture is a big, important business in Lexington, and farmers are justifiably concerned about anything that might encroach on them. But agriculture has always been evolving. Farmers should be wary of banning or restricting low-impact activities they may need someday to make a living on their land.

Like it or not, the work group has been tainted by a nasty dispute between Burgess Carey, who wants to create an outdoor recreation center at his Boone Creek Anglers Club, and his neighbor, former Council member Gloria Martin. Each has many fired-up supporters, and the rhetoric and behavior on both sides have been over-the-top.

Vice Mayor Linda Gorton formed and chaired helped lead the work group in response to the Boone Creek dispute. But the group often seemed hostile to Carey and tried to exclude him from the dialogue. Only one of the group’s 15 members ever accepted Carey’s invitations to visit Boone Creek to see what he wants to do.

Carey wants to turn his property, which is unsuitable for agriculture, into a low-impact outdoor recreation area featuring guided “canopy tours” on platforms and zip lines built in the trees.

If well-designed and regulated, Carey’s facility could be a terrific asset for Lexington. Located on Old Richmond Road just off Interstate 75, the traffic impact would be far less than, say, the city’s Raven Run nature park on Jacks Creek Pike.

Most objections to the project by Carey’s opponents have been over-wrought. To hear some of them talk, allowing zip-lines in tree tops is tantamount to building a Six Flags amusement park.

During her dozen years on the Council, Martin was an outstanding advocate for rural land preservation at a time when suburban development was running amok. But her battle against Carey has looked more like an elitist “not in my back yard” campaign.

Carey made it easy for people to attack him, though, by flouting zoning processes that have served Lexington well for decades. After the Board of Adjustment turned down his request for a zoning variance, he ignored the city planning staff’s advice and proceeded with building a smaller canopy-tour course.

Carey and his lawyer, John Park, have argued that his fishing club has as much right under current zoning law to offer canopy tours as horse farms have to offer farm tours without a permit. But the Board of Adjustment rejected Carey’s appeal and is considering sanctions against him.

The battle over Boone Creek has gotten so nasty that it may well end up in court. But what is needed is a compromise that puts common sense ahead of politics and personalities. That is because Carey’s project is the right idea in the right place at the right time.

Boone Creek Outdoors and projects like it could show people the enormous potential of developing the Kentucky River Palisades corridor as an environmental education and outdoor recreation area. Under the work group’s recommendations, it could be allowed.

Low-impact outdoor recreation opportunities along the Kentucky River could become a big economic engine for Lexington. They also could generate the kind of money needed to protect the Palisades from harmful development and the invasive plant species that are rapidly destroying its fragile ecology.

Besides, unless the Boone Creek fiasco is resolved in a way that removes the perception of politics, it will be hard to make progress on these broader issues of rural land management that are essential for Lexington’s future.

The University of Kentucky honored Gray Zeitz, center, last Friday on the 40th anniversary of his Larkspur Press in Monterey, which publishes hand-crafted books by  Kentucky writers. Before the ceremony at Margaret I. King Library, Zeitz, center, talked with Gay Reading, left, whose aunt, Carolyn Reading Hammer, taught Zeitz the art of printing at the King Library Press at UK. At right is Zeitz’s wife, Jean.  Photos by Tom Eblen 

Richard Taylor recalled that when Gray Zeitz was establishing his Larkspur Press in the mid-1970s, he received a printing commission from the Kentucky Arts Council. Anxious state officials asked for a deadline, but Zeitz would not be rushed.

He replied to them with a metaphor drawn from his love for Kentucky’s native plants: “Who knows when the phlox will flower?”

Taylor, a former Kentucky poet laureate, told that story last Friday evening as more than 130 writers, artists, friends and fans gathered at the University of Kentucky’s Margaret I. King Library to honor Zeitz for four decades of continuous flowering.

Zeitz was lauded by Taylor and eight other writers and artists whose work the small press in rural Owen County has published over the years: Wesley Bates, Gabrielle Fox, Nana Lampton, Ed McClanahan, Maurice Manning, Maureen Morehead, Mary Ann Taylor-Hall and Jeff Worley.

The ceremony opened an exhibit of pieces produced by Larkspur Press, which has published more than 100 handmade books and countless broadsides since 1974. The free exhibit will be up through August. The library at 179 Funkhouser Dr. is open 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday.

Larkspur Press, on Sawdridge Creek Road near Monterey, has a public open house each November, on the Saturday and Sunday after Thanksgiving.

Last Saturday, Zeitz led a letterpress printing workshop at the King Library Press on UK’s campus. That was where he learned his art and trade, first as a student and then as an apprentice to director Carolyn Reading Hammer.

In the 1950s, Hammer and her husband, Austrian artist Victor Hammer, began a Kentucky tradition of fine letterpress printing using hand-operated presses, hand-set type and woodblock engravings.

Zeitz, 63, is one of their most successful protégés. Using century-old presses and thick, creamy paper, he prints elegant books that are hand-stitched and bound, in both fancy collector’s editions and affordable paperbacks.

“Gray is stubbornly and endearingly independent,” Taylor explained in his remarks. “He has steadfastly refused to become ensnared by the Internet. One of his friends designed a web page (larkspurpress.com) that Gray has no means or desire to see.”

But, as the writers and artists explained, Zeitz is much more than a printer. A poet himself, he carefully selects the writers, artists and works he wants to publish. Most are from Kentucky.

In addition to those who spoke Friday, they have included Wendell Berry, Bobbie Ann Mason, Silas House, Erik Reece, Gurney Norman, Frederick Smock and the late Guy Davenport and James Baker Hall.

Bates, a Canadian wood engraver, said he first encountered Larkspur Press nearly two decades ago and was impressed by the quality of the printing, the large volume of books produced and Zeitz’s curatorial skill in choosing work to publish.

“It was above and beyond the idea of book as art,” Bates said. “It was book as communication, as preservation of culture.”

As for Zeitz, a burly man with a long beard who always wears blue jeans and suspenders, Bates said, “I thought he looked like he was part of the band ZZ Top.”

Taylor-Hall talked about how Zeitz consults with writers about how their books should look, down to such things as the color of ink. Worley joked that even if readers hate his poetry, they won’t throw away his Larkspur Press editions because the books themselves are too beautiful.

Several others remarked on Zeitz’s craftsmanship, exacting standards and placid demeanor. “Every time I see him, he seems filled with joy,” Manning said.

When it finally came time for Zeitz to speak Friday, he was, as always, a man of few words. He introduced two longtime collaborators, Carolyn Whitesel and Leslie Shane, and thanked audience members for writing and illustrating his books, buying and reading his books and even helping him on occasion move heavy, iron presses.

Then, Zeitz read a poem he had written, which the King Library Press printed as a broadside to give those in attendance:

Printer’s Note

Sweet rain yesterday.

We have put your book on the press.

My hands do not tremble

because I’m unsure,

but shake in the finalizing of page

as a foal, newborn,

begins to stand.

It should be said

there will be absolutely no deadline.

Who knows when the phlox will flower? 

Jonathan Bush built this 4-level grist mill in the early 1800s along Lower Howard’s Creek to produce flour for export, likely to New Orleans.  The dry-laid stone mill has fallen to ruins in recent years. “Every spring I come down here I see more stones that have fallen,” said Clare Sipple, manager of the Lower Howard’s Creek preserve. Photos by Tom Eblen

WINCHESTER — A trip to the Lower Howard’s Creek Nature and Heritage Preserve is more than a hike in the woods; it is a journey back into Kentucky business history.

This was, after all, Kentucky’s first industrial park.

I would never have guessed it as I began walking down the hill with Clare Sipple, who manages the 350-acre preserve, and her husband, Harry Enoch, a retired biochemist who chronicled the creek’s commercial history in his 2009 book, Col. John Holder: BoonesboroughDefender and Kentucky Entrepreneur.

The first sign of that history was when we reached a large millstone, thought to have quarried on Pilot Knob in Powell County, hauled here and finished with wrought-iron fitting. It would have been used on one of 15 mills that once operated along the creek to produce wheat flour and corn meal for export down the Kentucky, Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans.

In addition to grain mills there were sawmills, distilleries, cooperages to make barrels, leather tanneries, a warehouse, a woolen factory, blacksmith shops, a boat yard, a ferry, a tavern and a store. The largest businesses were housed in buildings of dry-laid limestone quarried along the creek.

Most of the valley’s two dozen businesses were along the creek or the Salt Springs Trace, a road built in 1775 from Fort Boonesborough to the salt deposits at Blue Licks in Robertson County. It was one of Kentucky’s first heavily-traveled roads.

This area is now a remote corner of the rural Bluegrass on Athens Boonesboro Road behind Hall’s on the River restaurant. But from the 1780s until the Civil War, it and neighboring Boone Creek comprised one of the largest manufacturing centers west of the Allegheny Mountains.

Much of the development of Lower Howard’s Creek was the work of Holder, a land speculator and businessman who had been a leader during Fort Boonesborough’s heyday in the 1770s.

“He had a lot of business contacts in New Orleans,” Enoch said. “He must have been quite a wheeler dealer.”

Lower Howard’s Creek reached its commercial zenith as the Civil War began. But the war cut it off from its main customers in Southern markets. After the war, railroads started replacing river navigation. Steam engines replaced unreliable water power. The last industries on Lower Howard’s Creek were gone by the dawn of the 20th century.

Mother Nature has slowly reclaimed this valley, now covered with second-growth forest after extensive logging in the 1800s. The preserve has more than 800 species of plants, including many rare and endangered ones.

River otter and beaver now ply the rushing creek that once powered Kentucky’s first manufacturers. The trees shelter a wide range of birds, including warblers, tanagers and cedar waxwings.

“It’s unusual to see some of these birds in Kentucky,” said Sipple, 62, who grew up in the area and first explored the creek on horseback as a child.

Lower Howard’s Creek is dotted with ruins of the old stone buildings, as well as the stone fences, earthworks and remnants of the Salt Springs Trace. The Kentucky Heritage Land Conservation Fund purchased much of the preserve’s land, which is now owned by Clark County Fiscal Court. A 228-acre tract was dedicated as a state nature preserve in 2001.

Some of the most significant stone ruins are Jonathan Bush’s mill, which had four levels and a 20-foot mill wheel, and his home. Both have been ravaged by time and vandals, who a few years ago smashed the detailed inscription on the 1855 tomb of Diana Bush, his second wife of 35 years, who he obviously loved very much.

The preserve’s John Holder Trail, which begins at Hall’s on the River, is open during daylight hours. Sipple leads periodic hikes through the rest of the preserve. For more information, go to Lowerhowardscreek.org.

Sipple recently secured a $600,000 grant to restore some of the Salt Springs Trace road and its fences. A shelter was built over Bush’s house in 2004 to limit deterioration until money can be raised to restore it. But 200-year-old Bush’s mill is rapidly falling apart.

“Every spring I come down here I see more stones that have fallen,” she said, estimating that it would take $1 million to restore the huge mill.

“There are stone buildings all over this valley,” Sipple said. “It’s a really significant site. But we’ve always been limited by funding.”

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Commerce Lexington unveiled a five-year private fundraising campaign on Wednesday to finance economic development efforts by announcing that it already has raised more than $2.5 million, or 65 percent, of its $4 million goal.

Initial contributions to the Full Stride initiative came from 26 local companies and organizations, with the largest amount coming from Toyota Motor Manufacturing. Individual donor amounts were not disclosed.

“Short of health and family, there is nothing more important in the world than a good job,” Mayor Jim Gray said at the announcement event at Griffin Gate Marriott, which included a symbolic balloon launch.

Lexington now has 225,000 jobs, about 10,000 more than it had three years ago, Gray said. Still, he added, the local unemployment rate is more than 6 percent, which means the number of unemployed people looking for work would fill almost half of Rupp Arena.

“This effort is at the top of what we’ve got to do,” Gray said.

Gray said job-creation is the most important factor in keeping the local economy strong. And to get those jobs, he said, Lexington must “double down” on creating the kind of attractive, livable community that will attract the best people and employers.

The $4 million raised from private companies will be combined with economic development money appropriated by the Urban County Council. Commerce Lexington is seeking $2.275 million from local government over the next five years.

“This is a public-private partnership,” said Bill Lear, managing director of the law firm Stoll Keenon Ogden.

Much of the money will be used to better market the Bluegrass region to employers. Strategies include encouraging companies already here to expand and recruiting diverse new businesses, including making calls on companies in Europe and Asia.

Other strategies include encouraging the development of small and minority-owned businesses through programs that provide loans and sales opportunities with area manufacturers. Also, the plan calls for several educational initiatives to improve workforce skills development.

“We have to create jobs,” said Central Bank CEO Luther Deaton. “And we have to educate our workforce.”

Poet Nikky Finney poses on the marble steps of the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. It is a place she will miss when she returns to South Carolina to be closer to her aging parents. Photo by Tom Eblen

Nikky Finney has always been drawn to buildings and neighborhoods with a sense of history and community. When she joined the University of Kentucky’s English faculty in 1993, she got to know Lexington by walking and biking through the city’s historic districts.

One day, Finney happened upon the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Gratz Park. She thought it was the public library, which, until recently, it had been. It reminded her of the Carnegie library in Sumter, S.C., where she spent so much time as a girl falling in love with literature. After looking around the beautiful old building and being warmly greeted by the Carnegie Center’s staff, Finney realized she had found a home away from home.

There were several study carrels in the Carnegie Center, and she claimed one as an informal office. Each morning that she wasn’t teaching, Finney sat in the carrel writing her second book of poetry, Rice, published in 1995.

So it seems almost poetic that as Finney prepares to leave Lexington after 20 years to take a faculty position at the University of South Carolina, where she can be closer to her aging parents, her last scheduled public appearances will benefit the Carnegie Center.

Finney, who won the 2011 National Book Award in poetry for her fifth poetry collection, Head Off & Split, will be the keynote speaker June 7 at the Carnegie Center’s Books-in-Progress Conference. The next day, she is to speak at a literary luncheon benefiting the center, whose mission ranges from showcasing Kentucky’s most accomplished writers to teaching children and adults how to read.

“For many reasons, the Carnegie Center is one part library and one part community center,” Finney said last week. “I believe really passionately that public spaces should also have at their heart a sort of intimacy for other things. And here I found the intimacy of the imagination, the intimacy of books.”

Besides finding it a peaceful place to write, Finney was inspired by the literary community that gathered in the building for readings, classes and celebrations.

“It was a hub of activity, and this activity seemed to have an artistic drive and also a community drive,” she said. “In its own way, it feeds back around to the quiet work we do in the carrel the next morning.”

It is amazing, Finney said, “for a city this size to have a place like the Carnegie Center, not just here but more viable today than I’ve ever seen it.”

Finney has gained fame since winning the National Book Award and giving what actor John Lithgow, the award ceremony’s host, called “the best acceptance speech for anything that I’ve ever heard in my life.” The video of that speech became an Internet sensation, introducing many people who don’t often read poetry books to the power and mastery of Finney’s writing.

Earlier this year, the National Civil War Project commissioned Finney to write a piece with jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard that they will perform in October 2015 on the Antietam battlefield in Maryland, with the Kronos Quartet and a 500-voice choir.

Another big project is a memoir of essays that she is calling The Sensitive Child. The title is how her mother often referred to her, “which did not always have good connotations.” But that sensitivity is what led her to writing, she said.

Finney has described her move back to South Carolina as “a daughter’s decision.” In addition to the Carnegie Center, she said, there are many things about Kentucky she will miss. She plans to keep her home and studio in the Bell Court neighborhood.

Finney said living in Kentucky for two decades helped give her the distance and perspective she needed to write about South Carolina. Once she’s in South Carolina, Finney said, she wouldn’t be surprised if she starts writing about Kentucky. She already has some ideas.

As she was moving into her UK office two decades ago, fellow writer and professor Gurney Norman, whom she had never met, welcomed her with a box of books and manuscripts about the black experience in Appalachia. It is a rich but little-known legacy.

“That’s one of the questions I’ve wanted to pursue: Why is that not at the heart of some great American novel?” Finney said about black Appalachia. “There is a bounty of information and history there to pull from. I’m leaning there.”

If you go

Carnegie Books-in-Progress Conference

When: June 7-8

What: Keynote address by Nikky Finney, workshops and activities for those considering a book project or engaged in one.

Where: Carnegie Center, 251 W. Second St.

Cost: $175.

Registration: Call (859) 254-4175, Ext. 21, or go to Carnegiecenterlex.org.

Literary Luncheon with Nikky Finney: Benefiting the Carnegie Center.

When: 1 p.m. June 8.

Where: Elmendorf Farm, 3931 Paris Pike, Lexington.

Cost: $80 (includes lunch).

Registration: Call (859) 254-4175, Ext. 25 or email jmattox@carnegiecenterlex.org.

José Ignacio Martínez-Valero, left, shaved ham as Lucas Montero served cheese to attendees at Alltech’s annual international symposium in Lexington on Tuesday. They represent Ibericos COVAP, a line of traditional Spanish gourmet products produced by a farmers’ co-op near Córdoba, Spain. Photo by Tom Eblen

I spent some time last week at the Alltech Symposium, Lexington’s biggest annual international event that many people have never heard of.

Alltech, the Nicholasville-based animal health and nutrition company, has put on this flashy educational conference for 29 years as a way to strengthen relationships with its customers in 128 countries.

This year’s symposium attracted about 2,000 people from 72 nations, plus about 400 Alltech employees from around the world.

Honestly, animal nutrition is not something I would normally find very interesting. But I leave this event every year fascinated by innovative ideas.

The symposium looks at the future of food and agribusiness from the perspective of natural systems and processes, which has always been Alltech’s approach. That approach has become fashionable in recent years as consumers worry more and more about chemicals and genetically-modified organisms.

This year’s symposium featured several technologies Alltech is working on, such as producing algae for nutritional supplements.

Two years ago, Alltech bought one of the world’s largest algae-making plants, just off Interstate 64 near Winchester. Pearse Lyons, Alltech’s founder and president, said the plant is now producing 10,000 tons of algae a year and is already too small to meet the company’s needs.

Lyons thinks algae could become more popular than fish oil as a major source of docohexaenoic acid, or DHA, a popular nutritional supplement thought to slow the decline of brain function as people age. With the fish oil market now at about $1 billion, Lyons sees opportunity.

The symposium’s theme this year was “Glimpse the future in 2020.” In addition to algae, presentations and panel discussions focused on such topics as growing antibiotic-free poultry, farming at sea, finding financial rewards in reducing agriculture’s carbon footprint and learning to embrace regulation.

“Enough is enough,” the regulatory session’s thesis statement said. “If we do not regulate ourselves, the FDA or the European Union will regulate us. Learn how to embrace regulation.”

Alltech thinks successful businesses won’t just come from new ideas and technology. There are big opportunities in better marketing and distribution of high-quality traditional foods that offer nutrition and unique tastes.

My favorite booth at the symposium’s World Market trade show this year was Ibéricos COVAP, a farmers’ cooperative near Córdoba, Spain. Farmers there have for centuries been producing gourmet cured ham from free-range Ibérico pigs that grow fat on acorns from the forests of the Sierra Morena mountains.

The co-op already distributes its products in New York and Los Angeles. Now, it sees opportunity in middle America, beginning with Kentucky, where cured country ham has been a delicacy for generations.

“We are looking for big opportunities we think we have in this area,” said the co-op’s director, Emilio de León y Ponce de León.

Based on how symposium attendees were devouring delicious samples of thin-shaved ham and Spanish cheeses, Ibéricos COVAP may have some opportunities.

Alltech used to offer the symposium as a free or low-cost event for customers. In the past, Lyons said, Alltech absorbed the costs. Now, each person pays hundreds of dollars to attend.

This year’s symposium, which cost more than $1 million to produce, may come close to breaking even, Lyons said. In the future, he added, it could become a profit center. That is because Alltech’s customers find value in the symposium’s educational sessions and networking opportunities.

“What we’re striving to have is a real joint venture with customers — a real meeting of the minds that creates a win-win situation,” said Lyons, an Irish-born entrepreneur who moved to Lexington in 1980 and started Alltech in his garage. “There are huge returns for international business people willing to work together.”

Those opportunities are a big reason Alltech has been expanding its business in recent years from animal nutrition supplements to human nutrition supplements and high-quality food and drink.

The privately held company doesn’t release financial figures, but Lyons said sales this year will approach $1 billion. About 30 percent of that revenue came from acquisitions.

Lyons, who turns 69 on Aug. 3, said he expects the company to make many more acquisitions in his quest to achieve annual revenues of $4 billion in his lifetime.

Eric Sutherland, founder of the monthly Holler Poets series, poses outside Al’s Bar at the corner of North Limestone and East Sixth Streets. The series will celebrate its fifth year, and 60th session, on May 29. Photo by Tom Eblen 

As the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War approached in March 2008, Eric Scott Sutherland was frustrated and angry. So he fought back the best way he knew how: with poetry.

The writer organized Poets for Peace, a protest reading in the newly reopened Al’s Bar at the corner of North Limestone and East Sixth Street. The event featured an all-star lineup of local literary talent, including Jane Gentry Vance, who was then serving as Kentucky’s poet laureate. Nearly 100 listeners packed the house.

“It was just electric,” Sutherland recalled. “You could sense it.”

Sutherland had tapped into more than public outrage over a tragic, costly and unnecessary war. People seemed hungry for poetry and a venue for self-expression.

“There was pent-up demand for what this guy was doing,” said Josh Miller, one of the bar’s owners. So Miller’s brother, Lester, asked Sutherland if he would organize an event like that at their bar every month.

The Holler Poets Series was born.

The series celebrates its five-year anniversary, and 60th session, on Wednesday. The free event will begin, as always, with an open microphone for any writer wanting to share his or her work.

Then there will be the featured writers. This month’s are Frank X Walker, Kentucky’s current poet laureate, and his fellow Affrilachian poet, Mitchell Douglas. The evening concludes with a musical act. This month’s is Christian hip hop artist Justin Long, who performs under the name JustMe.

Holler’s format has changed little since the series began in 2008 with the award-winning poet Maurice Manning, who now teaches at Transylvania University. Since the beginning, events have been promoted with unique posters created by artist John Lackey, whose Homegrown Press Studio is a couple of doors down from the bar.

About 80 writers have been featured at Holler, including other well-known Kentucky names such as Nikky Finney, Silas House, Richard Taylor, Erik Reece, Ed McClanahan, Gurney Norman, Crystal Wilkinson, George Ella Lyon, Rebecca Gayle Howell, Bianca Spriggs and Leatha Kendrick.

Lexington’s poetry scene has flourished in recent years. Holler Poets — some of whom were born in mountain “hollers” or like to speak loudly — is a big reason why.

Since the beginning, Holler’s goal has been to both raise the profile of experienced poets and encourage the development of new ones. “The open mic has inspired a lot of people to develop their craft, given them something to work toward every month,” Sutherland said.

“Holler Poets has been extremely important in encouraging new voices to emerge, to go from writing for themselves to writing for an audience,” said Katerina Stoykova-Klemer, a Bulgarian-born poet, WRFL radio host, and owner of the Lexington poetry book press Accents Publishing.

“I thought I would go and mingle with like-minded people,” said Tina Andry, who had written poetry all her life but mostly kept it to herself. “Everyone was so welcoming, and the next thing I knew I was publishing a book.”

The Poets for Peace event on March 30, 2008 was followed a year later by Peace in the Mountains, where writers decried what environmentally destructive methods of surface mining for coal is doing to Kentucky’s land, water and air. Holler readers frequently critique an American society that values money more than people. Several of the events have been fundraisers for peace and environmental groups.

“For me, everything is political,” said Sutherland, 41, a Shelbyville native who studied natural resource conservation at the University of Kentucky and has earned his living as a baker and arborist. “It has been rewarding to use art as a way to inform people about what’s going on.”

Sutherland has been surprised by Holler’s popularity. He can’t remember an event where Al’s Bar wasn’t filled with people.

“I knew that our literary heritage would support it and that it was needed,” he said. “But I didn’t know it would catch on. I think the time was just right.”

Sutherland knew he had arrived when, at Holler’s three-year anniversary, Lester Miller surprised him on stage with a fancy certificate proclaiming him as the poet laureate of Al’s Bar.

Accents Publishing will soon publish Sutherland’s fourth poetry collection, Pendulum, inspired by his experiences working at the lobby café of Lexington’s downtown Central Library. Books are important, but Sutherland thinks Holler shows that performance can make poetry a more powerful artistic medium.

“When you hear people up on stage baring their soul, which takes a lot of courage, it ignites something in the listener,” he said. “I think people yearn to feel connected to other people. Poetry is really the last vestige of a direct expression of humanity.”

If you go

Holler Poets 60: Five-year anniversary

When: 8 p.m., May 29

Where: Al’s Bar, 601 N. Limestone

Who: Affrilachian poets Frank X Walker and Mitchell Douglas, hip hop performer JustMe. Open microphone for other poets, with sign-up beginning at 7 p.m.

Cost: Free.

More information: EricScottSutherland.com

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Ed and Kay Thomas watched as Scott Clark used a metal detector around an old bur oak near a circa 1810 farmhouse they are restoring in Bourbon County. Photos by Tom Eblen

PARIS — I always thought it would be fun to have a metal detector. I wasn’t so much interested in hunting for buried treasure as finding bits of history hidden a few inches beneath my feet.

Scott Clark, an Internet business consultant in Lexington, has similar interests. An avid metal detectorist since 1985, he has become quite skilled at it — and increasingly passionate about improving the ethics and image of his hobby.

Metal detecting doesn’t have the best of reputations, thanks to “treasure hunters” who look for relics on Civil War battlefields or pock-mark parks in search of lost valuables. Many historical archaeologists view detectorists about as favorably as a brain surgeon would a witch doctor.

But serious detectorists are trying to change that. Earlier this year, Clark was part of a group that worked with archaeologists to explore James Madison’s Montpelier estate in Virginia. Clark co-authored an article with Montpelier archaeologist Matthew Reeves on the blog of the Society for Historical Archaeology about how the two groups can work together and literally find common ground.

Clark has a blog at Detecting.us and often writes about best practices in the hobby. Those include always asking landowners’ permission before detecting, sharing finds with them and digging carefully so grounds are not damaged. He also avoids truly historic areas, such as battlefields.

Clark often donates his services to people who have lost valuables outside. Last month, he found a wedding band for a Versailles man after it slipped off his finger while he was mowing his yard.

Clark said he never accepts payment or rewards, but people often thank him by arranging access to interesting sites he can search. “The currency of the hobby is permission, which requires being trustworthy and transparent,” he said.

Clark detects to relax and for the love of history rather than profit. He said he has never sold anything he found — and even if he did, it wouldn’t begin to cover the thousands of dollars he has invested in detecting equipment.

Mostly, Clark finds old shoe buckles, keys, buttons, tools and coins. His most valuable find? A silver 1838 half-dime, worth a couple hundred dollars.

Clark said he likes to detect in places where people would have gathered a century or more ago — and lost things out of their pockets. That includes the grounds around old homes, schools, churches and stores.

Clark offered to show me how detecting works, then asked if I knew of a good hunting place. I immediately thought of Kay and Ed Thomas.

The Thomases live in a beautiful home in Bourbon County that her ancestors built in 1792. While restoring the place, the fun-loving couple delighted in finding interesting objects from the past. They are now restoring another place nearby — a circa-1810 brick farmhouse that her family bought in the 1940s.

As I suspected, the Thomases jumped at the chance to have Clark search their yards. Ed Thomas tagged along with Clark for the better part of three days while he carefully went over the ground with his detector, watching its dials and listening to its beeps, squawks and squeals.

To the untrained ear, the detector sounded like an arcade video game. But to Clark, the tones and gauges indicated the presence of objects in the ground — how big they were, what kind of metal they were made of and how deep they were, indicating how long they had been there.

Clark’s most interesting find on the Thomases’ property was a coin silver filigree bracelet with ivory cameos, which Kay Thomas thinks a long-dead relative bought on a European tour. He also found a few old coins, including an 1868 penny; spoon bowls of silver and pewter; a 1937 American Legion fob; old livestock tags and pieces of horse tack; and the remains of tools.

“Normally, I find three times this much stuff,” Clark said, clearly disappointed.

But the Thomases were thrilled — and not surprised that he didn’t find more.

“My relatives were frugal people!” Kay Thomas said. “If they had lost a gold ring, they would have been out here 24/7 until they found it.”

Ed Thomas also found something: a new hobby. For his birthday last Friday, his wife gave him a metal detector.

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When I moved back here 15 years ago, Lexingtonians were battling with bumper stickers. Builders and developers had “Growth is Good” stickers on their bumpers. Preservationists had “Growth Destroys Bluegrass Forever” on theirs.

It was a pointless debate. Growth is inevitable. The question is how best to handle it.

Fortunately, discussions about growth and development are now less heated and simplistic and more productive. Both sides realize that Lexington’s future depends on steady, well-planned growth that encourages compatible economic development but doesn’t spoil the Bluegrass’ unique beauty and quality of life.

I gained some valuable insights into these issues recently by joining 28 other local people in a program called Citizens Planning Academy. We met two hours each Wednesday morning for six weeks to hear experts speak about all aspects of local growth and planning from a variety of viewpoints.

The program was organized by the land-use advocacy group Fayette Alliance and co-sponsored by the Home Builders Association of Lexington, the Fayette Farm Bureau, the American Society of Landscape Architects and The Plantory, a shared workspace for social entrepreneurs.

While Lexington has made mistakes over the years, it has been trying longer and harder than most cities to manage growth. The city’s first comprehensive plan was adopted in 1931. My house was then at the eastern edge of the city limits. Now, many people refer to it as being “downtown.”

The 1931 plan referred to Union Station, the long-ago-demolished train depot, as the most important building in town. Ironically, it is now the site of the recently renovated Helix  parking garage and the office where people take automobile driving tests and get their licenses.

In 1958 — 15 years before city-county merger — Lexington became the first city in America to set an urban growth boundary to limit suburban sprawl and protect rural land. Over the years, the Urban Services Area has been expanded from 22 percent of the county to about 30 percent.

From the 1950s to the early 2000s, Lexington experienced rapid, automobile-centric growth as residential subdivisions and shopping centers were built on former farmland. In recent years, there has been more focus on urban infill and redevelopment as everyone realized Fayette County’s farmland and open space is precious, finite and a vital to Lexington’s economy, image and quality of life.

Unlike most areas of Kentucky, Lexington is likely to see continued population growth, from a current 302,000 people to about 376,000 by 2030.  How are we planning for that growth?  Here are a couple of trends to watch:

Future growth will likely be more dense, more urban and less dependent on automobiles.

“We’re planning for a different type of population,” said Chris King, director of Lexington’s Division of Planning.

Many aging baby boomers and young people want to be able to walk or bike to work, shopping and entertainment. That means different styles of new neighborhoods and retrofitting older neighborhoods to make them less isolated.

Residential development and revitalization of in-town neighborhoods has been a key piece of the renaissance of downtown Lexington as a mixed-use area. That trend is likely to continue, King said.

That’s good, because it makes more efficient use of land. But increasing density is sure to spark conflict with some existing neighborhoods.

Another big factor in Lexington’s future growth will be outdoor water quality. Many developments in recent decades were built with inadequate infrastructure, which led to storm-water runoff problems and pollution of local streams. The city must spend millions of dollars to remedy past sins and prevent new ones under a consent decree with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

That means that sewer capacity will limit future growth much more severely in the past. But the consent decree also has prompted city officials to get creative with natural solutions for storm-water management and filtering: permeable pavement, stream-bank restoration and systems for capturing and reusing rainwater.

The exciting Town Branch Commons proposal could be another piece of “green” infrastructure, creating both a linear park through downtown and helping to manage storm-water runoff.

The Fayette Alliance plans another Citizens Planning Academy next year, but dates have not been set. Watch FayetteAlliance.com for more information about how to apply.

At Thursday Night Live, Dave Floyd watches Ilias Pappas of the Athenian Grill food truck prepare his gyros sandwich. Pappas started his business as a food truck last September and plans to transition to a small Greek restaurant in Chevy Chase this summer.  Photos by Tom Eblen

Since food trucks and stands started popping up in Lexington a few years ago, they have become popular with customers but created tension with bricks-and-mortar restaurants.

Some restaurant owners have fought efforts to make food trucks more accessible, saying their low overhead makes them unfair competition. So far, the city has only permitted them to operate on private property or at special events.

Council member Shevawn Akers chairs a food truck ordinance work group, which has streamlined the permitting process. Last week, the group came up with a proposal that council should approve. It would allow a pilot project to let food trucks operate in designated downtown parking areas.

What will be interesting to see is how many food truck operators go on to start restaurants.

Ilias Pappas, owner of the Athenian Grill food stand, is well on his way.

Pappas, 33, was born in Lamia, Greece, and emigrated to this country to attend college at Lexington Community College, the University of Kentucky and Florida International University. After working in technology in Miami for a year or two, he returned to his first love: food. He worked in several Miami restaurants.

Pappas is now renovating a former bakery on South Ashland Avenue to be his Greek restaurant and market.

Pappas had grown up living over a bakery and eating traditional Greek food prepared by this mother and grandmother. While attending college in Lexington, he had helped his aunt and uncle, George and Louiza Ouraniou, a welder and a chef. They also were caterers and became popular fixtures at community events over the years, serving barbecued lamb and Greek gyros.

Then tragedy struck: George Ouraniou, 71, died in a car wreck in September 2011. Pappas returned to Lexington to help his aunt. Then he moved back for good a few months later.

“I never imagined I would end up living here,” Pappas said of Lexington. “But I realized this was the place I wanted to stay.”

Pappas said his uncle had always dreamed of opening a Greek restaurant, but never did. Pappas had the same dream, and figured a food truck would be an affordable way to start.

Last September, he created Athenian Grill, a food stand serving four types of gyros, Greek salad, spinach pie, Cypriot meatballs, hummus and baklava. With help from several friends, it became a popular fixture outside Country Boys Brewing and West Sixth Brewery and at Thursday Night Live on Cheapside.

“I didn’t have a business plan; I learned on the job,” Pappas said. “The (brewery) owners have been very good to me. The exposure I got as a food trucker provided opportunities for exposure and allowed me to introduce myself to people.”

That has led to catering and event opportunities. But Pappas wants to do much more than he can do now cooking on the street and preparing things in advance in commercial kitchen space he rents in Nicholasville.

“The food truck doesn’t allow me to give people a good exposure to a traditional family-style Greek dining experience,” he said. “It’s very limited what you can do out on the street.”

So Pappas has rented the former Belle’s Bakery building in Chevy Chase — an old two-car garage set back off South Ashland Avenue between Euclid and High streets— and has begun renovations. He hopes to open the restaurant in July.

In addition to a few inside and outside tables, the non-mobile Athenian Grill will have lunch delivery and a Greek market upstairs, which can be booked for small private dinners. In addition to traditional Greek food, Pappas plans to offer some of the flavors he grew to like while working in Miami.

“Ninety percent of the menu will be things you cannot find in Lexington at the moment,” he said.

Pappas is financing the venture with his own savings, plus loans from family and friends. He also has launched a campaign on Kickstarter.com, as much to attract community involvement as financing.

“Because of my food truck, people have given me the chance to take the next step,” Pappas said. “My uncle worked very hard in the food business. I want to dedicate my restaurant to him.”

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Hallie Adams, 7, sits atop Wanda, a Norwegian Fjord horse, as she is led around the Central Kentucky Riding for Hope facility at the Kentucky Horse Park. Martha Wiedemann, hidden, Nancy Herring, front, and Kassie Smith lead the horse while therapist Lisa Harris, center, works with Hallie to improve coordination and balance and strengthen her muscles. Photos by Tom Eblen 

This is Kentucky Derby week, the time each year when everyone is focused on horses that run fast for a living. So I thought I would write about horses whose job it is to walk slowly.

T-Ball and Wanda are hefty Norwegian Fjords who work at Central Kentucky Riding for Hope at the Kentucky Horse Park. They help heal the clients of Lisa Harris and Becky Johnson, two therapists at Cardinal Hill Rehabilitation Hospital.

It is called hippotherapy — hippo is Greek for horse — and it is a relatively new method of therapy that is struggling for recognition with the insurance companies and government agencies that pay most medical bills in America.

Hippotherapy is not the same as therapeutic riding. In hippotherapy, a patient sits or lies on a horse’s back and does movements under the direction of a therapist as the horse is led around slowly by a handler and a side walker.

“The horse’s pelvis creates a movement that is very similar to our walking,” said Harris, who has been on the board of the American Hippotherapy Association. “Its motion is our strategy.”

The horse stimulates movement by the patient on its back. Hippotherapy helps many patients improve balance, flexibility and strength, especially in the neck, chest and abdomen. Core strength is important not only in helping patients walk, but in speech therapy, Harris said. The hippotherapy environment also can help improve sensory perception in children who struggle with it.

“It can be very helpful as part of a full treatment plan,” Harris said. “We have seen some adults and kids who haven’t walked before take their first steps, or haven’t spoken before say their first words.”

Harris has ridden horses since she was a child. Her mother, Nancy Herring, was the first executive director of Central Kentucky Riding for Hope, which since 1981 has offered other healing-related activities involving horses, including work with military veterans disabled while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Her father is George Herring, a noted historian and author at the University of Kentucky.)

In addition to a master’s degree in physical therapy, Harris has a master’s in equine biomechanics and a bachelor’s in animal science. So she naturally became interested in hippotherapy after it was introduced in this country from Germany and Austria in the 1990s.

Harris began offering hippotherapy in Lexington in 2002 after Cardinal Hill formed a partnership with Central Kentucky Riding for Hope, the state’s only premium accredited therapeutic riding center. She and Johnson, an occupational therapist, use the methods with about 25 clients a week.

Many of Harris’ clients are children. Hallie Adams, 7, of Paris, was born with cerebral palsy. Her mother, Ginger Adams, said the sessions have helped make her daughter much stronger. Once around Wanda, Hallie becomes more motivated to work her muscles.

“She’s super engaged on the horse, so anything the therapists ask her to do, she will do,” Adams said.

Carlos Taylor, 34, of Winchester, is using hippotherapy to help recover from a 2005 construction accident. He was helping to build a log house when scaffolding collapsed and injured his spine, causing him to lose feeling in his lower legs.

“I never thought I would get on a horse again,” Taylor said with a laugh. He said he twice tried horseback riding before his injury and was thrown off both times.

Taylor receives several kinds of therapy, but he said that after he began hippotherapy last year, he quickly noticed improvement in core strength and muscle control.

“It has helped a lot,” he said. “I never thought I would be where I am today.”

The American Hippo therapy Association is trying to increase awareness of its methods so more insurance companies and other health care reimbursement agencies will pay for patients to get it.

“There’s a lot of confusion out there about hippotherapy and how it is different from therapeutic riding, which is done by a riding instructor and not a therapist,” Harris said.

She said about half the insurance companies in Kentucky will reimburse for hippotherapy, but unlike many other states, Medicare and Medicaid in Kentucky will not.

“This is the horse capital of the world,” Harris said. “Not saying yes to this treatment strategy is kind of crazy.”

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Holmes Hall on Euclid Avenue was built by the University of Kentucky in 1956-1958 and designed by Ernst V. Johnson. Its most distinguishing feature is a covered walkway of stone, brick and concrete canopy. Photo by Tom Eblen

When local architects started emailing me about preliminary plans to demolish several Modernist-style buildings on the University of Kentucky campus, my first reaction was to roll my eyes.

Like many people, I have always struggled to appreciate, much less like, a lot of mid-20th century architecture. It seems so plain, boxy, cold and, in the hands of some architects, just plain ugly.

To try to understand why so many professionals consider these buildings important and worth saving, I decided to take a closer look and learn more about them.

Nearly 30 percent of UK’s structures date from the 1950s and 1960s, and many academic buildings and residence halls have been neglected for years. To his credit, UK President Eli Capilouto is trying to catch up, initiating construction and renovation projects all over campus.

Initial plans included demolishing as many as seven of the 13 campus buildings designed between the 1930s and 1950s by noted Lexington architect Ernst V. Johnson: Jewell (1938), Holmes (1956) and Donovan (1955) residence halls, the Engineering Quadrangle (1938), the Wenner-Gren Aeronautical Research Laboratory (1941), the Funkhouser Biological Science Building (1942) and the Mineral Industries Building (1951).

The wrecking ball may also be aimed at the Kirwan-Blanding residential complex (1967), designed by Edward Durrell Stone. He was one of America’s best-known and most prolific Modernist architects, and his work has always been widely loved — and hated.

“It’s easy to see why most people don’t turn on to it,” said Graham Pohl, a Lexington architect with Pohl Rosa Pohl.

Modernism was the first architectural style in centuries that didn’t reference the past. Modernism began in Europe nearly a century ago, but didn’t catch on in this country until after World War II. Then it was everywhere.

“People felt free to be expressive and experiment with forms and new materials that felt right to them,” Pohl said. “It was a product of economic growth and national optimism about the future.”

But Pohl acknowledges that the style was widely abused. When so-called Urban Renewal reshaped America’s cities into concrete jungles built around the automobile, it included a lot of slap-dash architecture that was called “modern.”

“One of the reasons people don’t like Modernism is that it has been used as an excuse to do shoddy work,” Pohl said. “It’s more difficult to do good Modernism than good traditional work.”

Pohl said most of the buildings UK has considered tearing down are anything but shoddy. As an example, he cited Holmes Hall, an International-style building with an elegant stone and concrete stair-step canopy and interesting brick work.

Johnson’s buildings all have elegant brick work, perhaps because he was the son of a Swedish mason and worked his way through Yale as a union bricklayer.

“It’s more than decorative,” Pohl said of Johnson’s brick patterns on Holmes Hall. “It speaks to aspects of the building and the relationship between walls and openings. There’s a lot about that building that suggests someone thought deeply about it.”

Pohl also likes Stone’s Kirwan-Blanding complex, with its 23-story towers surrounded by smaller buildings arranged in a park-like setting. He likes the relationship of the vertical towers to the “incredibly elegant” horizontal canopies that connect the buildings.

“A lot of people see those forms as being part of their parents’ generation and they intentionally don’t want to relate to them,” said Pohl, adding that these buildings have much more architectural merit than anything that is likely to replace them in this era of budget-cutting austerity.

I grew up around the corner from Holmes Hall, on the block where UK is now building a massive dormitory complex. I have always admired Holmes Hall’s stair- step canopy, if not the rest of the building.

But I never liked Kirwan-Blanding — until, that is, I went to photograph it for this column on a beautiful evening last week. The moon was rising between the towers, which were bathed in the glow of the setting sun. Students were all around the buildings, studying among the trees and flowers or throwing Frisbees and footballs. I appreciated those buildings for the first time.

Architecture, like art, is often subjective, said Sarah Tate, an architect and founder of the Lexington firm Tate Hill Jacobs. She greatly admires Johnson’s work, for example, yet has never liked Stone’s. But that is not the point, she emphasized.

“Architecture is a reflection of history and culture, and that campus is a little museum of modern architecture,” Tate said. “Johnson’s buildings give us an architectural handbook of the influences that got us from the late 19th century to the late 20th century. I don’t think (UK officials) know what they have here.

“These mid-century buildings are part of our DNA,” she added. “You don’t want to take them all away. They are important links in our history and culture.”

Sasaki Associates, the Boston planning firm that UK hired to develop a new campus master plan, recently recommended as its first scenario renovating and reusing these historic Modernist buildings. UK officials should take that advice.

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 Alfalfa Restaurant moved into the Downtown Arts Center on Main Street a decade ago, decorating its wall with the sign letters from the original location on South Limestone Street. Photo by Tom Eblen

The way restaurants come and go, this one would seem like a long shot. A group of idealistic 20-somethings with little money and no experience wanted to serve wholesome food at reasonable prices.

Short of chairs on opening day in April 1973, they offered free meals to customers who donated them.

“We had an unusual business plan at first: six partners and two menu items,” said Art Howard, one of the original partners. “I wouldn’t recommend that now.”

Alfalfa Restaurant not only survived, it became a local institution that is now one of Lexington’s oldest restaurants. Current and former customers and employees are invited to a 40th anniversary party, 4 to 10 p.m. April 28 at the current location, 141 East Main Street.

“We’ve basically tried to have fun with the place,” said Jake Gibbs, an off-and-on minority owner who started washing dishes as a graduate student in 1979 and now tries to manage Alfalfa as well as a reluctant capitalist can.

“We don’t do a huge business,” Gibbs said. “We roughly break even every year.”

Artie Howard cooks during Alfalfa’s early days.

Making money was never the main goal. Alfalfa, after all, was started by what the restaurant’s website calls “hippie-type” young people with what was then a novel interest in healthy, locally produced food.

“We were pretty much ahead of our time,” said Howard, who sold his interest in Alfalfa a few years later, became a chef and, since 1995, has owned The Ketch Seafood Grill on Regency Road.

“They bought real vegetables from real local farmers before it was cool,” said Rona Roberts, a regular Alfalfa customer since 1973 who now writes the food blog Savoring Kentucky. “They have a lot of distinctive food; they’ve never given up on making everything themselves.”

When Alfalfa opened at 557 South Limestone, near the University of Kentucky, it was financed with $2,000 that Howard inherited from a grandmother and $100 or $200 kicked in by each of the other five partners, he said.

The restaurant’s name was the result of a desperate brainstorming session as opening day neared. Howard can’t remember who came up with “Alfalfa,” but he said it might have been less a reference to the forage legume than to a character from the 1930s Our Gang comedies, then in TV reruns.

Howard had been interested in starting a bakery, so he became the baker, setting a standard for fresh-baked, whole-grain bread that baker Tom Martin has kept going for the past 35 years.

Partner Leslie Bower, who had trained at Le Cordon Bleu culinary school in France, was the first head cook. (She was murdered in 1979 when she stopped in Georgia to ask directions.)

The restaurant’s most notorious employee was a cook in 1974 known as Lena Paley. Soon after she abruptly left town, Alfalfa employees recognized her on an FBI “wanted” poster as Susan Saxe, an accomplice in a 1970 Boston bank robbery in which a police officer was killed. Captured in 1975, Saxe pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was paroled in 1982.

Jake Gibbs, who manages the restaurant, began as a dishwashing graduate student in 1979.

Alfalfa left its original home a decade ago and moved into the Downtown Arts Center on Main Street. Gibbs said the restaurant is negotiating for another 10-year lease.

All of the original partners left Alfalfa long ago, and there have been several owners over the years who started as employees of the restaurant. They included Marina Ubaldi, Jeff Gitlin and Gibbs, who teaches history at Bluegrass Community and Technical College.

Jim Happ, the main owner since 2004, also is CEO of Labcon North America, a California-based manufacturer of sustainable laboratory materials. He and his wife, Betsey, met while working at Alfalfa. They named their daughter for Helen Alexander, who has been a cook there for 25 years.

Like previous owners, Happ and Gibbs have tried to maintain the quality and variety of Alfalfa’s health-conscious food, as well as the family atmosphere for both customers and employees.

“Alfalfa’s is such a nice family,” said Lexington artist John Lackey. He and his wife, Jenny, both worked at the restaurant, as did their son, Quinn, 21. Their younger son, Dylan, 17, works there now.

“It’s a labor of love,” Lackey said of Alfalfa. “It’s just such a great, interesting collection of people; the right balance of service and insanity.”

Alfalfa staff members photographed in 1974, the year after the restaurant opened. Among the owners at the time were, left to right, Marina McCulloch (wearing hat), Leslie Bower (front left in dark shirt), Artie Howard (tallest in back,  with beard), Lucia Walls (front right in dark shirt) and Ann “Panny” Hobson (right center).  Photo by Guy Mendes

Link Henderson of Kentucky Mudworks makes one of the ceramic pint glasses that will be part of her fundraiser for Seedleaf on April 27 at West Sixth Brewery. A $15 donation to the community garden group will come with a beer in one of her handmade pint glasses. Photo by Tom Eblen 

Link Henderson moved here after college in 1997 because her best friend got married, got a teaching job in Lexington and bought a duplex where Henderson could rent the other half.

“I always wanted to own my own business, ever since I was a kid,” said Henderson, who grew up in North Carolina and majored in Latin and ceramics at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa. “I just didn’t know what it was or how it would happen.”

After working as a waitress and baker, Henderson got a job teaching ceramics classes at the city-owned Loudoun House.

When it was closed for a major renovation, she rented studio space in an old carriage house downtown, offered her own classes and made pottery to sell.

As the business grew, she moved to larger quarters on Jefferson Street. One thing led to another, and Kentucky Mudworks LLC is now a full-service ceramics studio, school and store at 825 National Avenue.

The company will have one of its two annual charity fundraisers April 27 at West Sixth Brewery. Called Pints for Plants, the event benefits Seedleaf, a nonprofit organization that works to provide affordable, nutritious food for people at risk of hunger in Central Kentucky.

Henderson is hand-making more than 300 ceramic pint glasses. Donors get a pint of beer in a glass for a $15 donation to Seedleaf, from 3 p.m. until they are all gone.

Henderson said Kentucky Mudworks’ success has been all about diversification.

“Knowing my market and being willing to have a toe in every facet of the business,” she said.

When Henderson began making pottery and teaching classes, she was frustrated that there was no good place in the region to buy clay. There are fewer than a dozen ceramic clay manufacturers in the country, and mail order is expensive.

“A box of clay is only $30, but it costs $20 to ship it,” she said. “So, if you have a local supplier, it’s a really great thing.”

Henderson started selling clay to potters, schools and universities. Kentucky Mudworks now stocks 80 kinds of clay in its 11,000-square-foot facility, along with kilns, wheels and a full range of pottery materials and supplies.

When online retailers started taking a bite out of her margins several years ago, Henderson created her own line of tools.

“Instead of trying to compete with 30 or 50 online stores, I wanted to have products in those stores,” she said.

Dirty Girls Pottery Tools now has about 40 distributors in the United States and Canada. Henderson also sells them at her shop and website: Kentuckymudworks.com.

Henderson and her five employees make commissioned pottery, such as trophies and awards. They also offer ceramics classes for adults and children. Kentucky Mudworks recently partnered with Zig Zeigler, a stained-glass artist whose studio is down the street, to offer stained glass classes.

The hardest thing about building the business was financing.

“In the beginning, it was credit cards, which is an absolute no-no,” Henderson said. “But I was 25 and had no collateral.”

As the business grew, she was able to get a conventional loan, which she plans to pay off in September. Henderson owns 90 percent of the business. Eight percent is owned by a friend and investor, and a longtime employee owns 2 percent.

But, for many years, much of Henderson’s capital came from living simply and plowing most of her earnings back into the business.

“I probably lived on 700 bucks a month for I don’t know how long, literally living above the shop,” she said. “Ramen noodles: that’s how I financed my business!

“I didn’t have a family or a mortgage,” added Henderson, 38, who now lives on a farm near Lawrenceburg. “I started when I was so young because I figured if I don’t do it now, I’ll never do it if I have something to lose.”

In addition to constant financial discipline, Henderson said she does a business plan every five years to stay on track.

Kentucky Mudworks has been a lot of work, but it has been worth it, she said.

“I wish more young people would start businesses,” Henderson said. “I was very, very lucky. I found a niche, a hole in the market that I was able to capitalize on.

“But it takes so much more than you think.”

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Martin Demaine, left, and his son, Erik, with one of their paper origami sculptures. 

Martin Demaine became a single parent when his son was 2. Suddenly, the visual artist went from being a workaholic who spent little time with Erik to his constant companion, teacher and collaborator.

It has worked out well for both of them. Amazingly well.

When Erik started designing puzzles at age 6, they created a company to sell them. After first grade, Martin home-schooled his son, including teaching him a lot about art. Erik started playing with computers and teaching his father, who has gone on to do computer science research.

At age 20, Erik finished his Ph.D. in computer science and became the youngest faculty member in the history of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Then came a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant at age 21 and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship.

Erik, 31, and Martin, 70, both now teach at MIT. Earlier this month, they were awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Their current research into paper folding holds promise for breakthroughs in fields ranging from engineering to pharmaceuticals.

The Demaines will be in Lexington this week to give two free, public lectures about their research and open an exhibit of their work at The Art Museum at the University of Kentucky, which will be on display until May 26.

The Demaines will speak on “Algorithms Meet Art, Puzzles and Magic” at 5 p.m. April 24 at the Worsham Theater in UK’s Student Center. The next day, at 4 p.m., they will talk on “Geometric Puzzles” at Transylvania University’s Cowgill Center, room 102.

Their visit was initiated by Dr. Sylvia Cerel-Suhl, a Lexington physician whose son, Adam Suhl, studies with the Demaines at MIT.

Between those lectures, the Demaines will go to Danville to blow glass with Centre College artist Stephen Powell, who they met through mutual friend Lino Tagliapietra, the renowned Italian glass artist. In January, the Demaines plan to spend a week or two at Centre, creating art with Powell and lecturing on mathematics.

In separate telephone interviews last week, the Demaines said they work at the intersection of mathematics and art.

“We have used one to help solve problems with the other,” Martin said. “They are very similar in many ways. They both have these exciting moments when you discover things, when you succeed in visualizing something.”

“It’s all about creativity,” Erik said. “All about having clever ideas and executing those ideas. We look for mathematics in the art we do, and art in the mathematics we do.”

Many grants now require an artist to be part of the team of research scientists, because it brings a different kind of thinking to the problem-solving process. Much of the Demaines’ work at MIT involves acting as “translators” between artists and scientists.

In addition to creating art, the Demaines teach and have published about 80 scientific papers with each other and a variety of fellow researchers.

The Demaines’ current work began with a fascination for origami, the Japanese art of paper folding. The orgiami pieces in their UK show involve precise circular folds that cause paper to bend itself into distinct shapes. The sculptures are composed of several interlocking pieces of folded paper, sometimes enclosed in a blown-glass vessel they made.

“Origami has always been seen as a recreational art,” Erik said. “But we embraced it as a serious thing. That turned out to be a good bet, because there are a lot of applications to science and engineering.”

For example, their origami research has led to safer automobile airbags. Their research discovered new ways to fold up airbags so that, when they deploy, the force is spread more evenly so drivers and passengers are not injured.

Future applications of such folding techniques include self-supporting structures or even space station modules that could deploy themselves when they reach their destination. But the most exciting possibilities are microscopic.

“I think the big application for us would be if we could help develop techniques for protein-folding that would be better for drug design,” Martin said.

“It’s quite exciting,” he added. “It makes life for us an adventure. We are just hoping that more doors will open up.”