The Blue-Grass Region of Kentucky, and Other Kentucky ArticlesAllen, James Lane
General
The Blue-Grass Region of Kentucky, and Other Kentucky Articles
Allen, James Lane
Kentucky -- Description and travel; Kentucky -- Social life and customs
Soil and air and climate--the entire aggregate of influences happily
co-operative--make the finest grazing. The Kentucky horse has carried
the reputation of the country into regions where even the people could
never have made it known. Your expert in the breeding of thoroughbreds
will tell you that the muscular fibre of the blue-grass animal is to
that of the Pennsylvania-bred horses as silk to cotton, and the texture
of his bone, compared with the latter's, as ivory beside pumice-stone.
If taken to the Eastern States, in twelve generations he is no longer
the same breed of horse. His blood fertilizes American stock the
continent over. Jersey cattle brought here increase in size. Sires come
to Kentucky to make themselves and their offspring famous.
The people themselves are a fecund race. Out of this State have gone
more to enrich the citizenship of the nation than all the other States
together have been able to send into it. So at least your loyal-hearted
Kentuckian looks at the rather delicate subject of inter-State
migration. By actual measurement the Kentucky volunteers during the
Civil War were found to surpass all others (except Tennesseeans) in
height and weight, whether coming from the United States or various
countries of Europe. But for the great-headed Scandinavians, they would
have been first, also, in circumference around the forehead and occiput.
Still, Kentucky has little or no literature.
[Illustration: HEMP FIELD.]
One element that should be conspicuous in fertile countries does not
strike the observer here--much beautiful water; no other State has a
frontage of navigable rivers equal to that of Kentucky. But there are
few limpid, lovely, smaller streams. Wonderful springs there are, and
vast stores of water in the cavernous earth below; but the landscape
lacks the charm of this element--clear, rushing, musical, abundant. The
watercourses, ever winding and graceful, are apt to be either swollen
and turbid or insignificant; of late years the beds seem less full
also--a change consequent, perhaps, upon the denudation of forest lands.
In a dry season the historic Elkhorn seems little more than a ganglion
of precarious pools.
IV
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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