Bluegrass refers to several species of grasses of the genus Poa.
Kenton County is a county located in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. As of the 2010 census, the population was 159,720, making it the third most populous county in Kentucky. Its county seats are Covington and Independence. It was, until November 24, 2010, the only county in Kentucky to have two legally recognized county seats. The county was formed in 1840 and is named for Simon Kenton, a frontiersman notable in the early history of the state.
The Bluegrass region is a geographic region in the U.S. state of Kentucky. It makes up the northern part of the state where a majority of the state's population has lived and developed its largest cities. Its location is roughly bounded by the cities of Frankfort, Paris, Richmond and Stanford.
The Music of Kentucky is heavily centered on Appalachian folk music and its descendants, especially in eastern Kentucky. Bluegrass music is of particular regional importance; Bill Monroe, "the father of bluegrass music", was born in the Ohio County community of Rosine, and he named his band, the Blue Grass Boys, after the bluegrass state, i.e., Kentucky. Travis picking, the influential guitar style, is named after Merle Travis, born and raised in Muhlenberg County. Kentucky is home to the Country Music Highway, which extends from Portsmouth, Ohio to the Virginia border in Pike County.
Muldraugh Hill is an escarpment in Bullitt, Hardin, Jefferson, and Nelson counties of central Kentucky separating the Bluegrass on the north and north-east from the Pennyrile on the south and south-west. This escarpment fades into the Pottsville Escarpment on the east, and terminates at the Ohio River in the west, although in truth it continues in Indiana as Floyds Knobs.
The West Kentucky Coal Field comprises an area in the west-central and northwestern part of the state, bounded by the Dripping Springs Escarpment and the Pennyroyal Plateau and the Ohio River, but is part of the Illinois Basin that extends into Indiana and Illinois. It is characterized by Pennsylvanian age sandstones, shales and coal. Nearly all of the counties in the area are part of the television market known as the Kentucky–Illinois–Indiana tri-state area.
The Kentucky River Palisades are a series of steep, scenic gorges and limestone outcroppings that stretch for approximately 100 mi (160 km), along the Kentucky River in central Kentucky in the United States.
The Jefferson Memorial Forest is a forest located in southwest Louisville, Kentucky, in the Knobs region of Kentucky. At 6,500 acres (26 km2), it is the largest municipal urban forest in the United States.
The Knobs Region or The Knobs is located in the US state of Kentucky. It is a narrow, arc-shaped region consisting of hundreds of isolated hills. The region wraps around the southern part of the Bluegrass region in the north central to northeastern part of the state. The western end of the Knobs region begins near Louisville, Kentucky and continues southeastward through Bullitt, Hardin, Nelson, LaRue, Marion, Taylor, Casey and Lincoln counties before turning northeast and running along the Pottsville Escarpment and the Appalachian Plateau. The Knob arc has a length of 230 miles (370 km).
The Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area preserves the Big South Fork of the Cumberland River and its tributaries in northeastern Tennessee and southeastern Kentucky. In addition, the former mining community of Blue Heron is preserved and interpreted via signage.
The Ohio Valley is a sub region in Kentucky running 658 miles (1,059 km) long including parts of 25 counties and across five regions of the state. Over 45% of Kentucky's population live in counties the border the Ohio River, although those counties are only 16% of the state's land area.
Louisville is a city in Jefferson County, in the U.S. state of Kentucky. It is located at the Falls of the Ohio River.
The Festival of the Bluegrass, located in Lexington, Kentucky, is the oldest bluegrass music festival in the bluegrass region of Kentucky. The festival takes place the first full weekend of June each year. The Festival of the Bluegrass helped shape the early bluegrass festival culture.
Although Kentucky's culture is generally considered to be Southern, it is unique in that it is also influenced by the Midwest and Southern Appalachia in certain areas of the state. The state is known for bourbon and whiskey distilling, tobacco, horse racing, and college basketball. Kentucky is more similar to the Upper South in terms of ancestry which is predominantly American. Nevertheless, during the 19th century, Kentucky did receive a substantial number of German immigrants, who settled mostly in the Midwest, along the Ohio river primarily in Louisville, Covington, and Newport. Only Maryland, Delaware, and West Virginia have higher German ancestry percentages than Kentucky among Census-defined Southern states, although Kentucky's percentage is closer to Virginia's than the previously named state's percentages. Kentucky was a slave state, and blacks once comprised over one-quarter of its population. However, it lacked the cotton plantation system and never had the same high percentage of African Americans as most other slave states. With less than 8% of its current population being black, Kentucky is rarely included in modern-day definitions of the Black Belt, despite a relatively significant rural African American population in the Central and Western areas of the state. Kentucky adopted the Jim Crow system of racial segregation in most public spheres after the Civil War, but the state never disenfranchised African American citizens to the level of the Deep South states, and it peacefully integrated its schools after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education verdict, later adopting the first state civil rights act in the South in 1966.
The Interior Low Plateaus are a physiographic region in eastern United States. It consists of a diverse landscape that extends from north Alabama across central Tennessee and Kentucky into southern Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. Its natural communities are a matrix of temperate forests, woodlands, and prairies.
Mary Eugenia Wharton was an American botanist, author, and environmental activist.
Mound Hill is an archaeological site in the Bluegrass region of the U.S. state of Kentucky. Located north of Winchester in far northern Clark County, the site is part of a group of Indian mounds lining Stoner Creek, although by far the largest of the group. The mound has frequently attracted attention from mapmakers and other surveyors, due to its large size; it was measured at 240 feet (73 m) (circumference) and 20 feet (6.1 m) (height) by an 1884 survey, which pronounced it a "romantic sight" due to its hilltop location between Stoner Creek and Pretty Run. The surveyors suggested that its linear shape with a central depression might have been the result of erosion or of the construction of multiple mounds that were later merged into one. It lies approximately 0.5 miles (0.80 km) west of the rest of the group, which occupies the summit of a narrow ridgeline known as the "Devil's Backbone." Digging at these mounds, which were seemingly related to Mound Hill, produced artifacts such as pottery and a pipe, as well as numerous stone box graves.
The Lexington Limestone is a prominent geologic formation that constitutes a large part of the late Ordovician bedrock of the inner Bluegrass region in Kentucky. Named after the city of Lexington, the geologic formation has heavily influenced both the surface topography and economy of the region.
The geology of Kentucky formed beginning more than one billion years ago, in the Proterozoic eon of the Precambrian. The oldest igneous and metamorphic crystalline basement rock is part of the Grenville Province, a small continent that collided with the early North American continent. The beginning of the Paleozoic is poorly attested and the oldest rocks in Kentucky, outcropping at the surface, are from the Ordovician. Throughout the Paleozoic, shallow seas covered the area, depositing marine sedimentary rocks such as limestone, dolomite and shale, as well as large numbers of fossils. By the Mississippian and the Pennsylvanian, massive coal swamps formed and generated the two large coal fields and the oil and gas which have played an important role in the state's economy. With interludes of terrestrial conditions, shallow marine conditions persisted throughout the Mesozoic and well into the Cenozoic. Unlike neighboring states, Kentucky was not significantly impacted by the Pleistocene glaciations. The state has extensive natural resources, including coal, oil and gas, sand, clay, fluorspar, limestone, dolomite and gravel. Kentucky is unique as the first state to be fully geologically mapped.
