Tagged: Restoration

Music From the Front Porch co-host Mike Gowen organizes the "Turn of the Century Social" at Murray’s Central Park this Saturday from 10 to 2 with reenactors in period costumes reenacting scenarios at the old schoolhouse, courthouse, and train depot. Mike stopped by Sounds Good to talk with Todd Hatton about the weekend festivities. PS: Todd will be there handing out some WKMS News CDs (technology from the future).

Deana Wright visits Sounds Good Friday to give an update on work on revitalizing the Higgins House just west of the Murray Calloway County Public Library on Main Street. Wright says that Main Street is looking at about $200,000 in repairs before "the pretty" work begins to convert the hundred year old home into public spaces, particularly for social gatherings involving fewer than 50 attendees. Also, learn more about the 100 Year Anniversary of the County Court House on the Murray square to be celebrated on May 7.

June marked the bicentennial of the start of the War of 1812.  Not many Kentuckians know much about the conflict, aside from the burning of the White House, and “The Star-Spangled Banner.”  Even fewer know about the role the Commonwealth played in it, despite the fact that if you live in the Jackson Purchase, you likely live in a county named for a soldier who fought and died in one battle of the War of 1812: Major Bland Ballard, Major Benjamin Graves, Captain Paschal Hickman, and Captain Virgil McCracken.  

Long before the Jackson Purchase, in about 1000 C.E, back when the Vikings were the only Europeans to come to this continent, Native American civilizations were building mound cities in and around our region.  Today, researchers and volunteers work to preserve these sites.  They call the people who built these now brooding places the Mississippians.  While much is known about them, there’s much more that’s mysterious.