recent posts
- Marker No. 1466: Dr. Luke P. Blackburn, the Good Samaritan and the Yellow Fever Trunks
- Marker No. 2568: Joyland Park, Rollercoasters, Dancing, and Picnics on Paris Pike
- Marker No. 2174: Pope Villa, and the House That Hid Its Own Story
- Reformers, Firsts, and the Cemetery’s Silences
- Statesmen, Soldiers, and Lexington Fame
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Category: Historical Markers
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Marker No. 1876: Madeline McDowell Breckinridge, and the Fine Print Behind “Voting Rights for Women”
“MADELINE M. BRECKINRIDGE” This descendant of Henry Clay and Ephraim McDowell was born 1872 in Franklin Co.; grew up at “Ashland,” Clay’s home; and married Desha Breckinridge, editor of Lexington Herald. Ill with tuberculosis, she promoted its treatment and cure; advanced educational opportunities for poor children in Lexington and entire state; and helped gain voting…
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Henry Clay gave the dedication speech for this hospital in 1817 — to a building that stood empty for another seven years. The story of Kentucky’s second-oldest continuously operating psychiatric hospital includes a first patient known only as Charity, a superintendent who resigned rather than compromise care, and a campus now split between a thriving…
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The marker at 642 West Main Street honors a Lexington-born architect whose most famous work stands 750 miles away — but everything that made that career possible started on this street, watching his formerly-enslaved father run a construction crew.
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Old Morrison is one of the only markers in this book where the building itself is still standing — and still holding a tomb, a curse legend, and an alumni list that reads like both sides of the Civil War attended the same small college.
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Aristides wasn’t supposed to win the first Kentucky Derby — he was the rabbit meant to tire out the field for his stablemate. What actually happened depends on a Black trainer born into slavery and a nineteen-year-old Black jockey who never got the credit either deserved.
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The marker at 578 W. Main Street compresses Mary Todd Lincoln’s story into four tidy sentences — but the girl who left this house at twenty lived a far more complicated life than the plaque has room for.
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Kentucky’s marker #1635 stands for a horse, not a person — Man o’ War, foaled a few miles from here in 1917, who lost exactly once in 21 races and became the standard every American Thoroughbred since has been measured against.
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Kentucky’s first historical marker doesn’t sit at the Capitol or a battlefield — it sits at the edge of Henry Clay’s 17-acre estate, Ashland, the home he kept coming back to across five decades of American political life.
