KYKentucky Fun Facts

Surveyors have mapped more than 400 miles of passage under Mammoth Cave National Park and still have not found the end of it. No other cave system on earth is in the same range. Kentucky runs on that kind of excess in general: it owns an entire river it does not sit in, it holds a piece of land reachable only through Tennessee, and it makes roughly 95 percent of the world's bourbon in a state ranked 37th in size.

Facts most people get wrong

• Kentucky bluegrass is neither blue nor from Kentucky. Poa pratensis arrived from Europe and northern Asia with colonists. The blue cast only appears when seed heads are left to mature across a whole field, which is why the hills look blue from a distance in late spring and green up close.
• Bourbon does not have to come from Kentucky. Federal rules require only that it be made in the United States, from a mash of at least 51 percent corn, aged in new charred oak containers. Bourbon County is not a requirement either. Kentucky simply makes almost all of it.
• Fort Knox does not hold America's largest gold stash. The depository stores roughly 4,580 tons. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York's vault holds more, though most of that metal belongs to foreign governments rather than the United States.
• Kentucky never joined the Confederacy. The legislature declared neutrality in 1861 and the state stayed in the Union, even while a rival Confederate government claimed it. Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis were both born in Kentucky, about 100 miles and eight months apart.
• The first KFC franchise was not in Kentucky. Harland Sanders worked out his pressure fried chicken at a roadside stop in Corbin during the 1930s, but the first franchised restaurant opened in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1952.
• "My Old Kentucky Home" is an antislavery song. Stephen Foster wrote it in 1853 from the perspective of an enslaved man sold away from his family, and Frederick Douglass wrote approvingly of it. The legislature replaced a racial slur in the original lyric in 1986.

Records and firsts

• Mammoth Cave is the longest known cave system on earth, with more than 400 miles surveyed and new passage still being added. It became a national park in 1941 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1981.
• The Kentucky Derby has been run every year since 1875, the longest continuously held annual sporting event in the United States.
• Every Chevrolet Corvette built since 1981 has come off the line in Bowling Green.
• The melody of "Happy Birthday to You" was written in Louisville in 1893 by sisters Mildred and Patty Hill, as a classroom greeting called "Good Morning to All."
• Louisville Slugger bats have been turned in Louisville since 1884, when teenage apprentice Bud Hillerich made one for Pete Browning of the Louisville Eclipse.
• Cumberland Falls is one of the few places in the Western Hemisphere where a moonbow appears reliably, on clear nights around the full moon.

Geography that surprises

• Kentucky owns the Ohio River. The boundary follows the far bank at its 1792 low water mark, so a boat tied up on the Indiana or Ohio shore is floating in Kentucky.
• Kentucky Bend is a loop of state land wrapped by the Mississippi near New Madrid and completely severed from the rest of Kentucky. Fewer than 20 people live there and the only road in runs through Tennessee.
• The state spans two time zones. Louisville, Lexington and the east keep Eastern time. Bowling Green, Owensboro and Paducah keep Central.
• Kentucky touches seven states: Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia and Tennessee. Only Missouri and Tennessee, with eight each, touch more.
• Black Mountain in Harlan County reaches 4,145 feet on the Virginia line, while the low point, where the Mississippi leaves the state, sits at 257 feet. That is nearly 3,900 feet of relief packed into the 37th largest state.

Where the name comes from

The name comes from an Iroquoian word recorded by early traders, usually written Kentake and translated as on the meadow, a description of the open bluegrass country in the center of the state. The popular translation, dark and bloody ground, is folklore. It traces to a warning attributed to the Cherokee leader Dragging Canoe at the Sycamore Shoals negotiations in 1775, not to the language itself. The river carried the name before the county did, the county before the Virginia district, and the district before the state, which separated from Virginia and was admitted on June 1, 1792. Kentucky is formally a commonwealth rather than a state, a wording choice it shares with Virginia, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, and one that carries no legal difference at all.

Quick stats

• Population: 1 to 5 million
• Area rank: #37 of 50
• Admitted: 1792
• Capital: Frankfort
• Largest city: Louisville
• Time zone: Eastern and Central

Bordering states

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