Short Trips: Needle on the Plain

With all the short dashes away from Nashville, Nancy and I are running out of easy day trips.

In the 30-year-old travel guide that informs many of those trips, we have nearly completed a loop through central Tennessee and western Kentucky.

But there was one omission, a  353-foot-tall concrete needle standing alone east of Hopkinsville. The obelisk marked the birthplace of U.S Senate and later Confederate President Jefferson Davis, whose family resided briefly in Kentucky before heading south to Mississippi.

 The world's tallest unreinforced concrete structure has a observation deck at 310 feet. Nancy waited below while I headed to the top. An antique elevator moves slowly up the column.

The tiny windows presented great views of the surrounding countryside. Farmland, dense groves and rippling hills to the east all unfolded in this new perspective of Western Kentucky. Massive tobacco plants broke up the miles of corn. A column of horse-drawn wagons paraded through the park grounds. As we would later find out, western Kentucky had an Amish community, so horses were not out of place.

Aside from some parkland and a small museum about Jefferson Davis that made him seem much less a partisan than others in the Confederacy, that was the long and short of the birthplace site.

Nearby Elkton bore the look native to so many small county seats - downtown buildings formed a square and a small county courthouse stood in the middle. At a cafe, we dined on sandwiches and ice cream, the latter a relief on humid July day.The local daily touted an appearance from Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear. Having lived in state capitals for the past 15 years, I forget that for many places, a visit from the state's chief executive is a big deal. After all, we were 200 miles from Frankfort.

Todd County Courthouse

Elkton had its flourishes. Robert Penn Warren, the first U.S. poet laureate and author of All the King's Men, grew up here. We skipped the museum but I'm more inclined to pick up his work now that we've seen the terrain and the people that influence him.

On a country road that led back into Tennessee, we stopped at the Schlabach Bakery, which touted the goods of Amish country. The gentleman behind the counter certainly looked the part. We left with Damson plum jam, wheat bread and molasses cookies.

I'm always fascinated by state line communities. Maybe it stems from my parents country drives that ended with them crossing the Pennsylvania or West Virginia border only to buy a lottery ticket. Here they touted alcohol, tobacco and yes, lottery. But the towns were not the drab, dying villages sometimes expected of rural America. The old homes were well-kept, even if the commercial districts had seen better days. 

We emerged at Clarksville, just miles from an eccentric thatch of Kentucky farmland, where Amish, authors and obelisks were all intertwined.