My name is Stephen Middleton, for the past six years I've had the great opportunity to
make a series of documentaries about the place I love and call home, the state of Kentucky.
You had all of my travels within the Commonwealth I have always noticed Kentucky is one unique
state.
With new highway and modern travel arteries, you see less and less of the real Kentucky,
the one that I remember as a kid of roadside stops, curious attractions.
One of the lasting memories from my childhood was driving cross-country with my family, stopping
to view the array of roadside attractions of what I would call the real America.
I am traveling from north to south, east and west to see if this real Kentucky still exists.
To find out how many of these roadside attractions are charming a new generation.
The following documentary is an essay to these curiosities I found that still showcase the
great old time feel.
Along the way I've documented the bold, mysterious, comedic and curious places that show the
world how irreplaceable the Commonwealth of Kentucky truly is.
Thank you all.
My first stops were close to home in eastern Kentucky.
A lot of the local people have never been here.
I have more people from Ohio that know about this place than people in Grayson.
People just don't think about local attractions, you know, and they're in a hurry.
Usually they're going by and they're on their way somewhere else.
They're not in a tourist frame of mind in a local area like this.
My name is James Plummer, and we started here in 1972 with my father.
He was a collector and a military man, and he always wanted to have a small museum after he retired.
Dad was able to buy this old house. There was an old house on this property,
and we sort of just cut the walls open and built a section onto it, and they crammed all of our stuff in here.
Dad liked Indian artifacts and rocks and minerals, fossils.
So we grew up with that type of collecting going on, and of course a lot of that is really important to me.
A lot of the military items that Dad brought back and they were brought back by local men, you know, all of that.
We tried to display some of that each year.
We also had some Carter County historical items.
We had the propellers that were built at the workshop by Matthew B Sellers,
who was an early aeronautical engineer who lived about four or five miles from here.
Dad had been a career Navy man and brought back things from mostly the Pacific.
Of course, after the war, we had a lot of friends who came back out of Europe with souvenirs,
and we always picked up things as they came along and put together a pretty good collection.
As the years have gone by and after my Dad's death, I've sort of used this building mostly as a place to display different items for different people.
But in the summer, I usually like to put a general display out to kind of go over a little bit of everything.
Security problems causes me to not really put the displays out too heavily anymore.
I used to do it pretty heavy and that was always a security problem to me.
But today, I leave a lot of my materials stored in a different location and just bring it here on demand or to do certain things.
I like to use small cases and I can stack them and store them and unload them and move them.
I think the Indian artifact collection is pretty important.
It's a different time, a different place, and if it's displayed properly, it's really a pretty powerful collection.
Of course, I don't really do it as intensely as I used to, but I can put together a pretty tight, small display that really is almost world-class.
I like beautiful natural history items.
I like rocks and minerals.
I like fossils.
I like pre-Columbian type items that were from the Native peoples.
But I like pioneer and Civil War and World War I and World War II.
I like all of that.
People are moving pretty quickly.
It's hard for them to slow down and read a little bit.
But everybody's different.
Some people really take their time in here and look around and talk a little bit.
Most people are moving pretty quickly and they're on a schedule.
There's quite a bit of history in here.
There's some quality items, a lot of Kentucky history, a lot of U.S. history.
There's something for everybody here, I think, from children to the old timers.
I think anybody could spend a half hour in here.
I'm in and out of here some in the summers, closed completely in the winter.
I'm a roadside attraction, I guess.
I personally have had two bites from venomous snakes.
Both of mine were Western Diamondback rattlesnakes.
Both of them were me doing something stupid.
I tell kids in educational programs the number one way to avoid being bitten by a snake
is to not mess with it.
Just leave it alone if you see a snake.
I certainly don't recommend it.
It's something you want to do.
But it is a risk of working with them.
My name is Kristen Wiley and I'm the curator here at Kentucky Reptiles Zoo.
I got interested in snakes really in college, which is kind of different than lots of snake people.
Lots of snake people were interested when they were little kids and just kind of never grew up, I guess.
I got interested really in college.
I had a professor who had a bunch of animals in his lab and he let me, of course I thought I was helping.
Probably I was just getting in the way at that point, but he let me hang out and do stuff.
I always liked animals in general.
I always had an interest in being a biologist of some sort, but I really got focused on reptiles in college.
I like it here because I like living in Kentucky.
I enjoy being here just to begin with, but I like this job because I get to do a variety of different things.
So in a larger zoo, people tend to be more compartmentalized.
So they may be just an animal keeper or just an education person.
But here I get to kind of do a little bit of everything, which is good for me because I get bored with things.
So it's different every day.
I do a lot of animal care.
I also do educational programs where we take snakes on the road to schools and parks and things like that.
And then I also do the part I don't like is I also do the paperwork and permitting and that sort of thing as well.
So a lot of the snakes are born here.
We do breed ones that we need for venom production or to have on exhibit.
We also trade with other larger AZAs.
For example, a zoo may breed animals that it wants to have on exhibit and they want to have a few backup animals
or an next generation coming up.
But with a snake, if you breed them, you might get 20 or 30 babies.
They don't necessarily want that many.
So they'll have surplus that they're interested in sharing with other facilities.
So we'll get animals that way sometimes.
We also get animals that are confiscated.
So people have cobras or something as a pet somewhere that's illegal.
A lot of times we'll take animals like that.
We do occasionally get animals from the wild.
We try to avoid that unless it's something that we need for a particular venom project.
Then we may go out and collect them or source them from the wild.
But the vast majority of what's here is born in captivity.
We extract venom from pretty much every snake that we have.
Some of them there's a higher demand for their venom than others so they get extracted from more frequently.
But the venom that we provide is primarily used by people at universities or pharmaceutical companies
that are doing some sort of biomedical research with it.
We do provide a little bit sometimes to make the anti-serum here in the United States as well.
Probably the most interesting thing would be,
we probably are the largest collection of venomous snakes in the world in any one place.
And I don't think most people would expect that in Powell County.
Other than that, the fact that we're so involved with some international projects,
you know, I probably were getting the most international cash flow into the county of anyone here.
And we also are involved with a project trying to make the first anti-venom for the country of Sri Lanka.
It is old school in that we're a little bit hidden back here.
We're not very big.
And we certainly cater to people who are out for the weekend or even a day trip to visit the natural bridge or Red River Gorge area.
So, yeah, though, I hope we do a better job than what the connotation roadside zoo, you know, claims.
A lot of roadside zoos really don't take care of their animals very well.
And they may be in bad condition or have bad caging or that sort of thing.
And we really, we don't want that association because we really take a lot of pride and put a lot of effort into caring for our animals here.
So, yes, we're small and in a tourist area, but we try to be at a higher standard for taking care of things.
Actually, I remember when we used to stop at roadside attractions like you're saying, you know, even if you go down to Tennessee,
they've kind of, you'd see Indians dancing and stuff like that and you'd stop, and I call that like a roadside attraction,
but they've kind of stopped a lot of that too.
I've even seen in Tennessee before Indians rascaling bears, so they've stopped all that stuff now.
It's cruelty to animals, you know.
Gift shop was for sale and my wife was selling it for the lady and the lady almost insisted that we buy it, we really wasn't interested.
And finally, make a long story short, we bought it and didn't know what to do with it,
and we just kind of brainstormed as we normally do and come up with the wild things of Kentucky I do and it's kind of blossom from there.
Well, my name is Lloyd Little, of course, I live here in Slade, Kentucky, and we've got several businesses here.
Wild things of Kentucky, we've had a couple years and we kind of keep adding attractions and things for the tourists and for the kids, you know.
So about a month ago, we got the goats put them up on the roof there and people like to watch them and feed them.
And we've got a little nature center, it's a room all by itself, and we've got observation beehive, you can actually watch the bees making honey.
We've got aquariums with fish in it, turtles, we've got a lot of different wild displays,
then we've got a big huge area that we've got the local snakes that we catch ourselves.
Occasionally people will call us and say, hey, I've got a large rattlesnake under my porch and I'll go get it.
I've been doing carvings for 22 years and used to go to festivals and do a lot of carvings of eagles and Indian heads,
but now it's mainly bear and eagles, but that's the main thing, they love the bears.
You can see them sitting around and try to keep some on the shelf in there.
Well, I first came down to Kentucky about 20 years ago, came through Georgetown, Kentucky and seen a guy by the name of Sandy Shoe,
and he was doing some, he's setting up at different places.
We got him to come down here to try to bring tourists in on weekends and I just, when I first seen it,
I just really thought maybe I could do it and tried it.
Got where I could do it a little bit, you know, started, you get a little bit better, the more you do, the faster you get and so forth.
So kind of copied off Sandy, you might say.
You can basically look at a piece of wood.
I'm not a very good artist as far as drawing or anything like that, but a piece of wood seem like I can see different things.
See 3D better than I can see, like if I drew something on paper.
I use, it don't matter what kind it is, I can use Husqvarna steel, it don't matter.
Well, you know, we've got several things, like we've got the gym mining, you know, out on the open-air deck.
We've got the panning for gold and of course the gift shop I think is probably the most unique gift shop in Kentucky.
We've got a lot of different things and we never think that if we could look back 20 years ago, we never dreamed we had something like this.
This is Natural Bridge, Kentucky.
There's over a thousand natural arches in the area.
You know, you may enjoy some of our things and if not, you can go five minutes away and hiking and archers and waterfalls.
And, you know, we do a little bit of developing, build you a cabin.
My wife can rent a cabin for you.
My next stops were in Central, Kentucky.
Questions that people ask, people say, where did you get all this stuff?
And people say, the detail is amazing.
Just, I mean, I hear that every day from somebody or several people.
Where did this place come from?
I can't believe this place is in Danville, Kentucky.
My name is Lori Kagan Moore and I started working on the museum in 2005. We opened our doors in 2008.
I am the founder of this museum. It started in 2005.
I started collecting things in order to make the museum.
Sometimes people imagine that I've been collecting my entire life and when I got a huge number of things, I said, gotta make a museum.
But that's actually not the way this thing worked at all.
There are about six dollhouse or miniatures museums in the nation.
So people don't see very many dollhouse or miniatures museums. They're just not there.
And this is the only one that specializes in the United States social history.
So in that regard, we're different from others.
And in fact, we were designated by the state of Kentucky.
We're rather proud of that as an only one, which refers to being globally unique.
Well, the Underground Railroad is part of the timeline of U.S. history.
And one of the things that is a little bit different about the way we approach U.S. history is that it's all social history.
And social history is about the day-to-day lives of ordinary people.
You won't find military history here. You won't see the Battle of Gettysburg.
You won't see soldiers. You won't see George Washington.
We don't have political and military history, but the social history shows what people were really doing.
And we try to focus at least some of the attention throughout the museum on what would have been happening around here in Kentucky, in Ohio.
Ohio had huge Underground Railroad. So did Kentucky.
You know, Ohio is really famous and just had a huge Underground Railroad, but it was also very active in places in Kentucky.
One of the things that we tried to do, that we made a really specific effort to do in this museum, is to make this museum experience-oriented.
That it's not drumroll fancy thing. It's more like, this is the story of lives like yours at a different time.
And we like stories. People love stories. People love to see, oh, oh really?
When I was here in 1910, somebody with feelings like mine could have been living in a house like this with different challenges and things to do, but still kind of like me.
And so that is the, the action is to try to make it accessible so that people can enjoy it.
So people don't become kind of numb and sort of slip into comas while they're looking around.
That's a common criticism of museums, is that people come in and after five minutes they're brain dead.
People tell me that I've created something unique. I don't think too much about it. I just come in and work.
That's what I do.
People come in here and will come in and say, hey, I heard about you and we'll ask and we'll find out they heard about us in ways we didn't even know existed.
We had a camera crew came in one time from Finland and wanted to film and we're like, how did you hear about us?
And they told us we were in a book called Eccentric America. So somebody thinks we're eccentric.
Somebody else comes in and says, we saw you in Ripley's Believe It or Not book. We didn't have a clue.
We don't know how we get in these things, but we do. So that brings in occasionally that far flung visitor from who knows where.
And we're like, well, how did you find out about us? And they'll tell us that they saw us on some website or some book that we had no idea.
My name is Dennis Hyde. I'm the general manager here at the Lexington Ice Center in Miniature Golf.
The Miniature Golf has been here the first two courses have been here since about 1986, I suppose.
I was not here at the time. I did not come to about three years later, but they had developed the principal owners, had developed the idea of the Miniature Golf course, the biblical thing.
And so they had built the course one, which is our Old Testament course, and the course two, which is the New Testament course.
So they had developed those at that time. Now, since then, we've done a lot of innovations.
Several years after that, after I arrived, we built the third course, which is now we call Miracles.
And so all the courses, all the holes have a Bible verse that goes with them.
And as best we can, we try to gear the hole to display that verse.
As far as we know, at the time, it had never been done. There's all kinds of miniature golf courses out there.
There's dinosaurs, there's haunted houses, there's around the world, but no one had done a Bible-themed miniature golf course.
So it's just a wonderful way to do it. Like I said, it can be used to teach a lesson or it can be used just for fun.
I tell people, I just play for a living. You know, I come and I'll run a miniature golf course.
Now, I don't know if you can tell, I've been sweating already this morning.
So when I say play, that's, I guess, figuratively, but you know, it's a fun place to work because people come here to have a good time.
So the atmosphere is always a beat. You know, you see people enjoying themselves, enjoying their families.
So yeah, I love, you know, being able to provide that service.
We do not, you know, we don't have the luxury of having a real tourist population come through here.
Like the real elaborate miniature golf courses do say, you know, on the beach somewhere or in Gatlinburg, we don't have that.
So we rely on the locals. A few peak travelers coming through, but mostly it's probably people that live within 30 miles of here for the most part.
And so that's great. And then to be able to have it with the waterfalls and stuff.
And you know, as elaborate as we've tried to make it, I think that's pretty unique for a local miniature golf course.
Not, you know, again, not in a tourist area.
While in Lexington, I caught up with my friend JD Wilkes.
JD and musician, author and filmmaker has always shown a culture of Kentucky and America and his work that modern society has forgotten.
His documentary Seven Signs really opened my eyes to understanding the importance of real cultures before they are gone.
JD has extensively traveled the state, often telling stories about the interesting people he's met along the way.
I asked JD his thoughts on roadside attractions and a few feels they are a disappearing part of the real America.
Well, we're a young country compared to the rest of the world and they preserve the best parts of their history.
And I know we don't quite have the history they do, but what we do have, we should retain and maintain.
Because, you know, well, I just recently went up to Westport, Kentucky to argue on behalf of saving a dance barn,
where they used to have square dances and country music stars and local musicians play.
And there was sort of a debate broke out about, well, tear it down and build a new one and you can do it that way.
But there's something to be said for the old aesthetics for preserving the way things looked and as best you can, the feel of things.
They don't know how to quantify charm unless it breaks down into variables that you can count, like beans.
Charm is not one of those things that you can qualify or quantify until it turns into dollars.
And that's what I tried to explain to him, is like, why would anyone come to your town if it's going to look like every other little town
with a brand new state-of-the-art air condition auditorium that has no history?
It's the charm that people, tourists, will appreciate and spend money on to go back in time.
It's time travel and it's up to just a handful of artists that do care about that stuff to get motivated to save at least one building
or one automobile or something like that.
Can everyone that is going to see your show just do one thing to preserve that cool air that doesn't just stand for good aesthetics,
but it stands for a generation, a greater generation that preserved the American dream and added to it.
You're doing them a service. I think that would be the thing I'd hope for.
Just save one thing.
And when I made seven signs, I incorrectly made it about north and south, but it's really urban and rural.
Rural people are a little more connected to nature, a lot more connected to nature than city people are.
The pendulum swings, you know, I mean, we'll never see those days ever again, but maybe our generation that is the post-me generation
can, through Instagram, through documentaries, sort of put a frame around all of that and start brainwashing people back into the correct direction.
And that's what I seek to do with music, film, books, anything I can do to kind of like, hey, look at this, you know.
Music
Music
One of the neatest things is that you get to hear some good musicians, like these folks we have over here,
just some really top-notch musicians that are really talented at what they do, and you get to hear a lot of that.
It's just kind of neat. It adds a little bit of cake and ice cream to what you're doing.
Music
We went to Barber School, we went to Lexington, Lexington Barber College, and Roger Bailey was the owner at that time.
Well, that was, you know, about 39 years ago when I come over with my brother.
He had me come over with him and work with him when he brought Mr. Mark him out.
So we come over and I worked in with that.
They'll have jam sessions going, and sometimes they'll let me sing along, sometimes they won't.
All my name is Joe Aikman. We come here about 38 or 4 to 39, 40 years ago.
My brother had worked for a guy by the name of Lewis Markham, went to school under a guy by the name of Lewis Markham,
who was his instructor.
And Lewis bought out, come over and bought this shop out from the spy.
He's a hopper and then a spy, he'd run it, and he brought his star student over with him to help him out, which was my brother,
who is now deceased.
And then when he worked for him for two or three years, and then he bought him out.
And when he bought him out, I was working in Lexington, Winchester, actually, at that time.
And I come over with him from there, and then we've been here ever since.
Well, my dad's brother was String Bean.
He's a member of the Grand Ole Opry and also played on He Hall.
And we're awful proud of him.
We do a lot of different things.
We'll do bluegrass, we'll do country, we'll do a lot of different styles.
Just whatever they want to play, that's fine with us.
We'll also give guitar lessons and bass lessons.
And if anybody wants to be taught on the guitar and bass and banjo, we give some banjo lessons.
We can help them out on that.
We do, we have some that will see the music out front and they'll stop by.
And in place 10, we love for people to come by and listen to them.
We get to listen to a lot of real good musicians.
As they come by, they'll see us and see a guitar and a window or something, and they'll stop in.
And we really enjoy listening to them and listening to different musicians playing and singing for us.
That's a pleasure to us.
Paris is probably the best place in the world to be.
The people are friendly and nice and they're just a great bunch of people in Paris.
It's the center of the world.
The rest of the world rotates around Paris, Kentucky.
And we've got the greatest people in the world.
The only people who come close to them would be the ones in Jackson County where I was raised.
And they come real close to being number one both of the people up there.
Yeah, come get a haircut and hear some music and play us a tune.
My travels then took me to northern Kentucky to finally visit a place I'd heard so much about.
I think that if they've seen the Twilight Zone episodes or Magic with Anthony Hopkins,
they did probably four or five feature films that feature the psychotic ventriloquist and the dummy that comes to life.
It doesn't reflect really any one's act.
But it does draw people here.
Well, people come here and they don't really know what to expect.
Some of them want to be, think it's going to be creepy or darker.
I don't know.
They have more of a darker slant to it.
And I think what really happens on a tour is people gain an appreciation for this wonderful old entertainment form that has had its ebbs and tides
and is still, you know, vibrant and popular with people like Jeff Dunham and Terry Fader and so on.
My name is Lisa Sweezy.
I'm the curator and I'm also a member of the board of directors.
I've been affiliated with museums since 2000.
The museum was originally a private collection.
A man named W.S. Berger, William Shakespeare Berger, collected the majority of what is here.
He got his first dummy in 1910, but I wouldn't say that he was actively collecting until the 1940s.
Mr. Berger spent 62 years collecting and about 40 of those very actively collecting.
He wrote and received letters from all of the ventriloquists around the world and he built quite a reputation for himself as the center of the community.
He acquired about 500 of them in his lifetime and we get about 5 to 10 still a year.
At this point they're all donated, but in Mr. Berger's lifetime he would buy, sell and train just as much as you would baseball cards or some other collectible.
There are several private collectors who have very impressive collections, but this is the only museum of its kind in the world.
Everybody else's collections are private and they just show them to their friends.
I am not a ventriloquist. I'm a certified high school math teacher who just kind of fell into this wonderful job.
No, Mr. Berger did not want the curator to be a ventriloquist out of respect for the ventriloquists who had donated or sold their dummies to him.
Well, we have a very limited budget and we primarily operate off the funding that we get from our annual convention.
So we don't have a budget for any kind of press or direct promotion.
We do a lot by word of mouth and then of course with our website now that helps quite a bit.
We get picked up by websites, tourism websites and things that promote us with other niche museums or unique attractions.
The museum is seasonal and it always has been.
When Mr. Berger was alive he would let tourists come through May through September so we still do that out of the tradition.
We're May through September and it's by appointment only. I'm the only employee so I have to be here to make sure that I can give the tour.
Probably half my tourists are people who are going from one city to another across country and then they just want to do something different.
I had a woman who was taking her children around the country but for the entire month of June she left Asheville, North Carolina on Friday
and was making it to Indianapolis and of all the things to stop and see she picked us.
So I think that's kind of cool.
I enjoy watching people's impressions change as they're here for an hour and they take a tour because they learn an awful lot.
We're in that group with other people that don't have the advertising budgets and it's not a glamorous museum
but I think if the person, if the tourist is interested in finding places like this they certainly can.
Websites like Road Trippers really help a lot and any kind of off the beaten path type books usually will pick us up.
So it's out there for people that want to find the different things to do if they don't want to do a traditional Disney or beach vacation.
They can find us.
From there I headed west to a place some may call prehistoric.
This is actually one of three parks with the name Dinosaur World. The first one was opened in Plant City, Florida.
Kentucky is the second location and they've since opened the third one in Glen Rose, Texas.
My name is Chris Randall and I've been at Dinosaur World for 10 years and I'm the park director here.
I do a little bit of everything. I work in the gift shop, do schedules, even do some of the grounds keeping when we're running behind.
If you own a business and you thought that something might need to be done that's kind of what I do. I do a little bit of everything.
We make all the dinosaurs ourselves and a miniature golf place in Wisconsin I believe had purchased one and they were trucking it up here.
They stopped at the Cave City exit to stretch their legs and he looked around and saw we were near Mammoth Cave and the land setting and the land here was very good for one of his parks.
So that's kind of why we're here in Cave City.
The large ones behind us, we actually brought them in in pieces and kind of assembled them here once we had the location where we wanted to put them up at.
If a new dinosaur comes in, it's a little trickier. We have a little cart and we just have to move and wiggle around as best we can to get him where we want to go.
We're open every day except Christmas and Thanksgiving, which is kind of neat because right now all the vegetation's out and you can't really see another dinosaur until you go around the corner.
But in the wintertime it's a completely different park. You'll see the wooly mammoths and in the wintertime they look really cool, especially after we've had a little snow or something and they have the icicles hanging off of them.
They look pretty cool.
The neat thing about this park is I think it is kind of old school but it also has some new characteristics to it as well.
One of the best things about it I think is it's fun and it's educational and it kind of wraps everything together to make it a great park.
Out of all the visitors that we have every year, very, very, very few ever are not satisfied. Most everybody comes up and says, you know, this park is great.
I've heard the words magical. Just all kinds of great descriptions when they leave the park and I think everybody's usually very satisfied.
If you're in the area, stop in. We'd love to see you and check us out.
Venturing even further west, I came across two of the most curious places in all of my journey.
Obviously, as you can tell, I don't throw anything away, give or take.
Yes, I love roadside attractions like this and my parents stopped at all these weird places and to be honest with you, my stepdad wishes he had not stopped at those places after I started building this one.
Because he was right there with the neighbors and I'm not understanding any of this at all because these are the type of places I like going to and there are not that many out here.
And then what I find is like some people have never heard of us. They have not come across, you know, Roadside America, Road Trippers, all that because we're all listening on a lot of different sites.
And they don't know about us. There's accidentally because a lot of people do like to take the back roads and they're amazed to see a place and they are technically amazed that Kentucky actually has a place like this.
Because you don't expect to see places like this in this area. They're normally out west, like on Route 66 or in the older, like even the Lincoln Highway, they're all out west basically or not.
So some people are like totally amazed to see this place here.
I'm Keith Holt and this is known now as Apple Valley Hibbley Gardens in Toyland.
It basically started back in 1928 when my grandfather came here and bought an apple orchard and a two room house and he started making the apple cider and selling out along the highway along with the apples.
And then in 32, they paved the highway out here out front. Highway 68, they paved it. So he was fairing, he could make a little extra money off the tourist.
So he had the house added onto, so they have a room to rent to the tourist. And then I assume that's when he built the little white building that's been everything from a four seat diner to a golf gas station from 3964.
As we've been here for a while, I would say majority of the local people have grown to get used to us.
I'm not saying they still like us, but they gotten used to us. And a lot of people do know we are bringing folks in from all over the world, so to speak, that come through this area.
Because you know, they're not coming here to see us strictly, but when they come say from Europe or France and Israel, we have a couple guys even from Israel that were doing a bike.
They had bought their, they had come to this country, bought two bikes to travel Route 66. They had read about us, so they came off Route 66, come check us out.
So we do bring tourists in here that are over, coming over this country to do other things and they map us in.
So some of the people realize that, but we still do because like recently one of the local TV stations, we got covered on something. And in my Facebook messaging, I got some people messaging me like,
go back to your planet weirdo. Marshall County does not need this type of publicity, which I found entertaining and stuff like that. Bad reviews and people state that stuff to me.
I literally find it funny. It's, it's, I just, I love reading that type of stuff.
And now we are written about in certain places, we are written about that I am trying to keep that flair of the old roadside attraction alive.
Like I said, a lot of people compare me to Route 66, but this is technically 68 out here. But, but yes, I am trying to keep that alive.
And like, of course, I have my lawnmower ranch, which is a tribute to Caliq Ranch and I have another thing called Salvation Mound, which is my tribute to Salvation Mountain.
And everything kept growing from the county trying to get rid of me. And then the artists, few of the artists from Paduca would come here and say, dude, you are a folk artist.
You got to start playing up on it. And then like your friend JD, like JD was here one time, tell me that I remind him of like the beginnings of a Paradise Gardens.
I'm like, what's that? And, and then he said, I was done by Howard Fenster. I'm like, who's that? So I had to do all this research, but I gradually learned what folk artists were.
And then I kind of agree that now I kind of play, because I went to LA to become an actor. And it turns out I came back here now and my whole life is an act, so to speak.
Because I don't consider myself an artist, so I'm technically portraying an artist now. And everything around me is basically an act.
Well, I still hope of, I've never given up on that dream. I still hope to have an 80 by 100 foot building here and do the toy land the way I originally visualized it when I came out here in 2006.
I think it was when I visually came out here, because I had my concept drawings, all that stuff I already had about dining in LA. And then for like two or three years in LA, I, I would tell all these people about my dream of what I planned to do in Kentucky and, you know,
told them about it and then people would donate toys to me and I got a pretty massive collection to do it with. So I still want my dream to come true.
Now, however, if my dream ever comes true, they will still get the art, the art part of it, because I actually find the Hilly Park fun now, because that's even more fun, because it gets me fun trying to figure out what to do with this stuff.
And people of course drop me off junk about it, or every other week I get some new art supplies here. So it's kind of fun doing this. And then I had to have six acres, so it's kind of like, I eventually plan to have the whole acreage, like where there'd be a path you could walk with all the bad puns.
Because someday I guess I will have to break down and draw a map with the bad puns on it. It is a tribute to Roadside America, and that's what, that's all I'm trying to get the place.
And then that's the other thing I found hard, I am a mom-pop operation, so I technically don't have the money anymore I did, because to me, I know they're not prefab houses, but in court I even made a comment that the houses across the street from me are like,
prefab houses are more an eyesore to me than a place like this, because you're looking at, I don't know, I'd rather look at artistic stuff, and then like when I traveled even when I lived in LA, I would travel to places like this and check this type of stuff out and found it interesting.
I never knew at that time I would become one of those people, and then like how I like to say now is I, yes I do try to bring the weird out of Kentucky.
Well it's a mystery why they're here, all these monuments were erected by Henry Woodridge, Henry Woodridge was a horse trader, now I guess that's how he made his money, but that's what his occupation, but it's called the strength procession that never moves.
My name's Martha Bab, and I've lived in Mayfield for 88 years. Why would a man do this? I think it's interesting to think about why he was so egotistical to do this, and they're all carved of sandstone, except one which is carved of Italian marble.
So Henry decided that he would erect monuments to each member or family, and like I say it's strange because his father's not there, and so that's his sister, his mother, and several of his.
So he was also an avid hunter, and he had monuments of his two dogs and a deer and a fox, so this is the sum total of just what the monuments are for.
The one with Colonel Woodridge on the horse was carved in Paducah, and it was transported to Mayfield on a train bed that had new type of brakes, and so as they were bringing this monument to Mayfield, the town drunk climbed up behind Colonel Woodridge
and drove to Mayfield in style.
One of his nieces said to him, Uncle Henry, instead of building all those monuments, you better be concerned about where your soul's going.
And he said, well, I don't know where my soul's going, but my body's going to the city cemetery. When they had his funeral, they found out that the tomb was too short for his body, and they had to get a stone mason to come and enlarge that tomb.
Still, nobody knows how much money the man had, and whether he left it to anybody. And of course, you know, Mayfield is sort of famous for the Woodridge monuments. It's one of the seven wonders of Kentucky.
While traveling through the state, it became clear to me that the old way of life and travel has changed. People are now in a hurry to get to their destinations, no longer taking in the sights and stops along the way.
With more and more of our world becoming homogenized and developed for shopping centers, restaurant chains, cookie cutter homes, it was good to see that the old weird America was still alive if you wanted to find it.
Attractions like the ones I found are easily passed up by interstate travelers, forgotten by the generation that founded the age of roadside attractions.
My journey led me to six unique places that still showcase the old time feel of the real Kentucky. Within these places, I found unique and passionate people striving to maintain these attractions in a fast-paced, ever-changing world.
In the hurry of day-to-day life, it's easy to pass these places without a second thought. But there's something to be said about those people who continue to keep the real Kentucky alive.
So I challenge you to hit the road. Search out these places that are off the beaten path. Take the time to find your own curiosity before they are gone.
I set out to show the curiosities of the Commonwealth, and although it came as no surprise to me, the places I found prove without a shadow of a doubt that Kentucky truly is one unique state.
I'm going to show you what I found.
I'm going to show you what I found.
I'm going to show you what I found.
I'm going to show you what I found.
I'm going to show you what I found.
I'm going to show you what I found.
I'm going to show you what I found.
I'm going to show you what I found.
I'm going to show you what I found.
I'm going to show you what I found.
