We’re doing good, let’s keep up the pace! Today we’ll cover Kentucky and Indiana and get some fun info for y’all!
Kentucky
- The Kentucky Derby is the oldest continuously held horse race in the US
- Mammoth Cave is the world’s longest known cave and is the 2nd oldest touristist attraction in the ‘States. Promoted in 1816, only Niagara Falls beats it in age
- Corbin is home to the very first Kentucky Fried Chicken, originally operated by Colonel Sanders himself
- Abraham Lincoln, the President of the Union, and Jefferson Davis, President of the Conederacy were born in Kentucky, less than one-hundred miles and one year apart
- One for the knife fans too: Bluegrass isn’t blue, it’s green. It produces blue-purple buds that when seen in fields gives it a bluish tint. That’s why Kentucky is known as the Bluegrass state. And here I was thinking it was about music
- Middlesboro is the only city in the US built in a meteor crater
- Fort Knox holds over $6 billion dollars worth of gold within its vaults—the largest collection of gold in the entire world
- Fredrick Vinson is the only Chief Justice of the ‘States to have been born in jail.
- In 1888, “Honest Dick” Tate, the state treasurer, embezzled $247,000 and fled the state
- The radio was invented by a Kentuckian named Nathan B. Stubblefield
Indiana
- Santa Claus, Indiana on average receives over one and a half million letters at Christmas time
- In 1862, Richard Gatling of Indianapolis, invented the first machine-fed gun. This hand-cranked belt-fed monster could fire an astonishing twenty bullets a second and could theoretically fire almost 1,200 rounds a minute
- The Indy 500 was first ran in 1911 and the winner receive $14,000
- The first professional baseball game was played in 1871 at Ft. Wayne
- Indiana University’s Mark Spitz won 7 gold medals in the 1972 Olympics. No other athlete has ever won that many medals in a single year
- Elwood Haynes of Kokomo built the first successful gas-powered car in 1894
- In 1934 John Dillinger escaped the Lake Country Jail in Crown Point by using a dummy pistol he had carved from a block of wood
- In 1880 Wabash was the first city in the US to house electric streetlights
- It’s illegal in Indiana to catch fish with your bare hands
- Marcella Gruelle of Indianapolis created the Raggedy Ann doll in 1914