About My Old Kentucky Home State Park
My Old Kentucky Home State Park preserves Federal Hill, the Bardstown plantation house of the Rowan family, and takes its name from Stephen Foster's 1853 ballad "My Old Kentucky Home, Good-Night!" The story starts around 1795, when John Rowan Sr. and his wife Ann Lytle established a farm of about 325 acres with a log house and then a one-story brick home; Rowan named it Federal Hill after the Federalist party. In 1812 he planned a three-story Federal-style mansion with ceilings 13 feet 6 inches high and rooms 22 feet square. It was finished in 1818 after six years of work in which enslaved people made most of the materials and hired tradesmen and journeymen raised the building. By then the farm had grown past 1,300 acres.
The house saw hard years. Cholera killed eight family members and eight enslaved servants in 1833, and a lightning strike burned the third floor in 1841; carpenter Alexander Moore rebuilt it under a contract requiring every element to match the original. Ownership passed in 1843 to John Rowan Jr., who served as ambassador to Italy under President James K. Polk and belonged to Kentucky's anti-slavery political faction; he died in 1855 after a fall from a window sill, leaving his wife Rebecca to run the farm and raise ten children. Foster's sister Charlotte had visited the Rowans in 1828, and the family connection is the basis of the house's link to the song. After Rebecca Rowan died in 1897 the house and its contents went to Madge Rowan Frost, and on July 4, 1923 Federal Hill was renamed My Old Kentucky Home and transferred to the Commonwealth of Kentucky as a historic site. It became part of the state park system in 1936, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on March 11, 1971, and appeared on Kentucky's 2001 state quarter. Foster's song became the official state song in 1928.
Collections and Research Services
The park is a house museum rather than an archive, but its interpretation is unusually well documented. The website's History section includes a dated timeline, pages on the Rowans, on the enslaved people who built and worked the plantation, on the architecture, and on the family's Louisville townhouse, along with the full lyrics of the song. Tours of the mansion interior and grounds are led by costumed guides who perform "My Old Kentucky Home" on every tour, and the 200th anniversary of the mansion's completion was marked with new tours and displays. For family historians, Nelson County's records and the state's genealogical collections are the next stop; our guide to free family history research explains how to use state archives and county courthouses, and the Kentucky Historical Society in Frankfort holds the statewide collections.
Planning Your Visit
Mansion tours leave every hour on the hour from 9 a.m., with the last tour at 4 p.m.; the house is closed on Tuesdays in January and February and the park closes on Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. Tours fill first-come, first-served, sell out at 25 people, and can be reserved only for groups of 15 or more, so arrive early. Admission for the mansion and grounds is $18 for adults, $15 for seniors 62 and over, $14 for veterans with ID, $12 for ages 6-17, and free for children 5 and under; motorcoach and school groups and specialty tours (mint julep, biscuit and cider tours) are booked through Group Sales at (502) 564-1926. The 235-acre park also has an 18-hole golf course, a 39-site campground, a visitor center and gift shop, and an amphitheater where The Stephen Foster Story has been staged every summer since 1959. The mansion tour desk is at (502) 564-1915. Current prices and the events calendar are at visitmyoldkyhome.com, and park-system information is at parks.ky.gov.
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