There are three hard things in Kentucky, only one of which is to my taste; namely, hard bread, hard beds, and hard roads. The roads are excellent, macadamized as in England, and nearly as well kept; but that "beat-biscuit," a sort of domestic hardtack, in the making of which the flour or dough is beaten long and hard with the rolling-pin, is, in my opinion, a poor substitute for Yankee bread; and those mercilessly hard beds--the macadamizing principle is out of place there, too. It would not be exact to call Kentucky butter bad; but with all their fine grass and fancy stock, they do not succeed well in this article of domestic manufacture. But Kentucky whiskey is soft, seductively so, and I caution all travelers to beware how they suck any iced preparation of it through a straw of a hot day; it is not half so innocent as it tastes.
The blue-grass region has sent out, and continues to send out, the most famous trotting horses in the world. Within a small circle not half a dozen miles across were produced all the more celebrated horses of the past ten years; but it has as yet done nothing of equal excellence in the way of men. I could but ask myself why this ripe and mellow geology, this stately and bountiful landscape, these large and substantial homesteads, have not yet produced a crop of men to match. Cold and sterile Massachusetts is far in the lead in this respect. Granite seems a better nurse of genius than the lime-rock. The one great man born in Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln, was not a product of this fertile region. Henry Clay was a Virginian. The two most eminent native blue-grass men were John C. Breckinridge and John J. Crittenden. It seems that it takes something more than a fertile soil to produce great men; a deep and rich human soil is much more important. Kentucky has been too far to one side of the main current of our national life; she has felt the influence of New England but very little; neither has she been aroused by the stir and enterprise of the great West. Her schoolhouses are too far apart, even in this rich section, and she values a fast trotter or racer more than she does a fine scholar.
What gives the great fertility to the blue-grass region is the old limestone rock, laid down in the ancient Silurian seas, which comes to the surface over all this part of the State and makes the soil by its disintegration. The earth's surface seems once to have bulged up here like a great bubble, and then have been planed or ground off by the elements. This wearing away process removed all the more recent formations, the coal beds and the conglomerate or other rocks beneath them, and left this ancient limestone exposed. Its continued decay keeps up the fertility of the soil. Wheat and corn and clover are rotated for fifty years upon the same fields without manure, and without any falling off in their productiveness. Where the soil is removed, the rock presents that rough, honeycombed appearance which surfaces do that have been worm-eaten instead of worn. The tooth which has gnawed, and is still gnawing it, is the carbonic acid carried into the earth by rain-water. Hence, unlike the prairies of the West, the fertility of this soil perpetually renews itself. The blue-grass seems native to this region; any field left to itself will presently be covered with blue-grass. It is not cut for hay, but is for grazing alone. Fields which have been protected during the fall yield good pasturage even in winter. And a Kentucky winter is no light affair, the mercury often falling fifteen or twenty degrees below zero.