Trinity Episcopal Church

Lancaster, KY

Born in Garrard County in 1840, Eugenia Dunlap Potts built a literary career in Lancaster as a poet, author, and editor at a time when few women published under their own names. Her first work, "Song of Lancaster," was a metrical local history modeled on Longfellow's "Hiawatha," and in 1892 she became editor of the "Illustrated Kentuckian." She produced nine works before her death in 1912.

Wilmore, KY

Erected in 1976, this marker celebrates a rare double anniversary: the United States' 200th birthday and the town of Wilmore's own 100th, dating its founding to the 1876 arrival of the railroad through the Kentucky Bluegrass. Small as it is, Wilmore built an outsized identity around education, becoming home to Asbury College in 1890 and, decades later, Asbury Theological Seminary in 1923. Together those two institutions rooted in the Wesleyan-holiness tradition turned a modest Jessamine County crossroads into a nationally known center of Christian higher learning.

Lebanon, KY

This Rosenwald School, operating from 1931 to 1961, was one of 158 built in Kentucky during a remarkable partnership between African American communities and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald. Initiated by Black families themselves and matched with outside funding, these schools brought quality education to children long denied it under segregation. Across the South, the Rosenwald program educated more than half a million students.

Lebanon, KY

John Lancaster Spalding was born in this Marion County community in 1840 and rose to become one of the most influential Catholic thinkers of 19th-century America. A precocious scholar who finished college at sixteen and was ordained in Belgium, he served in Louisville before being named the first Bishop of Peoria in 1877. He is remembered above all as a champion of Catholic higher education and a founder of the movement that led to The Catholic University of America.