Bowling Green: Cave Town, Confederate Capital, Corvette City
Near Bowling Green, Kentucky
Bowling Green sits on a bend of the Barren River in south-central Kentucky, about halfway between Nashville to the south and Louisville to the north, and it carries a history far larger than its size suggests. The town was founded in seventeen ninety-eight when settlers including two brothers, Robert and George Moore, laid out a courthouse town above the river in the newly-formed Warren County. The Moores chose the name Bowling Green, most likely in memory of a park in New York City where, during the American Revolution, patriots had pulled down a bronze statue of King George the Third and melted it into musket balls.
A revolutionary act embedded in a county seat's name. Bowling Green grew as a river port and a regional market town, and when the railroads came through in the eighteen fifties it became a significant junction on the Louisville and Nashville line, which made it strategically valuable when the Civil War began. Confederate forces occupied the city in September of eighteen sixty-one, and for roughly three months it served simultaneously as a Confederate military headquarters and the capital of the provisional Confederate government of Kentucky.
The Confederate retreat in February of eighteen sixty-two left bridges burned and the city battered. It recovered, grew, added a state university in the early twentieth century, and in nineteen eighty-one gained a distinction held by no other city on earth: the only factory that makes the Chevrolet Corvette. Beneath all of this runs the Lost River, which disappears underground at the city's western edge and flows through limestone caverns that people have used for thousands of years.
Bowling Green sits above a geological wonder, beside a river, at the intersection of two American eras.
