Federal Hill: The House Behind the State Song

The house on the hill above Bardstown was built by United States Senator John Rowan between eighteen twelve and eighteen eighteen, and he named it Federal Hill. It was a Georgian mansion of considerable size , three full stories, twelve rooms, wide porches overlooking the rolling farmland of Nelson County. Rowan was a Kentucky power broker: a congressman, a senator, a state court judge. The house he built reflected his ambitions.

Stephen Foster was a distant cousin of the Rowans, born in Pittsburgh in eighteen twenty-six. He was already becoming one of the most popular songwriters in America , "Oh Susanna" had made him famous in eighteen forty-eight , and he may have visited Federal Hill sometime in the early eighteen fifties, though the historical record on his exact visits is thin. What is clear is that the song he published in eighteen fifty-three, originally titled "Poor Uncle Tom, Good Night," was inspired at least in part by Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, which had appeared the previous year. Foster revised the lyrics and retitled the song "My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night" , a sentimental portrait of enslaved life that he softened considerably from the original draft.

The song became one of the most beloved American parlor songs of the nineteenth century. In nineteen twenty-eight, the Kentucky Legislature adopted it as the official state song. It is sung before every Kentucky Derby.

Kentucky purchased Federal Hill in nineteen twenty-two and made it the centerpiece of a state park. Visitors today tour the restored mansion with costumed guides who interpret the lives of the Rowan family , and increasingly of the enslaved people who worked the plantation, whose labor built the prosperity that the house represents. The grounds still host summer performances of the outdoor musical Stephen Foster. Federal Hill became Kentucky's first official historic shrine on July fourth, nineteen twenty-three.