Mount Vernon, Kentucky

Mount Vernon, the seat of Rockcastle County, was settled in the late seventeen hundreds and incorporated in eighteen eighteen and named in honor of George Washington's Virginia estate. It perches on the eastern edge of the Bluegrass region where the Cumberland Plateau begins to rise, and that geography long made it a transit point for drovers pushing cattle and hogs westward to market. The town's courthouse square preserves the unhurried scale of a nineteenth-century Kentucky county seat, population around twenty-five hundred.

Rockcastle County itself takes its name from the Rockcastle River, named for the rock cliffs along its banks. Nearby Rockcastle River gorge is now prized by paddlers and hikers for some of the wildest whitewater in the state.