Royal Spring Park

In Georgetown, Kentucky, a spring discovered by surveyors in seventeen seventy-four became the foundation for an entire town, and arguably for bourbon whiskey itself. Colonel John Floyd followed a buffalo trail along Elkhorn Creek and found the largest spring in the Bluegrass region, a flow so steady it has supplied the community's water for nearly two hundred and fifty years without interruption.

In seventeen eighty-nine, a Baptist minister named Elijah Craig built a grain mill beside this spring and used its limestone-filtered water to distill a corn whiskey aged in charred oak barrels. Craig has long been credited as the father of bourbon, though historians debate the precise origin of the style. Whatever the full truth, the spring at Georgetown remains in service today, still supplying water to more than thirteen thousand customers.