Spalding Hall: Seminary, Hospital, Whiskey Museum
Near Bardstown, Kentucky
Spalding Hall in Bardstown is the kind of building that has been many things. Built in eighteen thirty nine as the main building of Saint Joseph College, it trained Catholic clergy on the Kentucky frontier. During the Civil War, when Confederate and Union armies both moved through Nelson County, the building briefly served as a hospital for Union soldiers.
Later the building became an orphanage and then a prep school. Today it houses two museums side by side: the Bardstown Historical Museum, which covers two hundred years of regional history, and the Oscar Getz Museum of Whiskey History, which is something else entirely. Oscar Getz was a Chicago liquor executive who bought a Bardstown distillery during the Second World War and spent decades collecting whiskey artifacts with the ardor of an obsessive.
By his death he had gathered one of the most remarkable collections anywhere: antique bottles and distilling equipment, period advertising posters, Prohibition-era medical prescriptions for whiskey, and, improbably, a document said to be tied to Abraham Lincoln's days as an Illinois storekeeper. Getz willed the collection to Bardstown, and the museum opened in nineteen eighty four, a year after he died. It is one of the most distinctive museums in the state.
