The First Two-Story Brick Church West of the Appalachians
Near Bardstown, Kentucky
On the main square of Bardstown stands a brick building that is easy to walk past without knowing what it holds. Built around eighteen twelve, it is the first brick church erected within the original city limits of Bardstown, and today it serves as the home of the Bardstown and Nelson County African American Heritage Museum. For much of the nineteenth century the building was Union Church, a Protestant house of worship used by successive white congregations.
After the Civil War, African American Baptists began meeting there and took on its upkeep. The museum was established through the vision of Bill Sheckles, a former Bardstown mayor, who saw the building as the right home for a history that had been largely invisible to visitors. The exhibits document two centuries of Black life in Nelson County, from the enslaved men and women who worked on the farms and in the early distilleries to the educators, business owners, veterans, and civic leaders who shaped the community through the twentieth century.
Among the artifacts is a slave auction block plate, a small and devastating reminder of the commerce that once moved through this town. The museum asks visitors to hold two truths at once: that Bardstown is genuinely beautiful, and that much of what built it was not freely given.
