Kentucky's Derby Region

Kentucky’s Derby Region wraps around Louisville and the bourbon country south of it, the broad metro-and-knob country that runs from the Ohio River south through Bardstown and Elizabethtown. The terrain shifts from urban Ohio River bottomland at Louisville through the rolling Outer Bluegrass country to the limestone karst-and-knob landscape that gave bourbon its character — limestone-filtered water, hardwood forest, and rolling pasture. Fifteen counties cover the region. Jefferson holds Louisville and the entire urban core; Nelson holds Bardstown (the official Bourbon Capital of the World, with My Old Kentucky Home, Heaven Hill, and Barton 1792); Bullitt holds Shepherdsville and the Jim Beam American Stillhouse at Clermont; Hardin holds Elizabethtown and Fort Knox; LaRue holds Hodgenville and the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park; Oldham holds La Grange. Churchill Downs hosts the Kentucky Derby on the first Saturday in May. Most trips here center on three threads. Louisville carries the urban itinerary — the Muhammad Ali Center, the Louisville Slugger Museum, the Speed Art Museum, Whiskey Row. The Kentucky Bourbon Trail runs through Bardstown. Lincoln’s birthplace at Hodgenville and his boyhood home at Knob Creek anchor the historical thread.