Exhibits – Athens of the West   

"But Lexington will ever be,
The Loveliest and the Best;
A Paradise thou'rt still to me,
Sweet Athens of the West."

Visitors who crossed the Allegheny Mountains into the western frontier around 1800 sent back word of the unique community they found on this Bluegrass plateau in “Kaintuck”.   Josiah Espy on his visit to Lexington in 1806 described the city in his journal attesting to its splendor as a frontier settlement:

"Lexington is the largest and most wealthy town in Kentucky, or indeed west of the Allegheny Mountains; the main street of Lexington has all the appearance of Market Street in Philadelphia on a busy day ... I would suppose it contains about five hundred dwelling houses, many of them elegant and three stories high. About thirty brick buildings were then raising, and I have little doubt but that in a few years it will rival, not only in wealth, but in population, the most populous inland town of the United States . . . The country around Lexington for many miles in every direction, is equal in beauty and fertility to anything the imagination can paint and is already in a high state of cultivation."