Historic Heartland Trails, Lebanon, KY (2026)

04/17/2026

The Walnut Baptismal Font He Left Behind

If you walk the ground at the old St. Thomas Seminary and listen carefully, the story does not begin with bishops or names carved into stone.

It begins with footsteps—men crossing worn paths, uncertain why they had come or how long they would remain.

In the years just after 1812, the first seminarians gathered there were not yet figures in history. Not portraits. Not titles. Simply men—young and not so young—trying to become something the frontier desperately needed, but scarcely knew how to form.

A Seminary Without a System

St. Thomas was not a seminary in any modern sense. There was no structured pipeline, no formal admissions process, no clear course of study with a defined beginning and end.

Men arrived as they could—some recommended, some encouraged, some simply because there was nowhere else to test a calling. And once they arrived, there was no guarantee they would stay. Some remained for years. Others only months. Some left quietly, without record, remembered only by those who had shared the work.

The Church in Kentucky was still in its infancy, and the seminary reflected that. It was not yet an institution. It was an effort.

Where They Came From

The men who gathered at St. Thomas did not come from a single place or background. Many were sons of Kentucky Catholics who had moved west in the late 1700s, carrying their faith into a rough and uncertain land. Others came from European Catholic families, bringing different language and customs into the life of the seminary.

A few had formal education. Many did not. Some knew Latin; others had never seen it. The English language was also a challenge for some. A few had studied under Stephen Badin, who rode on horseback across Kentucky, teaching where and when he could. Others learned what they knew at home, in log houses and small settlement schools.

They arrived uneven—and were formed that way.

The Work of Becoming

Study was only part of life at St. Thomas. Becoming a priest was not only learned—it was worked out in the fields, in the raising of buildings, and in the quiet labor that would one day give them a church.

The seminarians farmed. They planted and harvested their food. They cut timber and hauled stone. They helped raise the buildings around them.

There was no separation between intellectual formation and physical labor. A man might spend the morning struggling through Latin grammar and the afternoon behind a plow; another might study theology one day and raise a wall the next.

The seminary survived because they worked. And in that work, endurance took shape—not as an idea, but as habit, muscle, and necessity.

The Men Who Passed Through

Some names have come down to us.

Guy Ignatius Chabrat, among the earliest ordained from this frontier effort, would become a bishop and help guide the Church as it took root in Kentucky.

Elisha John Durbin entered as a young man and spent more than sixty years serving scattered Catholic families, eventually known as the “Patriarch-Priest of Kentucky.”

Simon Bruté, a man of learning and discipline, would go on to become the first Bishop of Vincennes, shaping the Church in what was then the western frontier of Indiana.

Others were there as well—Peter Schaeffer, Charles Coomes, and Robert Abell. None of them had yet become what they would be.

Uncertainty as the Norm

Not every man who came to St. Thomas became a priest.

Today, seminaries are often seen as places men enter after deciding. Here, the seminary itself was part of the decision. Men came to find out. Some discovered a calling; others did not. Some left because of the difficulty, others because of the demands, and some because life pulled them elsewhere.

When they left, they often did so quietly. No record. No notation. Just gone.

The One Who Stayed

Among those early seminarians was a man whose name, by ordinary patterns of history, should have disappeared.

Others left their mark in written accounts—moments recorded and retold. But to leave something tangible—something you can still see, still touch, and say this man made that—is far rarer.

His name was Millet—sometimes written Millett—and he left such a mark: a baptismal font still in use today.

He lived that life. Worked that ground. Studied alongside the others. Stood in the same uncertainty, asked the same questions, and began along the same path.

And like many others, he did not become a priest.

In most accounts, that would be the end of him—a name in a ledger, if that. No title. No parish. No record of ministry.
But not here.

A Tree, a Tool, and Time

From what has been preserved—recorded in Heritage of Faith: History of Saint Thomas Parish 1812–2012 by Gilly Simpson—Millet did something that placed him permanently within the life of the Church.

He carved the baptismal font—not from imported marble, but from a walnut tree felled on the farm itself.

Imagine the setting: a young man maybe no longer on the path to priesthood, still present in that place. Walnut tight-grained beneath the chisel, a log being shaped by hammer and tool, each stroke slow and deliberate, the form emerging over hours and days.

The Font

A baptismal font is not simply an object. It is where life in the Church begins—where water is poured, names are given, and families gather in hope.

In those early years at St. Thomas, that font—carved by a man who would never become a priest —became central to everything that followed. Priests came and went. Parishes grew. The Church expanded far beyond what those first seminarians could have imagined. The font remained.

A Different Kind of Legacy

The others went out into the world. They preached, rode circuits, established parishes. They built the visible structure of the Church across Kentucky and beyond.

Millet remained—not in title, but in presence.

Every baptism at that font carried something of his work forward. Every child brought there, every family gathered, became part of a legacy he could not have fully understood when he carved it.

If You Had Been There

If you had stood at St. Thomas in 1815, you would not have known any of this.

You would not have known who would become a bishop or who would spend sixty years in ministry. You would not have known who would leave the seminary behind.

You would have seen only men studying when they could, working because they had to, and trying to answer a call not yet clear.

There would have been no way to separate the important from the unimportant.

In that moment, they were the same.

What Remains

Time sorts names. Some rise; others fade. Places remember differently.

At St. Thomas, the story lives not only in records, but in what remains—in wood shaped by hand, in objects still in use, in quiet things never meant to be famous.

Final Reflection

History narrows itself to titles—bishop, priest, founder. But the life of the Church, especially in early Kentucky, was built by more than titles. It was built by men who worked the land, struggled through study, questioned their calling, and sometimes walked away—and still left something behind.

Millet never became a priest. Yet every time water was poured into that font, every time a life began there, his work became part of something larger than the path he did not take.

That kind of story is easy to miss—unless someone takes the time to show it.

And it is still here: in wood shaped by hand.

Visiting St. Thomas

For those who would like to encounter stories like this not only in words, but in the places where they happened, private guided visits are available.

Message here, or call 270-699-6152 to arrange a time.

03/25/2026

Castle Knoll Farm

When I stopped along U.S. Route 150 in Orange County, Indiana, to photograph a cluster of barns, I had no reason to believe the moment would matter.

Fourteen years later one of those photographs would appear on the cover of a book about Castle Knoll Farm — transforming what had been an ordinary roadside pause into an unexpected act of preservation.

One of the most complete and memorable barn complexes I have ever encountered stands along U.S. Route 150 in Orange County, Indiana, near Paoli.

When I took a few photographs there on May 28, 2011, I was simply traveling west on a day that had no fixed destination, moving through countryside that rewards attention if you are willing to slow down.

Years later (2025) I would hear from Kevin Tower, who was writing a book about Castle Knoll Farm and wondered whether he might use some of those images. The greater surprise came afterward, when one of the photographs was chosen for the book’s cover. What had begun as an ordinary roadside stop had quietly become part of someone else’s effort to preserve the story of a farm.

At the time, however, it was only another moment in a habit I had developed over the years — the instinct to ease off the accelerator when something about a farm place suggested it deserved a second look, or even a turn around and go back. (It drives my wife Jeannie crazy and is one of the reasons she seldom travels with me.)

There are farms you pass. There are farms you notice. And then there are farms that seem to insist, that you pull over and pay attention.

Castle Knoll was one of those.

US 150 across Orange County is not a road that encourages haste. It bends and rises with the contours of the land, going through wooded ridges, open pasture, and valleys. Farmsteads appear suddenly and disappear just as quickly beyond the next curve. It is a landscape where agriculture still feels close to the surface — present not only in fields and livestock but in the rhythm of buildings themselves.

On that early May afternoon, I had no expectation that anything memorable would occur. I was simply driving, watching the crops that were planted, farm houses, silos, and the many ways a wondering mind might question what it sees.

Then the barns came into view.

At first, it was only a roofline where I had expected trees. Then another structure emerged, and another. Within seconds it became clear that this was not a single outbuilding or even a typical Midwestern cluster. It was a coordinated complex — arranged with intention, expanded over time, and maintained in a way that suggested both pride and practical understanding.

I pulled over almost without thinking.

Anyone who has spent years around farms recognizes that feeling. Buildings can tell you, even from a distance, whether a place has been worked carefully and worked well. Castle Knoll conveyed that impression immediately. The barns seemed to step across the property as part of a deliberate system: space for livestock, machinery, storage, and activities whose purposes were not immediately obvious. Open ground hinted at loading patterns, sorting routines, feeding paths — the countless daily motions that defined the farm.

This was not random construction. It was architecture shaped by necessity.

In its earlier years, that necessity was tied not only to the farm family itself but to a broader regional economy. Castle Knoll was developed in part to help supply the nearby French Lick resort and its famed mineral springs spas — places that drew visitors from far beyond southern Indiana. Livestock, dairy products, hay, and other outputs moved from these barns into a hospitality enterprise that depended on steady provision. The farm was therefore both local and connected, rooted in the soil yet linked to a destination known for leisure and renewal.

Farm complexes rarely appear fully formed. They grow in response to opportunity, markets, and experience. Over decades the landscape becomes a visible record of decisions — risks taken, ambitions realized, or ambitions that did not work out. Castle Knoll looked like the product of such accumulated judgment. You could almost read its history in the spacing between structures.

There is a completeness to certain farm places that is difficult to explain to those who have never lived within that world. It reflects functional harmony — the sense that every building stands where it does for reasons grounded in daily practice. A good farm operates like a carefully designed machine. Livestock flow should require the fewest possible steps. Feed handling must also. Equipment needs shelter without becoming an obstacle. Water movement, drainage, sunlight, and prevailing wind all influence placement.

The people who built Castle Knoll clearly understood these realities. Evidence appeared in the alignment of doors, the positioning of lots, and the subtle relationship between structures and open ground. It was a demonstration of practical intelligence — knowledge acquired not from theory but from seasons of repetition.

By 2011, complexes of this kind were already becoming less common. Modern agriculture increasingly favors speed and scale. Steel buildings rise quickly where timber once required months of labor. Automation reduces the daily movement that historically shaped barn design. Farms grow larger, and the number of farmers declines.

Within that changing landscape, traditional barn groupings take on additional meaning. They become more than infrastructure. They become memory.

Castle Knoll stood — and still stands — as a reminder of how deeply farming once depended upon constant presence. The operator knew every hinge that squeaked, every gate that froze fast when ice formed overnight. There was no such thing as remote management.

The barns were not merely tools. They were companions in a demanding vocation.

That afternoon I took photographs without elaborate preparation. No tripod, no careful scouting of angles. Only the simple act of recording what felt like an important place. Then I returned to the road and continued west.

Over the years I have repeated that pattern hundreds of times across Kentucky, Indiana, Missouri, Illinois, Iowa and beyond. A curve reveals a structure worth remembering. I stop, walk a short distance along a fence line, make a few photos, and move on. Most of those images remain private confirmations that I had once stood in a particular spot at a particular moment.

Castle Knoll seemed destined for the same quiet place until Kevin Tower’s message altered that assumption. Seeing one of those photographs transformed into the public face of a book produced a complicated response — pride certainly, but also reflection.

It prompts a person to consider how many similar places were passed without stopping. How many farms once possessed equal dignity but disappeared before anyone thought to document them. How many stories remain concealed behind fencelines and rusted gates.

Barns have long served as the visual signature of Midwestern and Upper Southern agriculture. They signal occupation and commitment — evidence that someone has invested labor not just for a single season but for generations. Their construction demanded immense physical effort: timber felled and raised, stone foundations laid by hand, roofing fastened one nail at a time. Castle Knoll bears that imprint. It never feels temporary.

Yet even as agricultural use has diminished, the property continues to evolve rather than disappear. Portions of the farm are being developed as an event center. A performance stage has been constructed, and the hillside that once overlooked working lots and pasture is being adapted to provide seating for audiences. Where livestock movement once defined daily patterns, music and public gathering may soon shape new rhythms.

Many traditional farm buildings face uncertain futures. Economic pressure reshapes land use. Inheritance divides holdings. Maintenance costs rise while commodity prices fluctuate. Storms and fires can erase in minutes what once required decades to assemble.

When a barn falls, the loss extends beyond the structure itself. A chapter disappears from the visible record of agricultural life. Photography cannot prevent that outcome, but it can preserve awareness. It allows future generations to see what once existed — not as abstraction, but as reality.

That is why the simple roadside photograph matters more than we might realize at the time. It becomes witness.

I have often wondered what exactly compels someone to stop for a farm place like Castle Knoll. Perhaps it is recognition — a quiet acknowledgment that the values that built such places remain relevant even as technology transforms the industry.

Work done carefully. Planning with the long term in mind. Respect for land, weather, and livestock.

These are not outdated principles. They are foundations.

Along Route 150, Castle Knoll continues to serve a role that reflects both memory and adaptation. Travelers still notice the barns. Photographers still pull over. Historians still find significance in their arrangement. Now new visitors may arrive not to purchase livestock or deliver feed but to attend performances beneath an open sky shaped long ago by agricultural necessity.

Through the unexpected journey of one image, the farm has reached readers who may never set foot in Orange County. A place once devoted to supplying guests at a celebrated resort, and later to the steady routines of farm life, now contributes to cultural memory in yet another form.

Somewhere in my files remain hundreds of additional barn photographs — some sharper, some taken in better light, some composed with greater care. Yet Castle Knoll serves as a reminder that significance is not always tied to perfection.

Sometimes it belongs to timing. To circumstance. To the quiet decision to slow down when instinct suggests that a place matters.

Across the back roads of America, farmsteads like this still stand, holding their histories in timber, metal, and the lengthening power of time.

All we have to do is notice them.

Have you ever driven U.S. Route 150 through Orange County and seen Castle Knoll Farm?

Or is there a barn or farmstead from your own travels that always made you stop and take a second look? Leave a comment, maybe I am not alone about this.

03/07/2026

Beyond the Gate: A Day Looking for Casa Colorado and Casa Blanca

Most people who drive through Mesa Verde National Park never realize that many ancient cliff dwellings lie only a few miles away from the road.

They pass within easy reach of them every day, heading toward the famous ruins—Cliff Palace, Balcony House, and the others that appear in guidebooks and park maps.

But somewhere beyond a locked gate, out on the rough country where the national park meets the lands of the Ute Mountain Tribal Park, sit two cliff dwellings called Casa Colorado and Casa Blanca, that we were to see.

Reaching them requires leaving the road, leaving the crowds, and trusting a guide who is only reasonably certain he remembers where they are.

I only learned about them because of the tribal tours run out of Towaoc.

The arrangement was simple enough. The fee for the guide was sixty dollars, and the tribal center would furnish the transportation. The instructions were equally simple.

“Meet your guide, Victor, at the entrance to Mesa Verde National Park. He will be in a truck with Ute Tribal Park on the side.”

That alone suggested the day would be a little different from the usual park tour.

Leaving the Crowd

The vehicle arrived at the park entrance, and we started up the road toward the high mesas.

Mesa Verde is a remarkable place, and on most days the traffic reflects that. Cars move steadily up the grades toward the famous ruins—Cliff Palace, Balcony House, and the other great dwellings that have drawn visitors for more than a century.

But we were not headed for any of those.

Eventually we reached a quiet stretch near the boundary where the park meets tribal land. Victor pulled over near a locked gate.

He stepped out, opened it, and we drove through.

It is surprising how quickly a place can change.

On the park side of the gate there are always people somewhere—cars pulling into parking lots, hikers gathering at trailheads, voices drifting across overlooks.

On the other side there was nothing.

For the next six or seven hours, I would not see another human being except my guide.

The Guide

Victor was an older man, probably in his early seventies.

At the time I was in my early sixties, so we were close enough in age to recognize something in each other immediately—two men who had spent most of their lives outdoors and were comfortable walking rough ground.

He had the easy, talkative manner of someone who had spent years in this country.

As we drove across the reservation land he began telling stories.

When he was young, he said, he and his brother had roamed this part of the reservation. They hunted, explored, and rode horses across country that very few outsiders ever see.

It had been twenty years or more since he had lived here regularly. He had gone to work in the oil fields and had only returned because of health issues.

He told me he was reasonably certain he could find the ruins we were looking for.

That turned out to be a very honest statement.

The Truck Stops Here

After driving a mile or so along a rough road he stopped the truck.

“From here,” he said, “we go on foot.”

The country stretched away in all directions—sagebrush, sandstone ledges, and distant canyon walls. There were no signs, no trails, and no obvious direction to go.

We started walking.

At first the goal seemed clear enough. He pointed toward a distant ridge and said the first ruin should be somewhere along that stretch of cliff.

We headed that way.

Then we stopped.

Then we tried another direction.

Best I can remember, it took three or four attempts before we finally located the cliff dwelling we had set out to find.

But after the first ruin was found, it really didn’t matter.

Quiet Ruins

The ruins themselves were modest.

They were not the grand, multi-story complexes visitors see on the promoted tours inside Mesa Verde National Park or in the more well-known parts of Ute Mountain Tribal Park.

Instead they were smaller places—perhaps a handful of rooms beneath a sandstone overhang, or a tiny granary built high into a crack in the cliff.

In one of those sheltered spots you could still see ancient corn cobs lying where they had been left centuries ago. They were small things, nothing like the big ears we think of today—more like what a farmer back home would call a nubbin of corn.

But there they were, quiet and dry in the desert air, resting in the same place where someone had dropped them long ago.

That small detail stopped me more than the ruins themselves.

A wall of stone tells you people lived there.

But a cob of corn tells you how they lived.

Somebody had grown that corn in a small patch of soil on top of the mesa. Somebody had picked it, dried it, and carried it up into that cliff dwelling for winter.

And then one day they walked away and never came back.

That little cob of corn had been waiting there longer than the United States has been a country—longer even than the voyage of Columbus across the Atlantic in 1492.

The masonry was still there, the stones laid carefully by the people archaeologists call the Ancestral Puebloans.

But the structures had the worn look of places that had stood alone for a very long time.

No railings.

No platforms.

No interpretive signs.

Just the ruins and the silence around them.

And silence there was plenty of.

Standing in that canyon country, it occurred to me that if this fellow had been a serial killer, my body might never have been found.

There are a lot of places out there where a man could disappear.

Fortunately, he seemed far more interested in telling stories than in committing crimes.

Stories of the Mesa

As we walked from site to site he talked almost constantly.

Some of what he told was history. Some was family memory. Some belonged to that wide territory between the two that we usually call oral tradition.

He spoke about something he called the ghost deer.

According to his story, he and his brother had been hunting near this same country years earlier. A deer stepped out into an opening and he had a clear shot. He was certain it was a killing shot.

When they walked up to where the deer had been standing, however, the animal was gone.

There was no blood.

No tracks leading away.

Nothing.

After searching the area they finally decided it must have been what Victor called a “ghost deer”—a strange animal that appeared and disappeared in ways no ordinary deer could.

Personally, I suspect they may have had a few beers to many that evening.

But who knows. Maybe he was right. Victor was sure it was a Ghost Deer!

He also talked about the old days on the reservation, and the way families moved across the land seasonally—hunting, gathering plants, and holding ceremonies tied to particular places.

Then he mentioned something that caught my attention.

His grandmother, he said, had told him that when she was a child she had seen, several times, a group of ten or so small people walking across the same area of Ute Mountain where her family stayed during the hot summer months.

She said that her people left them alone, and they did the same.

They were never close enough to speak with.

They were simply seen moving across the slopes in the distance.

To her they were the old people—the ancient inhabitants of that mountain country whom archaeologists now call the Ancestral Puebloans, once commonly referred to as the Anasazi. Science says that they left in the early 1300's, Grandmother reports seeing them in the late 1800.s to early 1900,s . Who do you believe?

That statement stopped me.

Archaeologists say the cliff-dwelling people left this region sometime in the 1300s, migrating south toward the pueblos of what is now New Mexico and Arizona.

So I asked him directly.

Did he believe what his grandmother had told him?

He looked at me for a moment and answered with a question of his own.

“Would my grandmother lie?”

That was the end of the discussion.

The Bear at the Sun Dance

Later in the day he told another story that has stayed with me ever since.

During a Sun Dance gathering, he said, a bear wandered into the camp and began causing trouble.

Instead of panicking or trying to kill the animal, Victor walked toward it and spoke to the bear in the Ute language.

“We will be gone in a few days. We will not bother this place again.”

According to his story, the bear listened.

Then it turned around and walked away.

Now, I do not know whether the story happened exactly that way.

But the guide believed it.

And for a country boy from Kentucky, that was good enough.

Casa Colorado and Casa Blanca

Eventually we did locate the two ruins that had drawn me there in the first place—Casa Colorado and Casa Blanca.

Both dwellings sat beneath protective sandstone alcoves.

Casa Colorado consisted of a cluster of small rooms built carefully against the back of the alcove. Nearby were a few tiny storage structures—granaries where corn and beans had once been kept safe from animals and weather.

Casa Blanca stood in a slightly more dramatic setting, perched beneath a higher cliff with a view down the canyon.

Neither site would impress someone looking for monumental ruins.

But they carried something that the famous places often lose.

They felt untouched.

You could see the hand prints of the builders in the masonry. Fallen stones lay where they had dropped generations ago. Nothing felt staged or reconstructed for visitors.

They felt like places you had simply stumbled upon.

Hours Without Another Person

What struck me most about that day was not the ruins themselves.

It was the absence of people.

From the moment we passed through that locked gate until we returned to the truck hours later, we saw no one else.

No hikers.

No tour groups.

No park rangers.

Just two men walking across the mesa and the ruins left behind by people who had lived there seven centuries ago.

That kind of solitude is almost impossible to find in most of America’s national parks today.

The Ride Back

Late in the afternoon we made our way back to the truck.

By then the conversation had slowed. We talked a little about whether any of the younger Ute men would continue the old ways. The lure of cell phones and video games worried him and his people, just as it worried me and mine.

Part of the quiet was the miles we had walked.

Part of it was the stillness that settles over canyon country as the sun begins dropping.

Eventually we drove back toward the park boundary.

The guide stopped, unlocked the gate again, and we rolled back onto the public road leading through Mesa Verde.

The contrast was immediate.

Cars moved along the pavement. Visitors gathered at overlooks. The ordinary rhythm of the park had returned.

He dropped me off where my Jeep was parked near the entrance.

Something to Think About

There was not much conversation after that.

We shook hands, said goodbye, and went our separate ways.

But there was plenty to think about.

About the ruins hidden across that country.

About the stories people carry from one generation to the next.

And about the strange moment when history, memory, and belief all meet in the same place.

Somewhere out there on that mesa are the quiet remains of Casa Colorado and Casa Blanca, still standing beneath their cliffs.

And somewhere in that country there once walked a man who believed his grandmother when she said she had seen ten or so small figures crossing the slopes of Ute Mountain during the summer months when her family stayed there.

Whether that was history, memory, or something else entirely…

I still cannot say.

But it made for one unforgettable day.

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Lebanon, KY

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https://historicheartlandtrails.com/

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