I’ll be at the patriotic concert tonight at Transylvania University and then back downtown bright and early tomorrow for other festivities celebrating America’s 232nd Independence Day. I hope to see you there.
There isn’t a better day to be in Lexington than the Fourth of July, from the starting gun of the Bluegrass 10,000 race to the last flicker of fireworks over Rupp Arena. Apparently, it has been that way for a long time.
I have a small collection of newspapers published in Lexington before the Civil War. Several years ago, when I bought a copy of the July 6, 1826, edition of the Kentucky Whig, I found this small but vivid account of Lexington’s celebration of the 50th Independence Day, two days earlier.
Those wet but happy Lexingtonians had no way of knowing it then, but elsewhere in America that day, two of the founding fathers died within hours of each other. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the second and third presidents, had over the years gone from being partners in liberty to bitter political enemies to frequent correspondents and grudging admirers of each other. On his death bed, Adams is supposed to have said, “Thomas Jefferson survives.”
