Sherry Chandler

When making your long-range plans, please factor in next year’s KSPS annual meeting. It will be held October 13-15, 2006 at the Blue Licks Battlefield State Resort in Fleming County, about 50 miles northeast of Lexington.

Blue Licks is a fairly small and quiet park on the Licking River, but the site was important to Kentucky settlers. The “licks” refers to salt licks along the buffalo trace that served as a highway from Limestone (Maysville) on the Ohio River to Lexington for incoming settlers. (Roughly following the route of U.S. 68.) Daniel Boone was captured by the Shawnee there while on a salt-gathering expedition for Boonesboro. The licks attracted all manner of game, and some prehistoric mammal bones have been found there. It’s also the site of the last battle of the Revolutionary War, a battle in which a party from Boonesboro was snookered into an ambush by the British and Indians and thoroughly defeated. D. Boone’s son was killed, along with many others. Although the battle was lost, the war was won; the British and Indians made no more major forays into Kentucky.

You can walk a bit of the old trace at the park as part of a mile-long hiking trail that runs from the bluffs down into the river bottom, looping through a 15-acre nature preserve for the endangered Short’s goldenrod. Admittedly, goldenrod is not all that popular with the allergy prone in October but history buffs may enjoy tracing the drama of the pioneer charge across the river and up the hill into a massacre. The lodge is located on the bluffs overlooking the wooded river valley, so we should have some nice fall colors.

Diane Gilliam Fisher has agreed to be our featured speaker. She is a wonderful reader and her latest collection, Kettle Bottom (Perugia Press), was American Booksellers Association Book Sense Pick for the Top Ten Poetry Books of 2005. Diane has roots in West Virginia and is very active in Appalachian culture and literature.

Next year will also mark the Kentucky State Poetry Society’s 4oth anniversary and we hope to have some festivities to mark the occasion. Watch this site for further developments.