Signs of London, Kentucky Style

A highway sign in Kentucky:

Prohibited
Pedestrians
Bicycles
Motor Scooters
Metal Treads
Farm Equipment
Animals on Foot

Animals on foot? Oh, livestock. Funny image that: a herd of sheep or cattle blocking four lanes of interstate like they hold up a country road in Britain. I’m sad they’re not allowed, really. Might slow this nation down a little.

One of those blue tourist-attraction signs greets me as I arrive in this week’s town:

Welcome to London. Home of Madison McCowan. 2009 Miss KY Outstanding Teen.

Wow. Many towns announce themselves as the “gateway” to somewhere else, but this one recognizes one of its own as its point of pride. How’s that for down-home spirit?

Billboards tell a lot about an area and what its people find important enough to market. Up to now, they’ve mostly been the typical ads for food and hotels and attractions. London has a different set mixed with the rest. A goodly number advertise lawyers for car accidents, medical support for people who have trouble breathing, and hospice for the elderly. Other notable boards that speak of what troubles the population:

Gambling Can Be Addictive. Call 1-800-GAMBLER
LOSE WEIGHT STOP SMOKING With Hypnosis
Does Life Hurt? www.lifehurts.com

And my favorite:

Your Credit Won’t Fix Itself. Pay Bills On Time. www.creditfairy.org

Credit Fairy? So do you stick a credit card under your pillow and by morning the bill has been paid?

Most of current London clusters along two local highways lined with strip malls, hotels, and restaurants. A little to the north is the original Main Street, a few blocks long. US Courthouse. Laurel County Courthouse. A new multistory Laurel County Justice Center under construction. A lawyer firm on every corner. (Now I understand all those billboards for legal assistance.) A bank on every street. An insurance company on every other street. A massage and spa. Very few other businesses.

Beyond the tidy core block, Main Street disappears into ragged miles lined with dollar stores, elderly gas stations, Kroger, RiteAid, and a supermarket-sized antique mall that’s more like a huge garage sale collective. Oh, that’s right: London is flea market central—tourists actually come here for the flea markets, so this antique store cum garage sale makes sense. There are at least two other flea market locations nearby, each the size of a drive-in movie lot and open only on weekends. Lots of suntanning shops here, too, for some reason. Tammy’s Consignment and Tanning offers a unique combo: you can strip to the buff to get brown, then buy a new set of clothes to put on when you leave.

Two London side streets catch my attention at opposite ends of town: GOP Street and Middleground Way.

This area of Kentucky has drive-through tobacco shops like other towns have coffee stands. Most of the huts look dilapidated and are plastered with cigarette posters. One tobacco store was a former minimart, still pumping fuel and selling only tobacco. I’d bet that no cigarettes are sold in grocery stores.

A reminder of an older London: remains of a mining facility. This is across the road from a beautifully landscaped (grass, pond) community college and a very modern public library, all of them secluded from the more commercial parts of London.

Loved this retro birthday bus. Those railroad tracks are seriously bumpy to drive over.

I settle in for a week’s stay at the Levi Jackson State Park, one of the best sites I’ve been to yet…trees, grass, concrete pads, close to town but in the middle of the woods. Part of the Boone Trail from North Carolina, site of a settler massacre by Indians in 1786, home of a working water mill and millstone museum, and location of a Mountain Life Museum village. This will also be a good spot from which to explore bits of Kentucky’s southeast.

The park was gloriously uncrowded the day I arrived.

The onsite Mountain Life Museum invites an amble through a schoolhouse, family cabins, church, and other buildings. The blacksmith’s shop (way down there in the upper left corner) was transformed into the jailhouse for the movie The Kentuckian with Burt Lancaster.