Bowling Green is a small city in southern Kentucky, best known to many travelers as the home of the Corvette. I stopped here while traveling through the state, with the National Corvette Museum as my main destination. The city is also a convenient base for visiting Mammoth Cave and other attractions in the region.
Historic Bowling Green
Bowling Green began as a small settlement in the late 1700s. One of the more unusual chapters in its history came during the Civil War, when the city briefly served as the capital of Kentucky’s Confederate government. A historical marker downtown describes an encounter with Federal troops here in 1862.
I came to Bowling Green mainly for the Corvette factory and museum, but found more to see than I expected. Fountain Square sits at the center of downtown and has been part of the city’s civic life since its earliest years. What began as a courthouse square gradually developed into the landscaped public space seen today, with statues and memorials surrounding the park.
National Corvette Museum
The main reason I came to Bowling Green was the National Corvette Museum. The Corvette has been assembled in Bowling Green since 1981, making the city inseparable from one of America’s best-known sports cars. The museum opened in 1994 and traces the Corvette’s evolution through generations of production and racing.
Inside are Corvettes spanning much of the car’s history, from early production models to rare vehicles with only a handful of surviving examples. Seeing them together makes it easy to follow how dramatically the Corvette’s design changed over the decades.
One of the museum’s standout cars was this Corvette ZR1. In 2008, GM test driver Jim Mero drove a production-spec ZR1 around Germany’s Nürburgring Nordschleife in 7 minutes and 26 seconds. The demanding circuit has long been used as a benchmark for high-performance cars, and the ZR1’s time demonstrated just how capable the production Corvette had become.
Abraham Lincoln’s Birthplace
I also made a side trip to Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace near Hodgenville, roughly an hour northeast of Bowling Green. Lincoln was born here on February 12, 1809, on the Sinking Spring Farm.
Unfortunately, the memorial was under renovation during my visit, so I wasn’t able to properly see the symbolic log cabin housed inside. The building itself was constructed to commemorate Lincoln’s birthplace, while the cabin associated with the site represents the type of home in which he was born. I’ll have to return someday and see the site properly.
