Producer: Donna Ross

Special-Delivery Groceries

Valco’s mid-river deliveries

At Carrollton, where the Kentucky River flows into the Ohio, we find barge crews taking advantage of a unique, waterborne version of take-out food: Valco’s Meat Market’s deliveries of groceries and other items to the boats in mid-stream. The service made Carrollton one of the few places a boat could take on groceries between Pittsburgh and Paducah.

The store, which was owned and operated by Gene Valco, was located on Highland Avenue just east of downtown Carrollton. It has gone out of business since our 1996 visit.

For more information:
• Kentucky Folk Art Center, 102 W. 1st St., Morehead, KY 40351, (606) 783-2204

A Day in the Country ... with Folk Art

Minnie Adkins’s annual folk art celebration

Folk artists Minnie and Garland Adkins of Isonville, in Elliott County, started “A Day in the Country” to celebrate both art and the natural beauty of the mountain home they shared. The annual event features work by artisans from near and far. In this segment, taped while the event was being held at the Adkins farm, KET’s Charlee Heaton visits some of the displays and talks to the artists about their inspirations.

In 2003, Minnie Adkins asked the Kentucky Folk Art Center in nearby Morehead to help her manage the event. A Day in the Country is now held in Morehead on the first Saturday in June.

Minnie and Garland themselves were profiled in Kentucky Life Program 203.

For more information:
• WindStone Farms, One 20th St., Paris, KY 40361, (859) 987-0739 or (866) FOR-JAMS (367-5267)

Turning Berries Into Business

WindStone Farms

At WindStone Farms in Nicholas County, blackberries have replaced cattle as the primary enterprise. Founder Wayne Shumate shows us around and explains why he believes that growing the berries is even more profitable than tobacco.

Originally produced to be turned into jam for use in baked items such as jam cakes, WindStone’s berries are now also available fresh in many Kentucky stores. Meanwhile, the jams are still the most popular items available through the online farm store.

For more information:
• Aviation Museum of Kentucky, P.O. Box 4118, Lexington, KY 40544, (859) 231-1219

Wild Blue Yonder

The Aviation Museum of Kentucky

The sky’s the limit in this episode’s last segment as we visit the Aviation Museum of Kentucky in Lexington. The state’s only museum devoted to the history and preservation of aircraft pays tribute to achievements by Kentuckians in the skies ... and beyond. One of the featured pilots is astronaut Story Musgrave, who led the first dramatic in-orbit “service call” to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. Musgrave, now retired, made one last spaceflight aboard the shuttle Columbia in November 1996—spending his third Thanksgiving Day in space—at the age of 61.

The museum is located at Blue Grass Airport, on U.S. 60 between Lexington and Versailles, two miles west of New Circle Road (KY 4). It is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm ET and Sunday from 1:00 to 5:00 pm ET.

For more about the museum and Kentucky aviation pioneers, see KET’s 2003 Electronic Field Trip to the Aviation Museum of Kentucky.