Kentucky

Kentucky sits on top of the longest cave system on Earth. Mammoth Cave stretches more than 426 miles of mapped passageways, and explorers keep finding more every year. Nobody knows how far it actually goes.

In the 1830s, an enslaved teenager named Stephen Bishop became Mammoth Cave's most famous guide. Armed with nothing but a lantern and rope, he crossed a chasm called the Bottomless Pit and explored miles of tunnels no one had ever seen. In 1842, he drew a map of the entire cave system from memory, and people used it for the next 40 years.

The Cherokee, Shawnee, and Chickasaw knew this land long before European settlers arrived. In 1775, a frontiersman named Daniel Boone carved the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap and built a small fort called Boonesborough. By 1800, more than 200,000 settlers had followed that path into Kentucky.

Kentucky became the 15th state in 1792, and the first west of the Appalachian Mountains. By the Civil War, the state was tearing itself apart. Both Abraham Lincoln and Confederate president Jefferson Davis were born here, less than 100 miles and one year apart.

About 100,000 Kentuckians fought for the Union and 40,000 for the Confederacy. The Battle of Perryville in October 1862 was the state's largest and bloodiest, leaving more than 7,000 dead and wounded. After the war, Kentucky still refused to ratify the 13th Amendment ending slavery.

You can tour Mammoth Cave year round and walk the same underground paths Stephen Bishop explored nearly 200 years ago. In Louisville, visit Churchill Downs, home of the Kentucky Derby since 1875 and the longest continuously held sporting event in the country.

Drive the Bourbon Trail through Bardstown, where more than 10 million barrels are aging in warehouses right now. And at the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park in Hodgenville, a memorial building shelters a cabin marking the spot where Lincoln was born in 1809.