dmeyer wrote:
Oh, how I wish you had a picture of the old homestead to share!!
Somewhere I have photos, the old kind, if I happen to find one I'll scan it.
I can see the house as it is now on Google Maps, Street View. It has been remodeled and fixed up. Some brick facing over part of the white wooden siding, smoke house, chicken houses, hog house, corn crib and garage/tool shed are gone. The garage was replaced with a steel building, the tobacco barn to the west is replaced with another steel building and the cow/hay barn south of the house with milking stalls is gone. The pond is still there and bigger - maybe they stocked fish. The large garden and orchard to the west of the house is now just a patch of wild grass, and the small pasture with another orchard on the east side is now rutted dirt with what looks like a foundation for another steel building at the time they took the aerial photos. Some of the old shade trees have died and been removed but the ones that were small and the bushes/hedges are now much bigger, and you can hardly see the house from the road.
If you want to try:
Go to Google Maps and search "Barlow Kentucky", zoom in and follow US 60 south to the first road going to the east - VFW Road - follow that around a bunch of twists and turns until it turns south and meets Tabor Road (Rt 1368). Zoom in on the intersection and go to aerial photo view - the farm is just south of the intersection on the east side.
I just realized that in the previous post about the tourists, I got my directions mixed up. The road in front of the house is oriented North-South and the view is looking East across the valley.
If you zoom the view out a large wildlife management area and a bunch of lakes, ponds etc appear, and finally you will see the Ohio-Missippi junction area and Cairo,Illinois on one side of the river and Wickliffe, Kentucky (count seat) on the other.
Zoom in on Barlow and look at the aerial photos, it isn't the town I remember, most of the old buildings downtown are gone and replaced or now vacant lots. Even the market is gone. But they do have the county Recreation Center Offices, a Fish and Chips and a BBQ place in the center of town where US 60 takes a 90° turn. When I was a kid the old guys would often sit on the steps of the businesses at the intersection to talk and whittle while watching and laughing at the big rig drivers working their way through that turn. The street was two lanes with parking on each side, so the larger rigs you could often see the driver getting worked up and even hear some very colorful language (kids loved that). Almost all the big rigs now bypass the town on the interstate several miles east or stay on the west side of the Mississippi where there is another interstate. Back when those interstates first went in, I imagine the older drivers familiar with the US 60 turn in Barlow had a sudden drop in their blood pressure and were in general very happy to never see Barlow or that turn again.