My Old Kentucky Home State Park centres on Federal Hill, the 19th-century mansion associated with Stephen Foster's song "My Old Kentucky Home." The house tour is the main draw, with period rooms and guides who place the building inside Kentucky's carefully polished, and more complicated, memory of the antebellum era.
The grounds are pleasant, and the mansion gives Bardstown one of its clearest visual anchors. It is worth visiting, but with open eyes: the song and the house both belong to a history in which nostalgia and slavery sit uncomfortably close together.