One-hour North of Nashville and just over the Kentucky border lies a little jewel of a town called Bowling Green. With about 120,000 residents, it may seem an odd place to recommend as a family destination. But there’s more to do here than one might think … Bowling Green is the birthplace of every Corvette sold in America, home to the Bowling Green Hot Rods (a class A minor league farm team for the Tampa Bay Rays) and site of the Lost River Cave. It boasts a university with more than 20,000 students, 300 restaurants, the Corsair Distillery, the White Squirrel Brewery, Beech Bend Amusement Park and Brie the Pie Queen (more about her later).
Those attractions – though more than enough to pack a fun-filled family weekend – are not what makes Bowling Green worth a visit. It’s the people you’ll meet. Characters who will touch your heart, make you laugh and inspire you with their warmth, passion, and spirit. Here are a few I had the pleasure to meet on a recent visit.
Debbie and the Folks Who Build Every Corvette in America
Our morning began at the National Corvette Museum, a 115,000-foot museum dedicated to America’s sports car. We were welcomed by Debbie Eaton, a middle-aged woman with a southern accent, a love of cars, and a gift for storytelling. In her brief 10-minute welcome, we learned that the Corvette was created in 1953 for American servicemen who returned from the war hooked on Europe’s sports cars. We learned that every Corvette in America is made at the assembly plant just down the street, and that the 1983 design failed so many tests that they scrapped all of the Corvettes that had been built that year, save one that had been hidden by a passionate team of engineers and is now on display. Debbie had us on the edge of our seats with the story of the sinkhole that opened beneath the museum, just minutes before opening, on the morning of February 12, 2014, swallowing eight Corvettes, but not a single person. And we learned that Corvette people are as passionate about their cars as Bowling Green people are about their town.
From the museum, we moved on to tour the actual manufacturing plant where these beautiful cars are built. During this hour-long behind-the-scenes tour, we were able to see every phase of the process: how the seats are installed, how the width between the doors and the body is measured and measured again, how the body and the chassis are carefully joined together, and that wonderful moment when the engine of a new Corvette purrs to life for the first time. But it was the chance to watch the people do their work that was the most fascinating. A team of 40% women and 60% men, ranging from the hipster with green hair to the gray-haired granny, working side by side, each intent on fitting their critical piece of the puzzle into a brand new Corvette.
Chad and the Tales of Jesse James, an Underground Nightclub, Missing Confederate Soldiers and a Quest for Conservation
Did you know that Jesse James tended to a wounded member of his gang deep in Bowling Green’s Lost River Cave, Ella Fitzgerald sang at its underground nightclub, and four confederate soldiers either disappeared into the bottomless blue hole at the Cave’s entrance, or used it as a rouse to defect during the heart of the Civil War?
Spend an hour with Chad, Lost River Cave’s handsome park guide supervisor, and you will learn that and more. You’ll hear how the Lost River Cave was reclaimed in the 1990s by a passionate group that moved more than 55 tons of garbage that had been dumped there, how the team invites tourists and students and families and children to explore its depths in the hopes that they will take a bit of reverence for its natural beauty home with them, how to put a butterfly to sleep (hint, make it cold and they fall right to sleep to be woken later by the warmth of a human hand). You will leave feeling like you’ve just returned from another world, one where history comes to life around each turn of the rudder as a small boat navigates the underwater cave, where the stories Chad shares (admittedly, some more legend than fact) remind you that our history is not so far in the past.
An Old World Dairy Farmer and His New Robot
At Chaney’s Dairy Farm, I ate homemade ice cream and watched four women tear up listening to a farmer talk about cows. That is not hyperbole, that is what happened.
Carl Chaney is the current patriarch of this 50-acre farm that has been in his family since 1880. Each of its 60 dairy cows (Jersey’s because they make the best milk – not that Carl would ever speak badly of other cows and other milk, because, as he is quick to point out, all milk is good milk it’s just that Jersey milk is the best milk) has a name and a personality. And each member of the Chaney family has a role on the farm and a passion for keeping it all in the family.
And times are changing at Chaney’s Dairy Farm. For decades, Carl, and his father before him rose at 4:21 to begin the morning milking. It took an hour and a half, during which the cows waited in a pen for their turn. In the late afternoon, the process was repeated. These days Carl gets up without the help of an alarm, whenever he wants – okay, so that’s about 5:00, but still – because a recently-installed robot now milks the cows one at a time, whenever the cows feel like a snack and a milking. When they aren’t being milked, they are lounging in their covered barn, having their backs scratched, meandering beneath the many fans designed to keep them cool, or heading out to their own pasture.
Why visit Chaney’s Dairy Barn? Sure, there’s lunch, incredible ice cream, a complex corn maze, a big bouncy thing and lots of fun to be had. But that’s not the real reason to come. The real reason is to meet the Chaneys and get a glimpse into a family that is as deeply committed to one another as they are to their cows and community. And for the ice cream.
The Voice of Bowling Green Stuffs a Bus – or Five
Tony Rose, host of the morning show on D93, is the voice of Bowling Green. He broadcasts each morning from a tiny downtown building. But like much of Bowling Green, this little building is more than it seems. In continuous use as a radio station for more than 60 years, Elvis, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Jerry Lee Lewis, ZZ Top and other rock and roll legends have walked through its doors and up its creaky steps. And Tony is more than a colorful radio personality with a disagreeable unicorn, he’s also the force of nature behind Bowling Green’s annual Stuff a Bus program. Now in its eleventh year, the Bowling Green community came together to stuff five buses with more than 16.25 tons of school supplies so that every Bowling Green child could start the school year with the supplies they need.
Brie, the Pie Queen of Bowling Green
Finally, I left Bowling Green with a pie problem. Followed closely by a catfish problem. Both of which were the result of the two hours spent at Boyce General Store just on the outskirts of town.
Brie was raised just down the street and boasts knees scarred from a wipe out in the Boyce General Store parking lot. When the place went on the market a few years ago, Brie and her husband Brad couldn’t resist. They bought it, renovated it, painted it, loaded it up with antiques and knick knacks and invited the community for breakfast, lunch, dinner or Friday night fish fries on the back porch. And you have never had fried catfish like this – I’m already scheming how I can go back there for dinner.
And then there are Brie’s pies. And cookies. I started with the cookies. I ate four of them – brown sugar sammies with chocolate chip buttercream, peanut butter cookies with chocolate buttercream and no bake cookies with peanut butter icing. And since each was a sandwich cookie, if truth be told, I ate 8 cookies. And loved every single bite of every single one. They are the best cookies I have ever eaten. Ever.
And the pies? I have no words. Kentucky Pie (chocolate chip pecan with bourbon), coconut cream, lemon meringue, peanut butter fudge and mocha.
“Do you have a website?” this New York-bred entrepreneur asked.
“No, but if you email me, I can ship whatever you want,” Brie graciously offered. I asked her if I should share her email in this article, and she said yes. So you here go … here’s the person to email for the best cookies and the best pies I have ever tasted ... boycepiepantry@gmail.com. No joke, I just ordered 300.
Bowling Green is an unexpected treasure of a town. But at the end of the day it is the people who make a community special and a town worth visiting. Lots of info can be found at Visit Bowling Green.
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The Bowling Green Area Convention & Visitors Bureau hosted Macaroni Kid for a three-day press trip. Accommodations and most meals and activities were complimentary. No other compensation was received in consideration of this article and all opinions are that of the writer.
