The Audubon Museum and Nature Center
If you turn off a highway in Henderson, Kentucky, not far from the Ohio River and the Indiana state line, you find yourself quickly leaving behind gas stations and familiar fast food chains and instantly surrounded by trees. Next, and rather improbably, you find yourself parking your car outside of a French château in the middle of the Kentucky wilderness. It’s as if you managed to travel back in time and across an ocean without ever leaving your vehicle. You’ve arrived at the Audubon Museum and Nature Center in the John James Audubon State Park. Audubon lived in Henderson from 1810-1819, and the château-inspired museum was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1938 to reflect Audubon’s French ancestry.
I think I’d heard the name of Audubon connected with birds as a teenager, but my most recent memory of his work The Birds of America*, came from reading Anthony Doerr’s, All the Light We Cannot See, in which one of the characters has an immense love for looking at Audubon’s gorgeously-painted birds. I discovered this museum had copies of Audubon’s paintings whilst planning a trip to Kentucky for a wedding, and I knew I wanted to add this stop to my itinerary. Some of the prints are three-feet long because Audubon wanted his book to show the birds as large as they are in life. The colors are so rich and beautiful, and I love his innovative style of painting the birds as they are in nature instead of in the stiff, more anatomically-focused poses common at the time.
After walking through all the exhibits about Audubon’s life, my daughter and I ventured up the tower stairs. It is truly a beautiful building, one it makes me happy they took the time to design with so much character even during the lean Depression years. There were a few other exhibits we didn’t have time to see, as well as nature trails to walk on, but I took the time to choose a print from the gift shop that is now framed and hanging in my house. I’m not a painter, but I love taking pictures of birds, and this Mother’s Day my children gave me a copy of Audubon’s journals, which I’m looking forward to reading. It was so wonderful to be able to see so many of these paintings in person, and I’d highly recommend looking them up online or even better, stopping at the museum yourself.
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