A behind-the-scenes look at the BGT deTour video shoot at Glass Mill, cartoonist Joel Pett’s historic Jessamine County property. Photo furnished.
For the past decade, the local historic preservation organization Blue Grass Trust has provided behind-the-scenes access to a multitude of unique historic sites through the BGT deTours program, a monthly “happy hour” event taking place at a different location each month. Venues have included historic homes and buildings, such as the Lexington Opera House, the Bodley-Bullock House and Lexington’s historic former courthouse. But the events have also detoured to destinations that might not be first to mind when thinking of Lexington’s traditional historic sites: Parkette Drive-In, Rupp Arena and Paul Miller Ford have each hosted a deTour in recent years.
According to Blue Grass Trust preservation outreach coordinator Jackson Osborne, the underlying goal of the tours is to provide attendees an “off-the-beaten-trail experience,” offering intimate access to special places in the Bluegrass region where folks might not typically consider going – or be able to go – on their own while also helping underscore the importance of preserving the region’s unique historic sites.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit Lexington last March, the organization, like so many others, was forced to halt and reevaluate its approach to the event, which had become one of its most visible and important outreach methods, attracting anywhere from 20 to 500 attendees on any given month. After pausing the tour for a month last April, event organizers soon recognized what was the “new normal” and rolled out a virtual version of the event in May: a behind-the-scenes video tour of the Kentucky State Capitol building.
“If you watch [that] tape, you can see we were very green,” Osborne said with a laugh. “I think I had an iPhone 6, and I walked around and filmed it – the loudest thing on the video was me walking around.”
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Videographer Robert Tipton, co-owner of the Media Collaboratory, has become an indispensable partner for BlueGrass Trust in producing a series of informative monthly videos about historic regional sites over the past year.
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A behind-the-scenes look at the Historic Midway Gift Shop from a recent BGT deTour video video highlighting downtown Midway.
Since then, Blue Grass Trust has significantly upped the ante on the video production of its virtual deTours through a partnership with the Media Collaboratory, sponsored by the Woman’s Club of Central Kentucky to help cover the costs of production. Over the past year, BGT has posted nine 20-to-40-minute BGT deTour videos, most filmed and edited by Media Collaboratory producer and director Robert Tipton, on its website.
As they always have been, the deTour locations are selected by BGT’s deTour committee, which is chaired by local history enthusiasts Lucy Jones and Jerry Daniels.
The group meets every two months to hash out ideas for upcoming locations, and recent locations have included a tour of Glass Mill, cartoonist Joel Pett’s historic Jessamine County residence and property; Lexington’s African American Cemetery No. 2, located on Third Street; and Palmer Pharmacy, an architecturally significant modernist building on the corner of Chestnut and Fifth streets that was the first Black-owned Rexall pharmacy in the nation.
While the new format has provided the organization with an invaluable new collection of permanent content, it is, of course, difficult to replace the energy of the in-person tours.
“No matter how expert the production, we cannot re-create the tactile experience of being inside a building,” Jones said. But in other ways, she said, the format has created certain liberties. “We are able to feature buildings that, due to their finite size or remote location, wouldn’t be amenable to a traditional deTour. We also have greater reach, so we are shifting some focus to threatened buildings in order to highlight the urgency of their preservation.”
To check out the collection of BGT deTour videos, visit www.bluegrasstrust.org/past-detours. The most recent video featured Boot Hill Farm, the historic Clark County home of John Jacob Niles.