After touring the Wall to Wall murals along the riverfront in Paducah, we continued on toward our final destination of Knoxville, TN. I wanted to stop at Murfreesboro to see what General Mills had made of the old Pillsbury (Totino's) pizza plant. Linda didn't think that sounded like a worthwhile stop until she recalled that she followed the owner of a furniture store in Murfreesboro on YouTube, so we placed that destination into the GPS.
Along the way, we definitely wanted to make a stop at a fork in the road near Franklin, KY.
The routing through Franklin took us through some interesting and scenic areas.
Going directly from Paducah to Knoxville is only about 350 miles along the Interstate, but for us this took two days. The mandatory stop at Franklin quickly took us off I-24 and onto U.S. 68. We passed through the town of Fair Dealing and into The Land Between the Lakes national recreation area - the two lakes being Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley, the latter we recognized as being named for the thirty-fifth vice president.
The areas near the Land Between the Lakes are populated with summer homes. The delightfully named "Golden Pond" area where the National Park Service's headquarters is located, reportedly once had a national reputation for its moonshine production during the prohibition era. Today, the area plays host to a herd of Elk and Buffalo in what was once a native prairie habitat.
Continuing on for about forty miles past Golden Pond, we passed through Fairview, Ky. Fairview is a town of about 250. As we were approaching town, we noticed a very tall obelisk just off to the right and pulled off the highway to drive in that direction.
Nearby signs revealed that Fairview was the birthplace of Jefferson Davis and this was the site of the Jefferson Davis monument and museum maintained by the state of Kentucky.
We have spent enough time passing through Mississippi and along the Gulf Coast to visit the Davis Presidential Library and hear references to "President Davis," but had no idea there was a monument of this scale in Kentucky.
We pulled into the parking lot for a quick tour. The parking lot was empty but we found an attendant supervising the exhibits who informed us that the elevator to the top of the 350 foot monument was not working, but that we could tour the museum.
The exhibits include an excellent history of Davis' government roles before the Civil War as well as during and after. There is a rare Confederate Flag on display as well as a very large portrait on loan to the museum.
Continuing on to Franklin, Kentucky, we found our destination about eight miles off the beaten path along a very winding route. It's located at the junction of Bunch Road and Uhis Road, after taking a turn off Salmon's Blackjack Road. As we rounded the corner, we saw it - a fork in the road!
According to a story in the Franklin Favorite newspaper, the fork was erected in early May 2018, and built by the senior welding class of Franklin-Simpson High School. Made of stainless steel, it is 21 feet tall, weighs 680 pounds, and is anchored with a ton of concrete.
Naturally, we paused for a photograph.
The route is supervised by a small herd of beef that were admiring the fall color in the nearby pasture.
Nearby, we saw another "barn quilt," similar to the ones that we had seen in Canada earlier in the year.
Heading on toward the town of Murfreesboro, some 35 miles southeast of Nashville, we arrived at the northern city limits of Nashville at about the peak of rush-hour and spent close to an hour moving from the north side of the town to the south. We made it to Linda's destination, JD's All About Home furniture store, twenty minutes before closing and she was rewarded with a surprise gift from the owner by mentioning the magic word, "YouTube."
It was just a short five mile trip from the furniture store to what is now General Mills Yoplait yogurt plant. While it seems like only yesterday, it has been over fifty years since I was writing computer programs for the Pillsbury Doughboy, later acquired by our crosstown rival, General Mills. I still like to drive past the former Pillsbury manufacturing sites when the opportunity presents itself. Sadly, many of the plants are long ago demolished. But the current Murfreesboro plant, created with a $8 million investment in 1977 to manufacture Totino's frozen pizza at low cost, has grown to become one of General Mills largest plants. Pillsbury dough products like Crescent Rolls and Cinnamon Rolls are also produced here.
In between our two stops in Murfreesboro, we found quite a flock of birds settling in for the evening.
We headed northeast as dusk settled on Tennessee, joining the Nashville - Knoxville traffic and stopped for the night in Lebanon, Tennessee.
More photos at this Flickr album.
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