I was born down the road from Bourbon Stockyards in Louisville, Kentucky. The house I came home to on Mellwood Avenue, is not there anymore. Now it’s a driveway. But we would drive right by Bourbon Stockyards on our way home from my grandmother’s house on Barrett Avenue. I never gave it much thought. I would hear the cows and pigs as we drove by and we would always holler out “P.U.” It stunk. But we didn’t think anything of it.
My sister will tell you that she’s a vegetarian because of that place, or the packing house across the road. She just couldn’t stand to listen to the animals suffer, she would tell you. I really like bacon and hamburgers so the animal suffering didn’t bother me. And I came to learn later that the moo’s and the squeals had nothing to do with the animals suffering.
The Bourbon Stockyards began operation east of downtown Louisville in 1880. They closed in 1999 and the land was taken over and revitalized into the Home of the Innocents. Ironically, this nursing facility for pediatric patients also was developed in 1899. But, they kept the gate with the sign “Bourbon Stockyards”. Before the stockyards was torn down it had become a home for some of Louisville’s homeless population. Right before it was demolished a photographer was allowed to go in and capture the stockyards one last time.
David Modica is a Louisville area photographer. I had heard that he was doing a show of the stockyards long after I moved out of Louisville. I have always appreciated art and considered myself a photographer. I had never purchased a piece but have accepted many pieces as gifts through the years. It just so happened that I was in town at the time of his show. And I just so happened that I went. And it just so happened that I bought a piece. I remember telling myself that I couldn’t afford it. But I bought it and now it hangs in my kitchen exactly where I hung it after I bought it. I had to have it.
This is the piece that I bought at that gallery show so many years ago.
I remember passing that place throughout my childhood. It is an intricate piece of who I was then. And it is an intricate piece of who I am now.
I married a dairy farmer and moved to the farm in southwestern Kentucky. I see the light shine through open doors and windows and slats in the barns on this farm. There are decades of dirt on the ground in my piece and there are decades of dirt on the ground in our barns. Seriously, generations of DNA are in our cow lot. There are flies who travelled with the cows gone by in Louisville and flies who somehow survive into my house in the freeze of January. But the sun beams are the same. I can feel the warmth of the sun beam down in the dead of winter in my photograph and the shade of the shadows in the dead of summer. I see the lines of the sun and the stalls and the fences and the gates. And I can smell the cows. Now I say it smells like money.
There are stockyards all over the country. At one time the Bourbon Stockyards was the largest in the area. Who knows, maybe in years before, some of our cows or pigs rode the highway up to Louisville and went through those gates. Maybe one time I was driving by on my way home from my grandmother’s. Maybe the cows moo’ing were just saying hello and telling me that the cows at the farm in Fancy Farm were waiting for me.
These photographs are copywrited by David Modica and come from Google. They are also on his website. Their use herein was for personal use only and with his permission.
https://www.davidmodica.com
My grandparents lived close to the K&I bridge. When my father was young, cattle would off-load from riverboats and be driven uptown by cowboys 🙂