Were you to drive to Nicholasville, Kentucky, today, you would discover a small but growing city of 20,000 residents situated just beyond the reach of Lexington, a prosperous and spreading metropolis. Urban sprawl connects one city with the other, but the two remain distinct entities, the county seats of two different areas—Jessamine and Fayette counties. Lexington harbors the state's land-grant research university and a huge medical center, boasts a bustling modern airport with direct flights to Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas and elsewhere, and thrives on the wealth of corporate centers and racing horses. Nicholasville is too small to claim any of these metropolitan features, but it is blessed with charm and a bustling local economy, and it blends into the surrounding natural beauty of the Kentucky bluegrass country. The rolling plains and modest hills of the central piedmont where it is situated inevitably lead downhill toward the Kentucky River. The undulating land serves as a massive watershed reaching south toward the impressive cliffs of the Kentucky River Palisades near historic Camp Nelson, one of the largest recruiting and training centers for African-American troops entering the Union Army during the American Civil War. Lexington sits only thirteen miles from Nicholasville, almost due north on US-27, and where the large city displays its gleaming high-rise buildings, Nicholasville, in contrast, boasts its Jessamine County Court House that was completed in 1878 and its Old Jail, that was built in 1870 when General Ulysses S. Grant was well into his first term as President of the United States. Throughout Nicholasville, low-rise modern structures serve the needs of civic and private offices, but the atmosphere of this city derives from its 19th-century past.

At the same time, today's Nicholasville is also cursed by the inconvenience of urban renewal, something one might expect only in larger municipalities. However, even in a village of 20,000 residents, the all-too-familiar problems of adequate parking and utilities never dreamed of by the builders of the antique buildings that still stand proudly on or near Main Street is causing a fair amount of inconvenience and upheaval. As the downtown revitalization project proceeds apace in 2011, cars and trucks steer around traffic cones and torn up streets, and proprietors of small shops on Main Street wait anxiously for the recession to end and the work to be completed.