More praise for “Surrounding™ Fort Knox and Southern Indiana”

Prepare yourself to be educated, fascinated, and motivated by Ronald R. Van Stockum Jr. The latest in his Surrounding™ book series, “Fort Knox including Southern Indiana” is a hefty 760-page mix of—for starters—human, geological, and biological history. This is a sweeping tour of north-central Kentucky and, just across the Ohio River, south-central Indiana.

Van Stockum takes you by the hand and leads you to an amazing regional genealogy your eyes likely haven’t fallen on before. 

He explains. He documents. He walks and crawls and climbs with us, shows us what we likely missed in traveling the Interstate instead of the backroad. Or the cave. Or the mountain ravine.

This book was years in the making as its details attest. The back story of Otter Creek Park. An exploration of New Haven. An explanation of Lebanon Junction. Spelunking myriad caves hidden beneath the rolling fields north of Bowling Green and tucked under the Indiana lands of Crawford and Harrison County.

But “Surrounding™ Fort Knox” is hardly a dry, analytical study case of this region.  

True, Van Stockum is out to pass on some voluminous learnin’ to us, but he’s determined that we will have a good time taking it in. So Van Stockum kick-starts early into his easy style. Buddy-friendly. Chatty. Asides here and there. A little gossipy, even. 

There are no classroom lectures here, but information is most certainly passed on. Huge amounts of it, done with a wisecrack or a side comment or more often than not, a sense of the writer’s own wonder of time and place. 

Let’s take a break and stop for lunch in Indiana, Stockum urges. Why not? This is Van Stockum’s tour, and he’s having a ball!

Hey, he says. Did you know that Muldraugh Hill, is actually a cuesta, a steep, eroded edge of a plateau? Here is a forgotten African American cemetery. There, along Paoli Pike in Indiana, is where seemingly countless buffalo once ran, determined to cross the Ohio River at a low point in the Falls and take in the reward of Kentucky’s natural salt licks. 

And still, there is much more within these pages. The roles the Fort Knox area played in the Civil War. The journey that brought Abraham Lincoln’s own ancestors to Shelby, Hardin, Larue, Breckenridge, and Jefferson counties. And did I mention a chart describing ancient native Americans who, thousands of years ago, lived in the very places we live today?

Information and illumination seems to be laid out like a buffet on every page of this book. Its chapters—75 in all—play to a winning strategy, beckoning us to take our pick, in whatever order we choose. Many are short bursts of 2 or 4 pages. Other chapters may run in narratives that don’t stop until the 12th or 15th page. 

Again, the reader can run their eyes down the table of contents and visit these sites, hear the narratives, in whatever mood fits their fancy. Chapter 57? Let’s go check out New Haven. Chapter 30? Lincoln’s “Little Sister.” Chapter 64? Navigation on the Ohio River. Chapter 8? The Old L&N Turnpike. Chapter 35? The “White Caps Massacre” in Southern Indiana.

Lest one assumes Van Stockum is writing historical fiction here, he furnishes closing evidence of 238 footnoted sources. 

And that is not to discount Van Stockum himself, a scientist, lawyer, teacher, biologist, writer, guitarist and actor.” 

In other words, he stays busy.  

– Don Ray Smith

Don Ray Smith is a critic, humorist, performer, and author of four books of cultural commentary. His features, profiles, essays, and humorous sketches have appeared in Louisville Magazine, the Courier-Journal, Louisville Business First, LEO Weekly, African American Journal, The Cincinnati Enquirer, Kentucky Living magazine, The Lane Report, and other regional publications. He has earned journalism awards as a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, Louisville Chapter. Smith has published three books, including two collections of short humor, “Feel My Humerus” and “Kentucky Shorts,” and the comic romance novel, “Racebook, or How He Found His Nubian Prin-cess.”

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