• What to know if you go

Betsa Marsh/Special (ENLARGE)

Tour guide Stephanie Newton is flanked by portraits of sisters Alice and Ann Rowan in the dining room with its exotic wallpaper.

Fred Hagan/Special (ENLARGE)

The 1818 Federal Hill mansion, known as My Old Kentucky Home, has undergone a face-lift.

Bardstown, Ky. — When the wind is just right, you can sniff out little Bardstown before you see it, its bourbon distilleries turning corn into liquid Southern hospitality.

This Kentucky town of just 10,000 has always held an outsized draw. Travelers following a quirky range of pilgrim paths — music, antiques, architecture, bourbon, Civil War, railway and religious — come to Kentucky's second oldest city to find the unexpected.

Judge John Rowan's Old Kentucky Home on a bluff above Bardstown never glitters more brightly than during the holidays, and this season the 1818 Federal Hill mansion has even more reason to sparkle.

The interior of the home was recently restored, taking the elegant wallpapers, floor coverings and window treatments back to Stephen Foster's era of the 1850s. A deep-pocketed anonymous donor stepped up for the home's first face-lift since 1977.

The new walls and floors showcase the furnishings, 75 percent of which belonged to the home's founding family. Rowan, a cousin of Stephen Collins Foster, built the first portion of Federal Hill about 1799-1802. Using slave labor, he directed the firing of red bricks on-site and the construction of the grand home from 1808 to 1818. Indoors, a freed black man executed the elaborate carving on the fireplace mantels and windowsills.

As Rowan's career advanced from the Kentucky Court of Appeals to the U.S. Senate, his social circle grew. Federal Hill was known for its soirees. The home stayed within the family through the lifetimes of the judge's seven children. Son John Jr. had eight children to fill the rooms, and it was during his tenure that Stephen Foster visited in 1852.

Through family stories and Bardstown lore, most historians believe the Pittsburgh musician stayed here several times and may even have started writing "My Old Kentucky Home, Good-Night" on a desk at Federal Hill. He published the song in 1853, and it became Kentucky's state song in 1928. As soon as you drive up to the visitor center, you're apt to hear its melody wafting down from the carillon.

Madge Rowan Frost was the last mistress of the home, selling the mansion and 235 acres to My Old Kentucky Home Commission for $65,000 in 1920. Two years later, it entered the Kentucky State Park System, which maintains the home today.

It's this unbroken lineage that makes some of the home's pieces so remarkable: In Madge's bedroom, her well-worn boots lean up against a chair as if she'll be back any moment. In the judge's bedroom, a likeness of the Marquis de Lafayette, American Revolutionary war hero, hangs on the swagged wallpaper beside his mahogany canopy bed, and the lid is up on his potty chair in the corner.

The dining room is now an exotic trompe l'oeil scene whose wallpaper re-creates a stone balustrade and feathered palms. The Rowan family coin silver and 1830s Limoges china sparkle on the polished tabletop.

The grandfather clock at the top of the stairs, now carpeted in a dramatic Jacobean scroll pattern, is one of the home's most venerable pieces, between 225 and 229 years old.

Beginning in November 2004, Baltimore expert Matthew Mosca conducted paint analysis, taking the walls back to their original layers. The Federal Hill team contracted for authentic papers, carpets and window treatments. Craftsmen restored the graining to the doors, a faux mahogany appearance that Stephen Foster would have recognized.

Restorers relied on family letters, death inventories and photos from renovations in the 1920s and 1950s as their guides.

Some visitors may find the 2006 changes jarring, hallmarked by the high Victorian design sense that dictated different patterns and colors on nearly every surface.

"It was a different lifestyle," said park manager Alice Heaton, who has worked at My Old Kentucky Home State Park nearly 22 years. "If you came from a log cabin and you're suddenly able to explore color, you would. Matching is not what they did."

So the library's neo-Gothic wallpaper holds its own against the cross and key carpet pattern.

The Best Parlor vibrates with color, from the verdigris of the carpet to the gradated rainbow wallpaper to the green-and-red border. The square grand piano with mother-of-pearl keys, a gift from the judge to one of his granddaughters, still hugs a niche beside the fireplace. It takes just one quick flash of imagination to see Stephen Foster playing his tunes on those lustrous keys, ringed by his Kentucky cousins.

Betsa Marsh is author of "The Eccentric Traveler: A World of Curious Adventures" and a Lowell Thomas Award winner from the Society of American Travel Writers.

IF YOU GO

Getting there

Bardstown, Ky., is about 400 miles from downtown Atlanta, a little more than a six-hour drive.

Where to stay

Beautiful Dreamer Bed and Breakfast, 440 E. Stephen Foster Ave., Bardstown. 1-800-811-8312. Federal-style home with view of My Old Kentucky Home. Full breakfast. Doubles from $139.

Old Kentucky Home Stables and Bed & Breakfast, 115 Samuels Road, Cox's Creek. 503-349-0408. An antebellum mansion with the original trim, floors and design on a working horse farm. Full breakfast. Doubles from $115.

Old Talbott Tavern, Court Square, 107 W. Stephen Foster Ave., Bardstown. 1-800-482-8376. Built in 1779, the tavern is considered the oldest Western stagecoach stop in America. Abraham Lincoln, Jesse James and Gen. George Patton stayed here, among other notables. Doubles from $70.

Sherwood Inn, 138 S. Main St., New Haven. 502-549-3386. On the National Register of Historic Places, this home has been family-owned and -operated since 1875. In the city center next to the Kentucky Railway Museum. Full breakfast. $60.

Old Bardstown Inn, 510 E. Stephen Foster Ave., Bardstown. 1-800-894-1601. Directly across from My Old Kentucky Home State Park entrance. Doubles from $45.

Information

Bardstown-Nelson County Tourist and Convention Commission, One Court Square, Bardstown, Ky. 1-800-638-4877; www.visitbardstown.com.