Bardstown, KY: My Old Kentucky Home Tee
S
$33.00
Sale price
$33.00
Regular price
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Every state has a song. Kentucky has a story behind theirs.
In 1852, a young songwriter from Pittsburgh, named Stephen Foster, visited Federal Hill — the grand antebellum estate on the edge of Bardstown, owned by his cousins, the Rowan family — and left with something he had not arrived with. A song. One that would outlast him, outlast the estate's original occupants, and outlast nearly every piece of American music written in the same century.
My Old Kentucky Home was published in 1853 and has never stopped being sung since.
Federal Hill is the kind of house that makes you understand immediately why it inspired a song. A Federal style mansion rising from the Kentucky bluegrass, with the grace and melancholy of the antebellum South at its most architecturally extraordinary. Wide rooms. Tall windows. The kind of quiet that settles over a place that has witnessed more history than it will ever fully tell.
The song became the official state song of Kentucky in 1928. It has been played at the Kentucky Derby every single year since 1921 — 150,000 people standing together at Churchill Downs singing the same words about the same Bardstown estate that inspired them more than 170 years ago. Most of them have never been to Federal Hill. Most of them do not know the full story behind the song they are singing.
But they feel it. Every single year, they feel it.
That is what great songs do. They carry the place inside them even when the listener has never been there.
Federal Hill still stands today as My Old Kentucky Home State Park — open to everyone who wants to stand where Stephen Foster once stood and hear the song the way it was always meant to be heard. In the place that made it.
This shirt carries that place forward — the Federal Hill watercolor on the front and the back in the warm luminous palette that only watercolor can produce. The way the house looks in the long Kentucky light of a late afternoon when the bluegrass is at its most impossibly green, and the story behind the song feels close enough to touch.
Made for the locals. Inspired by the legends.
• Shirt color: Light Green
• 100% ring-spun cotton
• Fabric weight: 6.1 oz/yd² (206.8 g/m²)
• Garment-dyed
• Relaxed fit
• 7/8″ double-needle topstitched collar
• Twill-taped neck and shoulders for extra durability
• Double-needle armhole, sleeve, and bottom hems
• Blank product sourced from Honduras
Bardstown, KY: My Old Kentucky Home Tee
$33.00
Sale price
$33.00
Regular price
In 1852, a young songwriter from Pittsburgh, named Stephen Foster, visited Federal Hill — the grand antebellum estate on the edge of Bardstown, owned by his cousins, the Rowan family — and left with something he had not arrived with. A song. One that would outlast him, outlast the estate's original occupants, and outlast nearly every piece of American music written in the same century.
My Old Kentucky Home was published in 1853 and has never stopped being sung since.
Federal Hill is the kind of house that makes you understand immediately why it inspired a song. A Federal style mansion rising from the Kentucky bluegrass, with the grace and melancholy of the antebellum South at its most architecturally extraordinary. Wide rooms. Tall windows. The kind of quiet that settles over a place that has witnessed more history than it will ever fully tell.
The song became the official state song of Kentucky in 1928. It has been played at the Kentucky Derby every single year since 1921 — 150,000 people standing together at Churchill Downs singing the same words about the same Bardstown estate that inspired them more than 170 years ago. Most of them have never been to Federal Hill. Most of them do not know the full story behind the song they are singing.
But they feel it. Every single year, they feel it.
That is what great songs do. They carry the place inside them even when the listener has never been there.
Federal Hill still stands today as My Old Kentucky Home State Park — open to everyone who wants to stand where Stephen Foster once stood and hear the song the way it was always meant to be heard. In the place that made it.
This shirt carries that place forward — the Federal Hill watercolor on the front and the back in the warm luminous palette that only watercolor can produce. The way the house looks in the long Kentucky light of a late afternoon when the bluegrass is at its most impossibly green, and the story behind the song feels close enough to touch.
Made for the locals. Inspired by the legends.
• Shirt color: Light Green
• 100% ring-spun cotton
• Fabric weight: 6.1 oz/yd² (206.8 g/m²)
• Garment-dyed
• Relaxed fit
• 7/8″ double-needle topstitched collar
• Twill-taped neck and shoulders for extra durability
• Double-needle armhole, sleeve, and bottom hems
• Blank product sourced from Honduras
Size guide
| WIDTH (inches) | LENGTH (inches) | SLEEVE CENTER BACK (inches) | |
| S | 18 ¼ | 26 ⅝ | 16 ¼ |
| M | 20 ¼ | 28 | 17 ¾ |
| L | 22 | 29 ⅜ | 19 |
| XL | 24 | 30 ¾ | 20 ½ |
| 2XL | 26 | 31 ⅝ | 21 ¾ |
| 3XL | 27 ¾ | 32 ½ | 23 ¼ |
| 4XL | 29 ¾ | 33 ½ | 24 ⅝ |