What to See in Danville - Top Sights and Attractions

Museum in Danville, Kentucky. Constitution Square Historic Site is a 3-acre park and open-air museum in Danville, Kentucky. From 1937 to 2012, it was a part of the Kentucky state park system and operated by the Kentucky Department of Parks. When dedicated in 1942, it was known as John G. Weisiger Memorial State Park, honoring the brother of Emma Weisiger, who donated the land for the park. Later, it was known as Constitution Square State Shrine and then Constitution Square State Historic Site. On March 6, 2012, the Department of Parks ceded control of the site to the county government of Boyle County, Kentucky, and its name was then changed to Constitution Square Historic Site.

The park celebrates the early political history of the U.S. state of Kentucky. It features replicas of three buildings that stood on the original city square, including the courthouse that housed ten constitutional conventions between 1785 and 1792; these conventions ultimately led to Kentucky's separation from Virginia. It also includes the original building that housed the first U.S. post office west of the Allegheny Mountains and several other early 19th century buildings of historical import. The site comprises the majority of the Constitution Square Historic District which was added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 2, 1976. Among the annual events held at the site are the Great American Brass Band Festival and the Kentucky State Barbecue Festival.^[3]

The Confederate Monument in Danville, located between Centre College and the Presbyterian Church of Danville at the corner of Main and College Streets in Danville, Kentucky, was a monument dedicated to the Confederate States of America that is on the National Register of Historic Places. The monument was dedicated in 1910 by the surviving veterans of the Confederacy of Boyle County, Kentucky and the Kate Morrison Breckinridge Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The monument consists of a granite pedestal and a marble statue resting thereon. The marble figure depicts Captain Robert D. Logan, who actually came from Lincoln County, Kentucky, but lived after the war in Boyle County. Captain Logan served under John Hunt Morgan in the 6th Kentucky Cavalry's Company A, and was captured after Morgan's Raid in Cheshire, Ohio on July 20, 1863, and spent much of the war afterwards in prison camps, particularly the Ohio State Penitentiary. He died on June 25, 1896, fourteen years before the construction of the monument. The granite pedestal is twelve feet tall, and uses pairs of Doric columns to decorate it. The main inscription reads: C. S. A. 1861 - 1865 What They Were the Whole World Knows.

Danville's participation in the war was limited. The courthouse and several buildings of Centre College served as hospitals for Union forces after the Battle of Perryville. On October 11, Confederate forces retreated through the city with a Union force behind them. Danville was also the birthplace of Theodore O'Hara, whose Bivouac of the Dead would be a popular poem placed in various cemeteries for the War's dead.

After the war, many citizens of Danville gave up their eventual burial spots in the city's Bellevue Cemetery to form a Confederate cemetery in 1868, with 66 fallen Confederate soldiers reinterred there. This cemetery adjoins the Danville National Cemetery (1862) that was reserved for former Union troops.

In 2019, the Session of The Presbyterian Church of Danville voted to remove the monument from church grounds and petitioned the City of Danville to allow the monument's relocation to Bellevue Cemetery. After the City refused to allow the relocation, the UDC selected an alternative site in Meade County, Kentucky and, with the agreement of The Presbyterian Church, removed the monument from the church's property on December 29, 2021.

On July 17, 1997, the Confederate Monument in Danville was one of sixty different monuments related to the Civil War in Kentucky placed on the National Register of Historic Places, as part of the Civil War Monuments of Kentucky Multiple Property Submission. Three other monuments on the MPS are also in Boyle County, all of which commemorate the Battle of Perryville. These are the Confederate Monument in Perryville and Union Monument in Perryville, both by the visitor center at Perryville Battlefield State Historic Site, and the Unknown Confederate Dead Monument in Perryville, located in a nearby private cemetery.^[5]

The Boyle County Courthouse, at Main and 4th Sts. in Danville, Kentucky, was built in 1862. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.

The listing was for the two-building complex of the courthouse and the associated jail, built in 1875, and Mid-town Park, in between.

The courthouse was designed by architect James R. Carrigan to replace the former courthouse, destroyed in the Great Fire of 1860. Soon after the courthouse was completed, the bloodiest American Civil War battle in Kentucky occurred, the Battle of Perryville, on October 8, 1862. Like all other large buildings in town, the courthouse was commandeered to serve as a hospital. Court was held elsewhere in 1873, and some damage to the courthouse was still being repaired from 1873 to 1875.^[6]