Old Fort Harrod State Park – US 1269
Activation Date – 07 October 2026
The signals came in weak at the start and grew stronger as the morning warmed. By the time I logged my longest contact of the morning, a station down in South Texas nearly a thousand miles off, the band had properly woken up. Twenty-two contacts before I packed up the SUV to move my second activation of the day.
This was Old Fort Harrod State Park, stop number eleven on my quest to put all 44 of Kentucky’s state parks on the air for Parks on the Air (POTA)— set up a radio in a park, work ten or more operators, and you’ve “activated” it. But of all the historic ground I’ve operated from, this is the one that comes first. Literally. James Harrod and his men built this fort in June of 1774 — a year before Daniel Boone founded Boonesborough — which makes it the first permanent settlement in Kentucky. Everything else in the Commonwealth, in a sense, is downstream of this spot.
The park today is a reconstructed fort: blockhouses, a cluster of pioneer cabins, a one-room “blab school” where lessons were recited aloud. The actual original fort site, fittingly and a little comically, lies under the modern parking lot. Progress paves over its own beginnings. Vocal school – Wikipedia
My setup was the usual — the FT-891, a hundred watts into the CHA-25SS vertical. The one wrinkle was the location: Old Fort Harrod lies inside the city of Harrodsburg, so I was operating inside a town, with the electrical hum of everyday life — the QRM, in ham shorthand — riding along under everything.
It’s the same lesson My Old Kentucky Home taught me back in August: a park in the middle of a town makes you work for every contact. But the cool air helped, the bands improved by the hour, and twenty-two in the log is nothing to apologize for.
Eleven parks in now, and the Bluegrass loop is nearly done. My activation plan breaks the State Park locations into regions. This park, along with the others in the Bluegrass region fell into my Bluegrass loop. My planning for today fell a bit short with me missing a nearby park for me to close the loop. I missed the Isaac Shelby Cemetery State Historic Site. I’ll have to come back. I have completed my Bardstown and Northern Kentucky loops. From here I move onto my South-Central loop.
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