Perryville Battlefield State Historic Site – US-3785
Activation Date – 07 October 2026
Points south to me were dead air. I could work Arizona fifteen hundred miles to the west, I reached up into Canada and pulled in a station on Prince Edward Island off the Atlantic coast — but points south there was nothing. Not a single contact south of me. I could barely hear stations when I attempted a park-to-park contact and they couldn’t hear me. The bands do that sometimes. Some atmospheric mood I’ll never fully understand decides which way your signal travels and which way it vanishes. I didn’t have this issue in my earlier activation. All you can do is work what’s open. Which, fittingly, is exactly the strange thing this ground is famous for.
This was Perryville Battlefield, the quiet afternoon half of a two-park day. I started the morning in the middle of signal noisy Harrodsburg and ended it here, in a warm, hushed field in Boyle County. Stop number twelve on my quest to put all 44 of Kentucky’s state parks on the air. Set up a radio, work ten or more operators, and the park counts as “activated” in the Parks on the Air (POTA) program.
But Perryville is no ordinary quiet field. On October 8th, 1862 — a hundred and sixty-four years ago tomorrow, as it happened. This was the site of the largest Civil War battle ever fought in Kentucky. Some 7,600 men fell here in a single afternoon. The Confederates won the ground but then withdrew to Tennessee, abandoning their campaign for Kentucky, and the state stayed in Union hands for the rest of the war. It was the day Kentucky’s fate got decided, right under where I’d planted my antenna. Quite literally. My POTA station was near this marker:
Here’s the part that stopped me when I read about it later. The Union commander that day, Don Carlos Buell, was only a couple of miles away from the fighting and he never heard the battle. An “acoustic shadow,” they call it: a quirk of wind and terrain and air density that bends sound up and over a listener, so that a roar of thousands of muskets and cannon simply doesn’t arrive. Buell sat there believing nothing much was happening while one of the bloodiest afternoons in Kentucky history unfolded just beyond a ridge. He didn’t commit most of his army until it was nearly over.
I sat in that same field a hundred and sixty-four years later, watching my signal refuse to go south. Whole directions open or shut by the invisible mood of the atmosphere. I am sure it is more scientific than that, but I the irony of the situation remains for me. Buell couldn’t hear Perryville. I couldn’t raise parks in Georgia or Florida. Same physics, different wave, and a strange thread tying a man sitting under a picnic shelter to a general who missed his own battle.
Twenty-one contacts in the log before I packed up, every one of them north, east, or west. The park was gorgeous and still, the kind of still that makes it hard to picture what happened here. And driving home through the turning hills — I’ve been meaning to say this — I keep being struck by how beautiful this state is, park to park, back road to back road. That’s half of why I’m doing this, if I’m honest. The ten contacts are the excuse. The Commonwealth rolling by the windshield is my reward. By the time my POTA quest ends, I will have seen more of my beautiful state than I could have ever hoped.
A dozen parks down. The Bluegrass loop is just about finished, and I ended it on the ground where Kentucky, in a very real sense, chose its future.
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