Waveland State Historic Site – US-3786
Activation Date – 23 September 2026
England answered. I had been working the higher bands in a light cool mist, not expecting much, and then a station in eastern England came back to my park-to-park call — thirty-nine hundred miles, across the whole Atlantic, on a hundred watts and a vertical antenna staked in a Kentucky lawn. First time I’d ever reached across the ocean from a POTA activation. I sat there a second just letting it land. You chase a thing like that for a while before it finally happens.
This was Waveland State Historic Site, stop number nine on my quest to put all 44 of Kentucky’s state parks on the air for Parks on the Air — set up a radio, work ten or more operators, and the park’s “activated.” But Waveland sits on ground with a familiar name attached. The land was once Daniel Boone’s. He surveyed some two thousand acres out here and handed a piece of it to his nephew — Daniel Boone Bryan, the son of Boone’s sister, Mary, who settled it back in 1786. I keep bumping into Boone on this POTA project of mine, at his fort and his battlefield, and here he was again. This time he appeared as the man who gave the place away to family.
The grand house came two generations later. Joseph Bryan built the “Big House” in the 1840s in the Greek Revival style — a columned portico, a soaring entry hall, a front doorway modeled on a temple on the Athenian Acropolis, fourteen-foot ceilings to hold the summer heat at bay.
It’s also honest about what it was, and I’ll be too: Waveland was a plantation, growing hemp and grain, and the Bryans enslaved people here — a dozen by the 1850 census, eighteen by 1860. A two-story brick slave quarters still stands on the grounds, a few steps from the beautiful portico. You can’t tour the one without seeing the other, and you shouldn’t. The slave quarters still stand on the grounds, a few steps from the beautiful portico. The same hands that make a place lovely are not always the hands that are remembered in its name. I set up my little station on the grounds of both. I think the right thing to do is just say so. https://www.nhcnow.com/blog/waveland-state-historic-site-lexington-ky/
The radio part was the best technical day I’d had to that point. The mist kept things cool and I worked four bands — fifteen, seventeen, twenty, and forty meters — which is the most I’d stretched across in a single activation. Toward the end of my activation some farm-edge QRM added signal noise, but it didn’t matter at that point. I reached the US West Coast one direction and England the other, fourteen contacts spanning most of a continent and then some.
That England contact was my longest ever — for about a week. I’ve since reached France from another park and nudged the record out past four thousand miles. But Waveland was the first time the Atlantic opened for me at a park, and you don’t forget the first one.
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