Lexington-Fayette County largely lives up to its image as a land of galloping horses, prosperous farms and green hills accented by white rail fences. The result is a strong agricultural economy and an even stronger tourism industry, generating $880 million annually. But people here also realize that their county’s unique rural character is central to their quality of life and identity. And they act on that recognition by working to protect this heart of the Kentucky Bluegrass Region for future generations.

A future champion surveys the track at the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington-Fayette County, the heart of the Kentucky Bluegrass Region.

Almost a century ago, the City of Lexington and Fayette County recognized the interdependence of the urbanized core and its surrounding countryside. Even though the City and County did not formally consolidate until 1974, the two governments formed a joint city/county planning department and commission in 1928. In 1958, the City and County adopted an Urban Service Area, creating the first urban growth boundary in the United States and six years later adopted a minimum ten-acre lot size for most land in the Rural Service Area. In the 1990s, the ten-acre rural zoning became increasingly less effective at discouraging rural development as evidenced by the creation of over 400 ten-acre lots between 1990 and 1998. A study conducted in 1999 demonstrated that the land converted to ten-acre lots in that nine-year period consumed more land than the area used by all other development (residential, commercial and industrial) within the Urban Service Area during the same time frame. As a result, in 1999, the minimum lot size in the rural area was changed to 40 acres.

In the year 2000, the Lexington-Fayette County Purchase of Development Rights (PDR) Program was adopted, becoming the first agricultural easement program adopted by a local government in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. The PDR program proposes to buy easements on 50,000 acres of rural land within 20 years using $120 million from a combination of local, state and federal funding. The local funding portion is budgeted annually by Lexington-Fayette County. As of 2008, the PDR program had permanently preserved 196 farms with a total of 22,589 acres. Of this total, conservation easements donated by the landowners preserved 33 farms containing 1,610 acres.

In 1972, the Commonwealth of Kentucky bought over 1,200 acres of land in northern Fayette County that had been used to raise Thoroughbred horses long before the Civil War. Today, the Kentucky Horse Park is essentially a theme park devoted to horses, including horse museums, horse-drawn trolley rides, horse barns, horse monuments, horse shows and special events of all kinds as long as they involve horses. Kentucky also preserves two historic sites in Fayette County: Waveland, an early 19th-century plantation, and Boone Station, the settlement that pioneer Daniel Boone called home between 1779 and 1782.

In addition to farmland, Lexington-Fayette County is also working to preserve its natural heritage with over 100 parks and two nature preserves. The largest of these is Raven Run Nature Sanctuary, which protects 734 acres of land along the Kentucky River and provides a home to over 600 species of plants and 200 species of birds. Raven Run also features a ten-mile trail system allowing hikers to discover remnants left by the early settlers including a lime kiln and a network of dry stone walls now grown over with vines and wildflowers.

Preservation organizations are also working to preserve Fayette County land. The Bluegrass Conservancy alone holds donated easements on almost 1,000 acres in Fayette County. The Conservancy works with the Kentucky Heritage Council, the Bluegrass Trust for Historic Preservation and the University of Kentucky’s Center for Historic Architecture and Preservation to protect over 1.2-million acres in seven Kentucky counties identified by the World Monument Fund as the Bluegrass Cultural Landscape. The Fund’s World Monuments Watch placed the Bluegrass Cultural Landscape on its 2006 list of the 100 most endangered sites on earth following the loss of 80,000 acres of farmland in this seven-county region in the prior decade. Thankfully, the people of Lexington-Fayette County recognize the uniqueness of their portion of this endangered region and are taking steps to protect it permanently.