The Commonwealth: Divided We Fall

Exhibition Now On View—Get Tickets

In May 2023, at the 2023 American Alliance of Museums Annual Meeting & MuseumExpo in Denver, the AAM presented the Frazier an award for the advancement of Diversity, Equity, Access, and Inclusion, citing The Commonwealth. Read more here!

Featuring an array of objects, replicas, and walk-in installations, The Commonwealth: Divided We Fall takes visitors on a winding journey through the lives of everyday Kentuckians, from pre-settlement to the early 1900s.

At the beginning, visitors enter an immersive space that simulates the sights and sounds of nature in presettlement Kentucky, with lush foliage overhead and touch-screen water underfoot. Populating the water are creatures central to Shawnee, Cherokee, and Chickasaw myths and origin stories.

Arrowheads, spearheads, scrapers, awls, drills, fishhooks, and tattoo needles loaned by Corn Island Archaeology illustrate the lives of indigenous residents dating to the Archaic, Paleoindian, Woodland, and Pre-contact eras. Wall panels offer insights into Native-European contact, domestic life on the frontier, and combat during the Revolutionary War; others define foundational concepts such as "extractive" versus "settler colonialism" and profile settlers such as William Croghan, Robert Craddock, and Pierre Tardiveau.

Boarding a replica early 1800s riverboat modeled on Enterprise, the first steamboat to ascend the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, visitors learn how Louisville became a port town and logistics hub long before the days of UPS cargo planes. Objects that belonged to settler George Rogers Clark, Gov. Isaac Shelby, Congressman Henry Clay, and emancipationist Cassius Marcellus Clay appear in "Architects of the Commonwealth."

Topics explored include the road to statehood, the Constitution of Kentucky, the formation of villages at Louisville, Lexington, and Maysville; the War of 1812, the rise of the Whig Party, the emergence of the middle class; the evolution of industry, trade, and transportation; slave revolts, free black communities, and abolitionism. A replica Choctaw Academy diploma represents the Indian boarding school that operated in Scott County from 1818 to 1842.

Mounted opposite the boat is an original clock face and columns from the Town Clock Church, an Underground Railroad stop in New Albany whose congregation was actively engaged in the hiding, feeding, medical care, and transport of enslaved persons from areas of danger to freedom.

Past the clock, visitors traverse a replica Slave Cabin furnished with hundreds of blown glass replicas created from 3D scans of two artifacts—a spoon and a cowbell—that belonged to enslaved persons. Designed and created by artist Ché Rhodes in partnership with the (Un)Known Project, the Slave Cabin provides visitors with an immersive environment in which they can reflect on the stories of enslaved Kentuckians.

In the Civil War room, artifacts of battle include a Confederate flag likely carried into the Battle of Seven Pines, a Union snare drum and complete infantry soldier's uniform, and a Virgin Mary amulet a Christian soldier would have carried. Also on display is the Bloedner Monument, a limestone memorial honoring the German-American Union infantry soldiers who died in the Battle of Rowlett's Station in December 1861.

Carved in January 1862, the Bloedner Monument is the oldest surviving memorial to the American Civil War. An original telegraph table and letters, including a letter Clinton County—born Confederate guerilla and war criminal Champ Ferguson wrote three days before his execution, are on display.

Additional topics include life after the Civil War, the Lost Cause mythology, the G. A. R. (Grand Army of the Republic), whose members were Union Army, Navy, and Marines veterans; and the Freedmen's Bureau. A corn cutter and tobacco cutters are on display with information about agriculture, labor unions, citizen uprisings, the Tollgate Wars, and the Black Patch Tobacco Wars. On display is a ribbon from the 1900 funeral wreath of assassinated Gov. William Goebel and an early 1900s souvenir hatchet emblazoned with the likeness of temperance movement leader Carrie Nation.

After passing through Murphy's General Store, an 1890s-style country store replica stocked with faux vegetable crops, spices, elixirs, toy soldiers, and household products, visitors enter a 1910s bar named the Knight Owl where they can post up on a stool and read about immigrants to Kentucky.

Replica portraits of Kentucky immigrants include Serur Dawahare, a Syrian-American who peddled wares at coal camps in Appalachia in 1907, and Chin Ming, the first Chinese-American to operate a restaurant in Kentucky in 1920. Wall panels touch on the impact of anti-immigrant sentiment, including 1855's Bloody Monday, when Protestant mobs attacked Irish and German Catholic neighborhoods in Louisville.

The name Knight Owl is a nod to the medieval armor the Frazier originally displayed—a cornerstone exhibition from 2004 to 2015—and the name of the museum's founder, Owsley Brown Frazier.