Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 4).djvu/201

 *modation and attendance, are not surpassed in the United States, and there are several large houses, where people under the necessity of attending the courts, or detained for any time in Frankfort, can be accommodated with private lodgings. The erection of a permanent wooden bridge over the Kentucky has been lately commenced, which will be about one hundred and forty yards long from bank to bank, the surface of which is about fifty feet above low water mark. The present bridge of boats is about sixty-five yards between the abutments, and the river now at low water is eighty-seven yards wide. Three brigs have been built above the bridge, and sent down the Kentucky, the Ohio, and the Mississippi, but the Kentucky is not navigable during the low water of summer and fall. Coals are brought down it nearly three hundred miles and delivered in Frankfort at sixpence per bushel, but wood being yet tolerably plenty, they are used only in the penitentiary and by the blacksmiths.

There are several curious strata of marble, rising from the margin of the river, like steps of stairs, towards the top of the bank on the town side. The marble is covered by a stratum of blue limestone, which has {172} over it a super-*stratum of reddish clay and gravel mixed.

After dinner we visited the penitentiary accompanied by our landlord and Mr. William Hunter, a respectable printer and bookseller, and a genteel man, to whom I had brought a letter of introduction.[131] In our way we passed the government house, which is a good, plain, two story, brick building,