Rob Stone Shoots, Hebron, KY (2026)

09/09/2026

FROM FOSTER TO DOVER, KENTUCKY, I TOOK THE BACKROADS THROUGH MINERVA… AND THERE’S A LOT MORE HISTORY OUT HERE THAN I EXPECTED.

📍 Minerva, Kentucky

My last photo from Foster was the little Bradford Schoolhouse. From there I just kept going, following the backroads through the hills into Mason County, passing old farms and some really beautiful old homes as I made my way through Minerva and eventually toward Dover.

Looking at some of these houses made me curious about Minerva itself, so I did a little digging. Turns out this quiet little place was once a pretty active community. By the 1870s there were churches, schools, blacksmiths, stores, to***co dealers, a physician, a boarding house and even Minerva Collegiate Institute here. Dover, about five miles away on the Ohio River, was the nearest shipping point, with to***co, livestock and other farm products from this area making their way to the river.

And those old houses aren’t just a coincidence. Minerva and the surrounding countryside were once known for some impressive homes and plantations. One name that kept coming up in the history was John Paddy, a free Black brick mason who lived in Mason County. He is credited with building a number of the area’s homes during the 1850s, some of which are still standing today.

Here’s another one I definitely didn’t know. Stanley Forman Reed was born in Minerva in 1884. He went from this tiny Kentucky community all the way to Washington, where he served on the United States Supreme Court from 1938 until 1957.

Today you can drive these roads and see little more than farms, fields and old houses, but there was a whole community and economy operating out here, with Dover and the Ohio River connecting it to the outside world.

These are some of the things I saw between Foster and Dover. And since I eventually ended up down along the river in Dover, that’s where we’re going next.

09/09/2026

Good morning from Hebron Ky 🌅

09/09/2026

WHO’S BEEN TO FOSTER, KENTUCKY?

📍 Foster, Kentucky

If you’ve ever driven Route 8 along the Ohio River through Bracken County, you’ve probably passed through Foster. Today it’s a small community that only takes a minute or two to drive through, but I started digging into its history and found out there used to be quite a bit going on here.

Foster started as a river town near the mouth of Holts Creek and was named for Israel Foster, an early settler and large landowner in the area. With riverboats stopping here, the community became known as Foster’s Landing. A post office opened under that name in 1847, and in January 1850 the name was shortened to Foster and the town was incorporated.

By the late 1800s, Foster had grown into a busy little community. There were to***co warehouses, shoe and cigar factories, a bank, hotel and other businesses here. The C&O Railroad reached Foster in 1888, giving the town another connection to the outside world in addition to the Ohio River. Historical records from the 1890s put the population at around 200 people, which gives you an idea of just how different the community once looked.

Like so many small towns along the Ohio River, Foster changed as the world around it changed. Transportation evolved, industries and businesses came and went, and over the generations the population became smaller. Foster eventually dissolved its incorporation in 1999, and the 2010 Census counted 44 people living here. It’s still a community today, just a much quieter one than it was more than a century ago.

The history around Foster actually goes back long before the town existed. In 1793, a group of Native Americans crossed the Ohio River and concealed their canoes near the mouth of Holts Creek before heading into Bourbon County to take horses. Simon Kenton gathered a group of men and waited four days for them to return. When they did, Kenton’s group ambushed them, killing six, scattering the others and recovering the horses. There’s still a Kentucky historical marker in Foster telling the story today.

One of the things that brought me out this way was the Bradford Schoolhouse, just outside Foster. It’s a surviving one room schoolhouse where one teacher taught grades one through eight, usually with around 25 students a year sharing the same room. The school remained in use until around 1929 to 1930, when consolidation was changing rural education across Kentucky. Thankfully the building survived, and in 2003 the Bradford Schoolhouse was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

That’s one of the reasons I enjoy stopping in these smaller Kentucky communities instead of just driving through them. Foster may look a lot different than it did during the days of riverboats, to***co warehouses and the railroad, but the history is still here if you know what you’re looking for.

Who’s been to Foster, or does anyone have old photos or stories from when more of these businesses were still here?

09/08/2026

This frog and my iPhone have me wanting to dabble in macro photography 📸🐸

09/08/2026

TAKE A LOOK AROUND UNDER ONE OF KENTUCKY’S MOST FAMOUS NATURAL LANDMARKS.

📍 Natural Bridge State Resort Park, Slade, Kentucky

Here’s a full 360° view from directly underneath Natural Bridge. Drag the photo around and you can look straight up at the massive sandstone arch, back down the trail and all around the surrounding cliffs and forest.

Natural Bridge spans 78 feet and rises about 65 feet above the ground. People have been coming here as tourists since the late 1800s, when the railroad developed the area as a private attraction and brought visitors in on excursion trains. In 1926, the land became one of Kentucky’s original state parks.

It’s one of those Kentucky places that’s been photographed a million different ways, so I figured I’d photograph it in a way that lets you stand there and look around for yourself.

Drag the photo around for the full 360° view.

09/08/2026

YOU DIDN’T EVEN KNOW YOU WANTED TO EXPLORE AN ABANDONED MINIATURE RAILROAD… WITH A TUNNEL AND A FAKE WESTERN TOWN.

📍 Crestview Hills, Kentucky

Hidden behind that massive Columbia Sussex building along I 275 was something most people around Northern Kentucky probably never knew was there.

The Richwood Tahoe Railroad.

The railroad opened in 2009 and ran for about a mile and a half around the property. And this wasn’t just a model train. It used 24 inch gauge track and had a real working 2 6 0 steam locomotive, No. 12, built by Mammoth Locomotive Works in Colorado specifically for the railroad.

Paul Hemmer Company, which handled construction of the Columbia Sussex headquarters, also oversaw construction of the railroad itself.

The train wound through the property, past a little fake Western town and through a tunnel. The tunnel wasn’t just for looks either. It doubled as the railroad’s storage and maintenance shop, complete with water, electricity, lights and a work pit.

The Richwood Tahoe Railroad was used for special events and charity fundraisers. People could come out, ride the train and help raise money for local organizations.

But it didn’t last very long.

Operations ended around 2015. There doesn’t appear to be an official public explanation for why it shut down, although people familiar with the railroad later pointed to changes in leadership and a loss of interest in keeping it operating.

Then it just sat.

The locomotive remained stored inside the tunnel for years while the railroad slowly became overgrown. In 2022, No. 12, the cars, track and other railroad equipment were finally sold and removed. No. 12 eventually ended up in private ownership in Arizona.

But they didn’t take everything.

The tunnel is still here.

Parts of the little Western town are still here.

And unless you knew the story, you could drive past this place a thousand times and never know the Richwood Tahoe Railroad once wound through the woods behind that giant office building.

So naturally, I went looking for what’s left. This video starts in 2020 and then cuts to 2024.

09/08/2026

360° FROM THE TOP OF THE ROEBLING.

📍 Cincinnati, Ohio / Covington, Kentucky

Here’s a view you don’t get every day. This 360° photo was taken from the very top of the south tower of the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge.

The bridge opened in 1867 and, at 1,057 feet between its towers, was the longest suspension bridge in the world at the time. John A. Roebling later designed the Brooklyn Bridge, and you can definitely see the family resemblance.

More than 150 years later, the Roebling is still carrying people across the Ohio River between Cincinnati and Covington.

Drag the photo around and have a look in every direction. You can see Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky and the Ohio River from a perspective very few people ever get to experience.

09/08/2026

THIS CINCINNATI LANDMARK SURVIVED PROHIBITION, BECAME HOME TO ONE OF THE CITY’S BIGGEST BREWERIES AND SAT ABANDONED FOR MORE THAN 30 YEARS. IN 2019, I FILMED ITS FINAL DAYS.

📍 Cincinnati, Ohio

I filmed this back in 2019 as the old Hudepohl Brewery in Queensgate was being demolished. The first half of the video is my flyover of what was still standing. The second half is something you definitely can’t go back and film today…the wrecking ball taking it down.

The history of this property actually goes back even farther than Hudepohl. Beer was being brewed on this site along West Sixth Street as far back as the 1860s, and it eventually became home to the Lackman Brewery.

Hudepohl itself was founded in Cincinnati in 1885 by Ludwig Hudepohl and George Kotte after they bought the Buckeye Brewery. Unlike a lot of Cincinnati breweries, Hudepohl managed to survive Prohibition by making near beer and soft drinks. The old Lackman property was used for other purposes during Prohibition, including ice cream production, before Hudepohl acquired it after Prohibition ended.

Hudepohl kept expanding the Sixth Street brewery and eventually moved all of its brewing operations here in 1958. By around that time Hudepohl had become Cincinnati’s largest brewer, producing hundreds of thousands of barrels a year. If you grew up around Cincinnati, there’s a good chance you remember names like Hudepohl 14-K and Hudy Delight. Hudepohl was also closely tied to Cincinnati sports, sponsoring Reds broadcasts and producing special cans celebrating the Reds and Bengals.

But local breweries were getting crushed by the national beer companies. Budweiser, Miller and the other giants had bigger advertising budgets and a much larger reach. By the 1980s Hudepohl was producing only a fraction of what it had at its peak. Hudepohl merged with another Cincinnati brewery, Schoenling, in 1986. Schoenling had the more modern brewery on Central Parkway, so production at this old Queensgate plant ended in 1987.

And then it sat.

For more than 30 years.

Fires gutted parts of the complex in the 1990s, redevelopment plans went nowhere and the buildings continued falling apart. By the time the Port bought the property for $400,000 in 2014, this wasn’t just an old abandoned brewery anymore. It was a massive environmental cleanup.

There was asbestos throughout the site, including an enormous outdoor pile of contaminated demolition debris. The EPA eventually stepped in and completed a major cleanup in 2018 before the remaining buildings could safely be demolished.

There was an effort to see if at least the famous HUDEPOHL smokestack could be saved. Engineers inspected it and found failing mortar joints and other serious problems. Just repairing and stabilizing the 170 foot stack was estimated at nearly $1 million, and that didn’t include the additional cost of protecting it while everything around it was demolished.

Ultimately, they decided it just wasn’t financially realistic to save it.

So in 2019, after more than three decades of sitting abandoned, the old brewery came down. On June 16, the wrecking ball began taking down the Hudepohl smokestack too, removing something that had been part of Cincinnati’s skyline for generations.

That’s what makes this old footage pretty special to me now. I wasn’t just filming another abandoned building. I happened to catch one of Cincinnati’s great brewing landmarks right at the end of its story.

The first half is what was left.

The second half is the end.

09/07/2026

HAVE A LOOK INSIDE THE BURIAL VAULT OF A U.S. PRESIDENT… AND ONE OF THE STRANGEST GRAVE ROBBING STORIES I’VE EVER COME ACROSS.

📍 North Bend, Ohio

It’s interesting enough being just a few feet away from William Henry Harrison, the 9th President of the United States. Harrison is famously known for having the shortest presidency in American history, dying just 31 days after taking office in 1841.

But there’s another man buried in here with a pretty wild story of his own.

John Scott Harrison was William Henry Harrison’s son and the father of Benjamin Harrison, who would later become the 23rd President. That makes John Scott Harrison the only man in American history to have both his father and his son serve as President of the United States.

Then there’s what happened after he died.

John died in 1878 and was buried in the family burial grounds here at North Bend. Grave robbing was a real problem at the time, with bodies being stolen for use in medical schools. The Harrison family knew the danger. On the day of John’s funeral, they discovered that the nearby grave of a young man named Augustus Devin had already been robbed and his body was missing.

They took extra precautions with John. A cemented brick vault was built around his casket, the grave was filled with heavy stones and earth, and a watchman was hired to check it every hour at night for a week.

It still wasn’t enough.

The very next day, two men, including one of John’s sons, went to Cincinnati with search warrants looking for Devin’s missing body. Their search took them to the Ohio Medical College. They didn’t find Devin, but they did notice a rope leading down through a trap door into a chute.

Hanging from the other end was the naked body of John Scott Harrison.

The man they had just buried.

And if this story wasn’t strange enough already, Devin’s missing body was eventually traced all the way to the University of Michigan, where it was found in a vat of brine.

Today John Scott Harrison rests inside this tomb with his father, William Henry Harrison, his mother Anna and other members of the Harrison family. There are 24 burial vaults inside, and several of the sealed vaults aren’t even marked.

So have a look around inside the tomb of America’s shortest serving president, where you’ll also find the only man in American history whose father AND son both became President… and whose body was stolen from his grave almost immediately after he was buried.

Pretty wild history sitting on a hill above the Ohio River.

09/07/2026

Maysville KY. If you know , you know and you don't, you should really go check it out.

Rob Stone Shoots

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