The visit will include community forums on Thursday and Saturday and tours of the community on Friday, as students get input from residents, explain some of their initial understandings of the area, and begin discussing some of their ideas for Owen in the years to come.
Brian Lee, a professor overseeing the landscape architecture program at UK, said the 17 undergraduate students involved with the project have already been busy researching Owen County’s history, culture and geography by reading books like “The Kentucky River” by William Ellis and studying information from databases such as the Kentucky Geography Network and the Kentucky State Data Center.
“It’s a show and tell, getting the students to understand more about the community, more about the landscape,” Lee said of the upcoming visit to the county. “We’re trying to find out as much as we can about the community.”
In all, the students have about three months’ time in their class, a capstone course for their degrees, to gather, prepare and present their findings.
“This is kind of our big jump into the real world,” said Katie Hardcastle, one of the students working on the project.
The group will present their work in the form of a slideshow presentation and spiral-bound book at an April 23 forum at the county extension building.
“What we’re doing, along with the community, is developing ideas,” Lee said about the project, which the university has done in counties throughout the state for the past couple of decades. “We don’t implement anything. We just make ideas available.”
Hardcastle said the project presents real-world challenges for the students in learning to work together as a group and listening to clients’ demands, in this case the demands of Owen County residents.
The students ultimately want to answer questions like “how does Owen County fit into Kentucky, and how does it fit into the global aspect of it all?” Hardcastle said, adding that one goal of the project is to bring the community together “as a cohesive body, so it’s all one county.”
A 7 p.m. meeting Thursday at the Owen County High School auditorium will allow students to get feedback from residents as they explain how they ended up in Owen County, what they have learned about the area prior to their visit, discuss the process and timeline for the project and tell people more about what is landscape architecture.
A second meeting will be held Saturday at 10 a.m. at the county extension building after students have completed tours of the area.
“The key to this whole partnership is between the students and the community,” Lee said.
Owen County Extension Agent Kim Strohmeier, who has been heavily involved with several groups focused on outlining a plan for Owen County’s future, arranged eight different tours for the students to take on Friday.
The eight groups will focus on a broad range of issues: arts and small-town government, farms and tourism, county government and infrastructure, community outreach and history, real estate and local development, small business and entrepreneurialism, wildlife and recreation, and resort areas and education.
Tours will include stops that canvas the county, Strohmeier said, including visits to many area churches and farms, the proposed site of a future Kentucky American water-processing plant, New Horizons Hospital, the Senior Citizens Center, the Elk Creek Hunt Club and Winery, the Kleber wildlife area and Perry Park, among numerous other locations.
Student groups will also meet with area business owners, government officials, church leaders and a panel of high school students, among others.
“They’ve spent a lot of time on this,” Strohmeier said. “This is a pretty impressive bunch of students. “
Another project Strohmeier has worked on, Owen 20/20, has helped the students understand some of the things community members want to see included when planning for the county’s future.
Lee said the 20/20 surveys have helped the group in at least a couple of ways, in that residents have already learned to work together for such a project and they have already expressed a sense of what they want the community to be.
“That’s one thing that impressed me about Owen County is the sense of community there,” Lee said. “The ball has already started rolling, and that makes it better for us.”
Hardcastle noted that many of the students working on the project are from a similar type of background to Owen County, having grown up in a rural Kentucky community.
“This is something that’s going to be a part of all of us and a part of our heritage,” she said.
But, despite the likeness to other Kentucky communities, Hardcastle said Owen County is unique in many ways. For instance, it has a golf course, winery and farmland within its borders.
“Initially we were going into the idea that it was another county and another project situation,” she said. “But this is completely different than most other places we’ve worked with.”
Lee said in addition to this week’s forums, students will host a meeting at the extension building to get feedback from the public on the group’s initial ideas.
“That’s a really critical meeting,” he said.
Students will use information from that meeting, in addition to ideas from the Owen 20/20 taskforce presentation on March 1, to tweak their final presentation, to be unveiled in late April.
Lee said the project is dependent on input from the community.
“Tell us if it will work,” he said. “Tell us if you have any ideas to make it better.”

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