abstract:The Kentucky Derby Festival is an annual festival held in Louisville, Kentucky during the two weeks preceding the first Saturday in May, the day of the Kentucky Derby. The festival, Kentucky's largest single annual event, first ran from 1935–1937, and restarted in 1956The Derby itself began in 1875 at Churchill Downs.
Louisville barely registers on most folks' list of hip places to travel, but it comes alive each year in the days before the first Saturday in May when this not-quite Southern, not-quite Midwestern Ohio River town turns on the charm for the KentuckyDerbyFestival.