The Story

Plain Jane
was supposed to be
the last one.

The name was a joke. A way to keep track of how many banana bread recipes a home baker had tried and failed to perfect. The plan was to stop at one. Then twelve. Then thirty-one. Then fifty.

The Baker

Renee
Adamson.

Renee has been baking since she was nine years old, when her grandmother handed her a bunch of overripe bananas and said “do something with those.” Two decades later, she's still doing something with them.

Fifty recipes' worth, to be exact.

She bakes every loaf herself, in her Franklin, KY kitchen, with the same oven she's had for twelve years. She will not tell you the brand.

Ingredients laid out in Renee Adamson's Franklin, KY kitchen

The Process

How it's made.

The banana test

Only bananas past the point of eating make the cut. Spotted, soft, nearly black. Renee can tell by smell alone.

The batter

Each shade has its own ratio. Some call for melted butter. Some call for browned butter. A few call for something she won't put in writing.

The bake

One oven. One temperature. One rack position. She's been baking long enough to know when a loaf is done before the timer.

Your pickup

Baked when you order. Never before. You come to Franklin, KY. You leave with something warm.

Franklin, Kentucky

Two centuries
of standing
still.

Founded on a primed well, divided by a war, visited by Johnny Cash, and briefly made famous by a UFO. Franklin has always been more interesting than it lets on.

1819
Founded on a trick.
Simpson County is carved from Warren, Logan, and Allen Counties on January 28th. Two sites compete for the county seat. William Hudspeth's land wins, not on merit, but because he secretly hauled water from Drake's Creek to prime a dry well the night before the commissioners came to inspect. They chose his land based on a well that wasn't real.
Joseph Duplessis, 1778 / Public Domain
1820
112 people and a name.
Franklin is officially incorporated on November 2nd by Legislative Act of the General Assembly. Named for Benjamin Franklin. The whole town is 112 residents. Streets run 80 feet wide, laid out in squares around a log courthouse. The county calls itself the Garden Spot of Southern Kentucky and means it.
Wikimedia Commons
1859
The railroad pulls through.
October 27th: the first Louisville-to-Nashville train completes its 187-mile run and passes through Franklin. Simpson County citizens subscribed $100,000 in railroad stock to make it happen. The locomotive that made the trip was named The Simpson. Hotels go up. Commerce triples. The town stops being remote.
1861
A county divided.
The Civil War splits Simpson County down the middle. Confederate guerrillas operate through the region. The jailer's residence (built in 1830) fills with prisoners. Their names and drawings are still scratched into the walls of the north room. On June 28, 1867, the only legal hanging in Simpson County's history is carried out in the courthouse square.
1882
The courthouse burns.
May 17th: an arsonist sets fire to the courthouse. It burns to the ground. Franklin rebuilds within 15 months. Same square, same center-of-town position, new stone structure designed by the McDonald Brothers of Louisville. That building still stands today, still the anchor of downtown, still the first thing you orient yourself by.
Library of Congress / Carol M. Highsmith Archive
1948
Something in the sky.
January 7th: Captain Thomas Mantell of the Kentucky Air National Guard dies when his P-51 crashes near Franklin while pursuing an unidentified flying object. Eyewitnesses across Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee reported the same object. It becomes one of the earliest and most widely publicized UFO-related fatalities in American history. A historical marker still stands at the Simpson County Tourism office.
U.S. Air Force / Public Domain
1968
Five-minute wedding.
March 1st: Johnny Cash and June Carter drive to Franklin to get married at First United Methodist Church. They chose Franklin specifically because Tennessee required a three-day waiting period. The ceremony lasts approximately five minutes. The only witnesses are townspeople who happened to be in the balcony. Franklin doesn't make a fuss about it. That's Franklin.
Joel Baldwin for LOOK Magazine, 1969 / Public Domain
Now
Fifty recipes in.
One home kitchen. One oven Renee won't tell you the brand of. Fifty banana bread recipes numbered by shade and baked to order. Franklin is still 112 square miles of stubborn, unhurried Southern Kentucky. The best things here have always been worth the drive.