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Fayette County, Kentucky, has changed enormously since it was created in 1792. This collection contains government documents for the city of Lexington, for Fayette County, and for the merged Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government, as well as funeral notices, club directories, scrapbooks, image collections and a history of Lexington Public Library.

The Kentucky Room's collections contain Lexington's residential directories going back over 200 years, and are some of the most useful resources for researchers looking for family information, neighborhood histories, and house histories.
See what's currently on display at our art galleries.

The library has a variety of directories and yearbooks with local information. In the library's current digital collection, there is a selection of residential and street directories, yearbooks, school directories, and organizational directories. These are all fully word-searchable.

The Undesign the Redline project unearths the deep and systemic history of structural racism and inequality in the United States. This interactive exhibit explores policies like Redlining, their implications for today, and what we can do to undesign them.
The exhibit was created by social impact design studio designing the WE and has been invited to dozens of cities across the country. A local advisory group has helped to produce local history and stories about Redlining in Lexington.

Lexington's school system dates back to the city charter of 1831, and it first school opened in 1834.
The Lexington Public Library’s Digital Archives provide open access to researchers and students to learn more about the rich history of Lexington and Fayette County. It contains a fraction of the Library’s physical holdings, which are housed and available for reference in the Kentucky Room at the Central Library. New material is being digitized and added constantly, so there's always something new to find.
The archives have a simple keyword search, and it is possible to browse the collections by subject, area, or decade. The Lexington Public Library actively reviews and labels materials in our archives with statements that indicate how you may reuse the images, and what sort of permission, if any, you need to do so. Please check the information for each image to determine its legal status.


Fayette County's buildings contain a great deal of history about the region and its inhabitants.

Fayette County churches contain some of the earliest records and information preserved about central Kentucky history. The digital archive contents include church ledgers, minutes, directories, and informational brochures.

The Fayette County Images contains photographs of Lexington and Fayette County Kentucky.

The Lexington-Fayette County Health Department had its earliest form almost as long as the city itself has existed, when the newly formed city of Lexington would appoint a local physician to investigate reports of certain diseases for qu

While the focus of content in the digital archive is Fayette County, many other counties are represented. This list is in alphabetical order by county name for non-Fayette County content.
Anderson County
The Central Kentucky Cemeteries Maps are powered by Google Maps. Counties include: Fayette, Bourbon, Clark, Garrard, Harrison, Jessamine, Lincoln, Madison, Mercer, Montgomery, Nicholas, Powell, Scott, and Woodford.
A local history exhibit commemorating 250Lex from March 21 to July 13 at the Central Library Gallery, 140 East Main Street. The exhibit includes items from the library’s own Kentucky Room collection as well as loans from the Lexington History Museum, Keeneland, the University of Kentucky, and local residents.
With your free library card, gain access to a diverse collection of print books, ebooks, audiobooks, online classes and databases, and more. You can apply for a traditional, wallet-sized card and key chain tag or a digital library card to add to your smartphone’s digital wallet (iOS and Android compatible).