Flowers for Danville, KY

On Christmas Day 1809, a Green County woman named Jane Todd Crawford rode sixty miles on horseback to a house on South Second Street, where Dr. Ephraim McDowell removed a twenty-two-pound tumor in the world's first successful abdominal surgery — no anesthesia, the whole town praying outside. Danville has been collecting firsts since before Kentucky was a state: the commonwealth's first constitution was drafted at Constitution Square, the nation's first state-supported school for the deaf opened here in 1823, and Centre College has twice put the town on the vice-presidential debate stage. Flowers move through all of it — get-well arrangements to the medical center that carries McDowell's name, recital bouquets to the Norton Center, June orders threading around the Great American Brass Band Festival crowds on Main Street.

Other Kentucky cities.