Elizabethtown is a county seat laid out in wheel pattern. The hub is a red brick courthouse that looks like a modern rural school building. Around it runs a narrow, traffic-packed street broken at four places by the highways that enter the town amidst the two-story shops that surround the circle. Beyond this central business section the radiating streets pass neat, well-spaced dwellings with spreading old trees on the roomy lawns.
Elizabethtown is a busy trading center for a rather large rural area in which livestock, tobacco and grain are produced. On county court days, if the Hardin County farmer has caught up with his chores, he generally comes to town to listen in during the court sessions. On Saturdays he puts the family into the old car, or the jolt wagon, along with farm products he wants to trade, and they all come to town and spend the day selling their wares, buying groceries and dry goods, and wandering around in their neighborhoods.
Works Progress Administration, Federal Writers' Project, Kentucky, A Guide to the Bluegrass State, American Guide Series, Harcourt Brace and Company, New York, 1939.