When renovation crews at Buffalo Trace Distillery uncovered the buried ruins of a 19th-century distillery, RSET scanning preserved the discovery as a permanent, explorable digital twin.
Some of the most important scanning work isn’t planned months in advance — it happens because someone found something they didn’t expect to find.
In 2016, renovation crews at Buffalo Trace Distillery in Frankfort, Kentucky were reinforcing a building known internally as the Dickel Building, preparing to convert it into an event space. While digging along the load-bearing walls on the first floor, workers uncovered brick and limestone structures buried beneath the concrete — the remains of a distillery no one on site knew was still down there.
Buffalo Trace brought in bourbon archaeologist Nicolas Laracuente and historian Carolyn Brooks to help piece together what had been found. What emerged was the buried footprint of the O.F.C. Distillery, originally built by the legendary Colonel E.H. Taylor in 1869, rebuilt larger in 1873, destroyed by a lightning-sparked fire in 1882, and rebuilt again almost immediately on the very same spot. Each time the site was rebuilt, the old foundation was left largely undisturbed underneath — which is exactly what preserved it, sealed under a concrete floor poured decades later, until the 2016 renovation broke through. Pristine from an archaeological viewpoint.
The site quickly earned a nickname that stuck: Bourbon Pompeii. Buffalo Trace’s plan was to preserve it as part of a future visitor experience — but a physical site like this is fragile, and a tour only reaches people who can physically show up.
Where RSET Comes In
A discovery like Bourbon Pompeii only gets one first look. Once a site like this is reinforced, built around, or opened to regular foot traffic, the exact undisturbed condition it was found in is gone for good.
RSET scanning captured the site as an interactive digital twin — a permanent, walkable record of exactly how the ruins looked at the moment of discovery. Historians, archaeologists, and Buffalo Trace itself now have a version of the site that doesn’t erode, doesn’t get walked on, and doesn’t depend on anyone being able to travel to Frankfort in person to study it.
Preservation Is a Scanning Problem
Buffalo Trace’s Bourbon Pompeii is a dramatic example, but the underlying need is common to any historic site, archaeological find, or building slated for renovation or demolition: once it’s gone or altered, it’s gone. Scanning turns a one-time physical discovery into a permanent, revisitable record — usable for research, education, litigation, training, or simply making sure a piece of history doesn’t disappear the moment the concrete goes back down.
Historical details in this article are drawn from Caroline Paulus, “Buffalo Trace Gets A Visit From Ghost Of Distilling Past,” The Bourbon Review, August 6, 2017.