Kentucky

Blue Licks Battlefield
Boonesborough
Cumberland Gap National Historical Park
Fort Jefferson
Harrodsburg Site
Louisville
Shelby (Isaac) Grave
William Whitley House

During the colonial era the British attempted to limit westward settlement to the headwaters of rivers flowing into the Atlantic (the Proclamation Line of 1763), but with no success. Only the perils of the wilderness and the actual inahbitants of the region, the Indians, kept the whites from moving west even faster. Five Indian nations had settlements within the region that is now Kentucky: the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Mosopelea, Yuchi, and especially the Shawnee. However, the center of each of these nations lay outside of this contested region. The first permanent white settlement was established at Harrodsburg in 1775, followed the next year by Boonesborough and St. Aspah (Logan's Fort).

The American Revolution in Kentucky was the struggle of these and later settlements to survive the sporadic efforts of British-supported Indian and Loyalist raiders. The colonists' victory at Point Pleasant (now in West Virginia) in 1774 permitted the first real surge of settlement. British-supported raids in 1778 wiped out all but three strong-points (those mentioned above); then the victories of George Rogers Clark in the Old Northwest in 1778 to 1779 prompted a new wave of immigration, mainly along Boone's Wilderness Trail from Cumberland Gap, but some down the Ohio from Fort Pitt.

In 1776 Virginia formed Kentucky County to encompass virtually all the present state of Kentucky. But the Old Dominion had too many troubles east of the mountains to give the Kentuckians much military support or an adequate system of local government. On the other hand, the frontier settlements in Kentucky, which may mean "dark and bloody ground," did not have the large number of skirmishes that occurred during the Revolution in New York, Pennsylvania, and the southern colonies. Hence there are fewer historic sites of the Revolution in Kentucky than one might suspect. Most of these are now state parks or "shrines" and are identified below.

The Kentucky Historical Highway Marker Program, which includes more than 1,750 markers of various historical topics, is administered by the Kentucky Historical Society. It sells a guide to these markers, Roadside History: A Guide to Kentucky Highway Markers (2002). The book is available through the University Press of Kentucky and can be ordered online or by calling (800) 839-6855. The Kentucky Historical Society publishes a number of other books as well, some of which pertain to the state's colonial history. The Society is located at 100 West Broadway, Frankfort, Ky., 40601. Phone: (502) 564-1792.

Tourist literature is available from the Kentucky Department of Tourism at the following address: Capitol Plaza Tower, 22nd floor, 500 Mero Street, Frankfort, Ky. 40601. Website: www.kentuckytourism.com; phone: (502) 564-4930. The Department of Tourism has several brochures and maps obtainable online or by calling the agency directly.

Blue Licks Battlefield

Blue Licks Battlefield, U.S. 68 at crossing of Licking River, near village of Blue Lick Springs, Nicholas County. Often and incorrectly called the last battle of the Revolution, this was a victory of the ferocious Simon Girty over a bunch of foolish frontiersmen on 19 August 1782. A party of Loyalist and Indian raiders threatened Wheeling, West Virginia, in July and then tried, unsuccessfully, to surprise Bryan's Station, just north of modern Lexington. Three days later, 18 August, they started withdrawing slowly to the northeast. Frontiersmen including Daniel Boone and Benjamin Logan started converging on Bryan's Station a few hours after the enemy left the vicinity, and the next morning about 180 of them caught up with Girty's force. Daniel Boone and others advocated waiting until Logan closed up with a large force, but hotter heads prevailed. Simon Girty was waiting with superior numbers (about 250 men) when the Kentuckians made a disorganized charge through the deep ford on a fork of the Licking River.

The tactical lesson ended in a few minutes; then the slaughter began. The Patriots lost about seventy killed and captured, and Daniel Boone's son Israel was among the dead.

Most of the battlefield is included in the 150-acre Blue Licks Battlefield State Park. It is in an attractive section of the state well worth visiting just to enjoy the scenery. But the state park is exceptionally well developed, with landmarks of the battle marked and an interpretive museum that includes a small relief model of the field. Recreational facilities (campsites, picnic areas, playground, and a community pool) are open in season; the museum, souvenir shop, and battlefield are open year-round. Phone: (800) 443-7008.

Boonesborough

Boonesborough, 9 miles north of Richmond, Exit 95 off Interstate 75 on Ky. Route 627, Madison County. Daniel Boone explored extensively in 1769 to 1771 through Cumberland Gap into the center of what is now the state of Kentucky. He returned in 1775 as an agent of the Transylvania Company, led his thirty axmen to this spot, and started construction of a fort. When completed in July 1776, at which time Indian hostilities were on the upswing, Boone's fort had four blockhouses and a palisade. Settlers arrived before the fort was completed, using the Wilderness Road through Cumberland Gap that Boone's axmen had opened. In September 1778 Boonesborough and nearby Harrodsburg withstood a sustained Indian campaign that wiped out all but one of the other Kentucky settlements. When the operations of George Rogers Clark in 1778 to 1779 established control in the Old Northwest, new settlers streamed into Kentucky (a county of Virginia from the fall of 1776), making Boonesborough a boom town. A short time later it went into a decline and soon disappeared.

No trace of the fort remains, but there are markers erected by the DAR and the Transylvanians of Henderson, Kentucky. The 108-acre Fort Boonesborough State Park includes the site of the settlement and the Kentucky River Museum. In addition, there are building reconstructions, a gift shop, hiking trails, and a variety of outdoor recreational activities available. Phone: (859) 527-3131. The site of the original Fort Boonesborough was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1996.

Cumberland Gap National Historical Park

Cumberland Gap National Historical Park. The more than 20,000 acres of this park cover parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia, with the visitors' center just south of Middlesboro, Kentucky. P.O. Box 1848, Middlesboro, Ky. 40965. Phone: (606) 248-2817.

Long before the white man reached America, Indian war and hunting parties followed Warrior's Path through the natural passage named Cave Gap by Dr. Thomas Walker of Castle Hill, Virginia in 1750. His expedition spent two months exploring the region, but did not get much farther west than the river they named the Cumberland.

John Finley had visited the fabled Bluegrass region of central Kentucky that Walker's party was unable to find, and in 1769 he convinced Daniel Boone, a fellow soldier of the Seven Years' War (1754–1763), that this could be reached through Cumberland Gap. With only four companions, Boone and Finley spent nearly four years exploring the Bluegrass. In September 1773 Boone led an unsuccessful effort to establish a settlement, but three years later he founded Boonesborough.

During the Revolution the Gap was frequently unpassable because of the Indians, but after George Rogers Clark's victories in the Old Northwest in 1778 to 1779, settlers surged through. By the end of the war some twelve thousand people had entered the promised land of Caintuck, most of them through Cumberland Gap (the others down the Ohio, the route used for establishment of the first settlement in 1775 at Harrodsburg). The Wilderness Road was improved for wagon traffic in 1796, but by 1825 it had lost importance except for driving cattle to eastern markets.

About 2 miles of the road remains in the national historical park. In addition to the wilderness scenery and spectacular views from Tri-State Peak and the Pinnacle, the park has ruins of an early iron furnace and Civil War fortifications.

Fort Jefferson

Fort Jefferson, Mississippi River near Wickliffe, Ballard County. This westernmost American base was established by George Rogers Clark after his conquest of the Illinois Country in 1779. The next year it successfully withstood six days of attack by Chickasaws and Choctaws, but in June 1781 it was abandoned as untenable. A blockhouse similar to the one at Fort Jefferson has been reconstructed in the Columbus-Belmont Memorial State Park, site of the Civil War works some 15 miles south of where Fort Jefferson stood. Phone: (270) 667-2327.

Harrodsburg Site

Harrodsburg Site, Lexington and Warwick Streets, Harrodsburg, Mercer County. In flagrant defiance of the Proclamation of 1763 limiting westward expansion of white settlers to the watershed of the Alleghenies, three settlements were established in central Kentucky just before the American Revolution.

The oldest permanent one is the present Harrodsburg. James Harrod (1742–1793) was a Pennsylvania frontiersman in the heroic mold, a skilled marksman with a remarkable mastery of woodcraft. During the Seven Years' Wars he served as a private under General John Forbes, and later he explored the Kentucky region. In 1774 he and thirty men picked the site of Harrodsburg and started building cabins, but because of the Indian troubles that culminated in Dunmore's War of that year they had to abandon this initial effort. Harrod took part in the Battle of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, then in 1775 resumed the work that made him famous as founder of Kentucky's first permanent settlement.

Harrod unsuccessfully opposed the ambitious schemes of Richard Henderson's Transylvania Company, whose first settlement, Boonesborough, was established in 1775 only 30 miles northeast of Harrodsburg. Harrod had an active part in the Revolution, building his fort in 1777, escorting military supplies from Virginia to the Ohio River, and taking part in a number of expeditions against the Indians. His settlement and Boonesborough were among the few that survived the Indian attacks of September 1778. After the Revolution the forts at both places disappeared, having outlived their usefulness (no mean trick on the frontier). Harrod himself was not so lucky: he disappeared in 1793 under mysterious circumstances and is believed to have been murdered by an enemy who lured him from home in search of a fabled silver mine.

Development of the area surrounding the site of Old Fort Harrod into the Pioneer Memorial State Park was undertaken in the 1920s. A 28-acre state park now includes a reconstruction of the fort on a slightly reduced scale. The original spring is still flowing inside a 12-foot-high palisade that connects the blockhouses and cabins. Old Fort Harrod State Park is open all year. Phone: (859) 734-3314. Park staff in period costume present an interpretive history. "The Legend of Daniel Boone" is a musical performed in the park during the summer. Another musical, this one from the Shawnee perspective, "Shadows in the Forest," is performed in repertory with the Daniel Boone show.

Louisville

Louisville, Falls of the Ohio. At this point navigation of the mighty Ohio is interrupted by falls and rapids along a 2-mile stretch where the water drops 26 feet. For 6 miles above this obstacle the Ohio is calm and about a mile wide. The Falls of the Ohio probably were visited by La Salle around 1670. They subsequently became a major landmark in the operations of George Rogers Clark in the Old Northwest during the Revolution. Captain Thomas Bullitt, a military companion of George Washington during the Seven Years' War, surveyed 2,000 acres in the area of today's Louisville in 1773, laid out a town, and attempted to start a permanent settlement. Bullitt was unable to get the necessary approval for his initial survey, and Governor Dunmore meanwhile conveyed the tract to his notorious friend Dr. John Connolly (see also forks of the ohio, pennsylvania, and point pleasant, west virginia).

A spit of land above the falls later called Corn Island (and since eaten by the river) was where George Rogers Clark established a fortified camp in the summer of 1778 before undertaking the remarkable operations in the Old Northwest (see vincennes under Indiana). About twenty English, Scottish, and Irish families had come along with Clark, "much against my inclination," as he wrote later, but he admitted that they proved to be of service in guarding a blockhouse built on the island for his supplies. When Clark's expedition of some two hundred troops moved on (26 June 1778)—shooting the rapids during a total eclipse of the sun—the twenty families remained. During the next winter the settlers built Fort Nelson on the mainland (where Seventh and Main Streets now intersect) and established a town government. Called "the Falls of the Ohio" initially, in 1780 the place was named Louisburg for Louis XVI (whose aid was already recognized as being critical in winning American independence). At this time (14 May 1780) the Virginia legislature declared that Dr. Connolly's title was forfeited. In 1828 Louisville was chartered as a city.

Meanwhile, the "Conqueror of the Old Northwest," whose achievements with a handful of men had done so much to give the United States legal claim to Kentucky and the vast Illinois country, had spent the last nine years of his life in a handsome brick home, Locust Grove, that has been preserved in Louisville. His brother-in-law, Major William Croghan, started building this two-story house in 1802. Clark's personal fortunes had declined after 1786, and since 1803 he had been living across the river from Louisville in a cabin, operating a grist mill, and deteriorating physically. After suffering a stroke of paralysis and having a leg amputated, Clark moved to his sister's home in 1809. He died there in 1818, and his grave was at Locust Grove until moved in 1869 to Cave Hill Cemetery, at Broadway and Baxter Avenue. "A red brick house of architectural distinction," as the National Survey calls it, Locust Grove (c. 1790) is preserved in northeast Louisville and is part of the 55-acre George Rogers Clark Park (561 Blankenbaker Lane). It is designated a National Historic Landmark. Phone: (502) 897-9845.

Shelby (Isaac) Grave

Shelby (Isaac) Grave, Shelby City, Lincoln County. The military exploits of this second-generation frontiersman spanned many states and are associated prominently with many of the most important sites covered in this book. But Kentucky claims him as its first governor. Elected in 1792, he declined the office in 1796, but again became governor in 1812. His grave is in the half-acre Isaac Shelby Cemetery State Historic Site, located 6 miles south of Danville on Highway 127.

William Whitley House

William Whitley House (Sportsman's Hill), off U.S. 150 on William Whitley Road about 9 miles southeast of Stanford, near Crab Orchard, Lincoln County. Often called the oldest brick residence west of the Alleghenies (which it is not), built between 1787 and 1794, the architecturally important two-and-a-half-story structure with handsome paneling was the home of a remarkable warrior. The state's tourism department bills it as "the first brick home in Kentucky." Whitley came to Kentucky from Virginia in 1775 and took part in Revolutionary War events, but was most famous for protecting emigrant parties from Indian attack along the Wilderness Road. As an elderly man he enlisted as a private in the War of 1812 and died in the Battle of the Thames (1813). The William Whitley State Historic Site was able to purchase about 30 acres of an adjacent farm in 2004 and add to its then 10-acre site. The use for that extra tract is yet to be established, although hiking trails are already formed. This historic site is open all year and has picnic areas. Phone: (606) 355-2881.