Civilization
The replica fort at Old Fort Harrod State Park was closed when I got there, so I couldn't go inside, but I did find a weakness in the defenses that let me poke my camera through the wall and get this picture. You wouldn't think that wooden stockade would be enough to defend a bunch of scared settler types from a hundred angry Shawnee people with guns, but walls like this held up well in places like Boonesborough.
"Say, Clint," you might be saying if you know anything at all about Kentucky history. "You mentioned Boonesborough up there, but you didn't say anything in that last picture about Daniel Boone. Isn't he supposed to be a thing?"
Well, friends, the fun thing about Kentucky history is that Daniel Boone gets a lot of history's press when it comes to early settlement, but Boone wasn't really the settling kind of guy. Sure, his wanderings kicked off the land rush that would eventually result in Kentucky's mad dash to statehood, but Boone wasn't the guy to turn to when you wanted to build a civilization. Civilization was what Boone was trying to escape, and he was really annoyed that it just kept chasing him down wherever he went.
Here's where Harrodsburg and Boone fit together. Daniel Boone was born in Pennsylvania in 1734, and he spent the next 30-someodd years roaming around Virginia and North Carolina. He was always wandering off into the woods, though, trying to find someplace where people weren't so that he could hunt all the deer and periodically get kidnapped by indigenous people. In 1769, his wandering took him through a relatively easy pass in the Appalachians that came to be known as the Cumberland Gap, and he found himself in a beautiful, untouched land of meadows. Eventually, that land would be called Kentucky.
As goes with all these settlement stories, "untouched" isn't really an accurate adjective. People had been living and roaming around Kentucky for 10,000 years at this point, but Boone happened to duck through the Gap in the middle of a unique set of decades. Eastern Kentucky had traditionally been home to the Cherokee and the Shawnee people, but over the previous hundred-someodd years, the Iroquois had come down from New York and tried grabbing all the territory for themselves. They were probably doing this as a response to white colonial encroachment on their own territory. The Iroquois push had proven successful, and the Cherokee were pushed south into Tennessee while the Shawnee were mostly forced north of the Ohio River into future Indiana and Illinois. But then things went badly for the Iroquois back in the New York homeland, so they never really did anything with Kentucky, and the place was left empty for a while. The Shawnee were using it as a winter hunting ground when Boone showed up.
Boone, meanwhile, was at the forefront of a colonial surge just itching to cross the mountains from Virginia. English folks had been heading west almost from the moment the first settlers landed at Jamestown in 1607, but the Appalachians were a daunting barrier to settler types, so they'd hesitated in expanding beyond the foothills. But eastern Virginia was getting crowded by about 1770 -- that's a big reason Virginians were so eager to join the Massachusetts revolt against King George III -- and a few adventurous types started poking their noses through the mountain gaps. Once everybody heard about Daniel Boone's 1769 adventure, the dam broke, and the setters started trickling in.
In 1774, at roughly the same time James Harrod and his Pennsylvania buddies were hopping in their boats on the Monongahela, a North Carolina judge and real estate schemer named Richard Henderson came up with a plan to claim an enormous patch of western Virginia west of the Appalachians and south of the Ohio for himself, which he would then turn around and sell. He had no legal basis for this claim, but then neither did anybody else (at least as far as colonial law was concerned), and a lot of wealth in those days came from bluffing people into thinking you had it. So Henderson invented a land speculation firm he called the Transylvania Company and told everybody that Kentucky was Transylvania Company property, and he tried to make it legit by hiring Daniel Boone to build a road and a fort. And so in early 1775, Boone blazed the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap and built the fort on the Kentucky River south of future Lexington that came to be known as Fort Boonesborough. (Just like at Harrodsburg, today there's a state park built around a replica fort at Boonesborough's site to show you a little of what that might have looked like.)
And so, after having left Kentucky alone for the previous 167 years of English Colonial settlement, the white folks started coming into Kentucky all at once. James Harrod finished his Harrodsburg fort just ahead of Boone by a matter of weeks. A few other groups came into Kentucky at roughly the same time and established similar forts. In May of 1775, Richard Henderson called for a convention of representatives from all the little settlements to meet at Boonesborough and establish something resembling a government. James Harrod made the trip from Harrodsburg with several of his associates, and a guy named Benjamin Logan came up with a few friends from a little outpost at a place called St. Asaph's (also known as Logan's Station, now called Stanford), and they all convened a little congress beneath a Boonesborough elm tree. And that was the start of Kentucky government.
It wasn't the end of it, though, because Richard Henderson didn't have the political sense it took to pull off his speculation scheme, and he ticked off everybody back in Virginia or North Carolina who might have given him legitimacy. I mean, seriously, the dude told Thomas Frickin' Jefferson to take a hike. The Transylvania Company fell apart over the next few years when the new United States Congress declined to recognize Henderson's claim, and Henderson slunk back to North Carolina. (He was eventually given a claim along the Ohio in western Kentucky, where Henderson County exists today.) Meanwhile, Boone, who'd been promised all sorts of land by Henderson and about half a dozen other people, wound up with nothing. He spent the next decade working as a surveyor, but he was really bad at that and wound up falling deeply into debt. Eventually, he got mad enough at the civilization rising around him -- the civilization he had helped usher in -- that he ran off to Missouri and tried the whole thing again.
Civilization
The replica fort at Old Fort Harrod State Park was closed when I got there, so I couldn't go inside, but I did find a weakness in the defenses that let me poke my camera through the wall and get this picture. You wouldn't think that wooden stockade would be enough to defend a bunch of scared settler types from a hundred angry Shawnee people with guns, but walls like this held up well in places like Boonesborough.
"Say, Clint," you might be saying if you know anything at all about Kentucky history. "You mentioned Boonesborough up there, but you didn't say anything in that last picture about Daniel Boone. Isn't he supposed to be a thing?"
Well, friends, the fun thing about Kentucky history is that Daniel Boone gets a lot of history's press when it comes to early settlement, but Boone wasn't really the settling kind of guy. Sure, his wanderings kicked off the land rush that would eventually result in Kentucky's mad dash to statehood, but Boone wasn't the guy to turn to when you wanted to build a civilization. Civilization was what Boone was trying to escape, and he was really annoyed that it just kept chasing him down wherever he went.
Here's where Harrodsburg and Boone fit together. Daniel Boone was born in Pennsylvania in 1734, and he spent the next 30-someodd years roaming around Virginia and North Carolina. He was always wandering off into the woods, though, trying to find someplace where people weren't so that he could hunt all the deer and periodically get kidnapped by indigenous people. In 1769, his wandering took him through a relatively easy pass in the Appalachians that came to be known as the Cumberland Gap, and he found himself in a beautiful, untouched land of meadows. Eventually, that land would be called Kentucky.
As goes with all these settlement stories, "untouched" isn't really an accurate adjective. People had been living and roaming around Kentucky for 10,000 years at this point, but Boone happened to duck through the Gap in the middle of a unique set of decades. Eastern Kentucky had traditionally been home to the Cherokee and the Shawnee people, but over the previous hundred-someodd years, the Iroquois had come down from New York and tried grabbing all the territory for themselves. They were probably doing this as a response to white colonial encroachment on their own territory. The Iroquois push had proven successful, and the Cherokee were pushed south into Tennessee while the Shawnee were mostly forced north of the Ohio River into future Indiana and Illinois. But then things went badly for the Iroquois back in the New York homeland, so they never really did anything with Kentucky, and the place was left empty for a while. The Shawnee were using it as a winter hunting ground when Boone showed up.
Boone, meanwhile, was at the forefront of a colonial surge just itching to cross the mountains from Virginia. English folks had been heading west almost from the moment the first settlers landed at Jamestown in 1607, but the Appalachians were a daunting barrier to settler types, so they'd hesitated in expanding beyond the foothills. But eastern Virginia was getting crowded by about 1770 -- that's a big reason Virginians were so eager to join the Massachusetts revolt against King George III -- and a few adventurous types started poking their noses through the mountain gaps. Once everybody heard about Daniel Boone's 1769 adventure, the dam broke, and the setters started trickling in.
In 1774, at roughly the same time James Harrod and his Pennsylvania buddies were hopping in their boats on the Monongahela, a North Carolina judge and real estate schemer named Richard Henderson came up with a plan to claim an enormous patch of western Virginia west of the Appalachians and south of the Ohio for himself, which he would then turn around and sell. He had no legal basis for this claim, but then neither did anybody else (at least as far as colonial law was concerned), and a lot of wealth in those days came from bluffing people into thinking you had it. So Henderson invented a land speculation firm he called the Transylvania Company and told everybody that Kentucky was Transylvania Company property, and he tried to make it legit by hiring Daniel Boone to build a road and a fort. And so in early 1775, Boone blazed the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap and built the fort on the Kentucky River south of future Lexington that came to be known as Fort Boonesborough. (Just like at Harrodsburg, today there's a state park built around a replica fort at Boonesborough's site to show you a little of what that might have looked like.)
And so, after having left Kentucky alone for the previous 167 years of English Colonial settlement, the white folks started coming into Kentucky all at once. James Harrod finished his Harrodsburg fort just ahead of Boone by a matter of weeks. A few other groups came into Kentucky at roughly the same time and established similar forts. In May of 1775, Richard Henderson called for a convention of representatives from all the little settlements to meet at Boonesborough and establish something resembling a government. James Harrod made the trip from Harrodsburg with several of his associates, and a guy named Benjamin Logan came up with a few friends from a little outpost at a place called St. Asaph's (also known as Logan's Station, now called Stanford), and they all convened a little congress beneath a Boonesborough elm tree. And that was the start of Kentucky government.
It wasn't the end of it, though, because Richard Henderson didn't have the political sense it took to pull off his speculation scheme, and he ticked off everybody back in Virginia or North Carolina who might have given him legitimacy. I mean, seriously, the dude told Thomas Frickin' Jefferson to take a hike. The Transylvania Company fell apart over the next few years when the new United States Congress declined to recognize Henderson's claim, and Henderson slunk back to North Carolina. (He was eventually given a claim along the Ohio in western Kentucky, where Henderson County exists today.) Meanwhile, Boone, who'd been promised all sorts of land by Henderson and about half a dozen other people, wound up with nothing. He spent the next decade working as a surveyor, but he was really bad at that and wound up falling deeply into debt. Eventually, he got mad enough at the civilization rising around him -- the civilization he had helped usher in -- that he ran off to Missouri and tried the whole thing again.