KYKentucky History

Jefferson Davis was born at Fairview on June 3, 1808. Abraham Lincoln was born in a cabin near Hodgenville on February 12, 1809, about a hundred miles east and eight months later. The two men who led the opposing governments of the Civil War came out of the same corner of the same state, which spent the first months of that war insisting it belonged to neither side.

Shawnee towns, Cherokee claims, Chickasaw west

Long before any of that, people here were building. Adena burial mounds went up across the Bluegrass more than two thousand years ago, and Mississippian townspeople raised the platform mounds at Wickliffe above the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi. The old settler line that Kentucky was an empty hunting ground with no inhabitants was convenient rather than accurate. Shawnee villages sat along the Ohio and its southern tributaries, the Cherokee asserted rights across the southeast, Yuchi people lived in the region, and the Chickasaw held the western wedge between the Tennessee and the Mississippi rivers. That wedge stayed Chickasaw until 1818, when Andrew Jackson and Isaac Shelby negotiated the cession known as the Jackson Purchase, which is why far western Kentucky joined the state twenty-six years after everything else.

Boone's road, and a county that left Virginia

Thomas Walker came through the gap in the mountains in 1750 and named the river, the gap and the mountains for the Duke of Cumberland. James Harrod founded Harrodsburg in 1774. In March 1775 Richard Henderson's Transylvania Company bought a vast claim from Cherokee leaders at Sycamore Shoals, an arrangement Virginia soon voided, and sent Daniel Boone ahead to cut the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap and build Boonesborough. Virginia organized the settlements as Kentucky County in 1776. Fighting there did not stop with Yorktown: at Blue Licks on August 19, 1782, ten months after Cornwallis surrendered, a Kentucky militia force walked into an ambush and lost more than seventy men, including Boone's son Israel.

Separation from Virginia took ten conventions at Danville between 1784 and 1792 and required Virginia's consent, which it gave. Kentucky entered the Union on June 1, 1792 as the fifteenth state and the first west of the Appalachian mountains, and it is one of the few states that never passed through a territorial stage. Frankfort, a small river town, beat out both Lexington and Louisville for the capital in 1792 after local backers offered land, materials and cash toward the statehouse. Six years later the legislature adopted the Kentucky Resolutions, drafted in secret by Thomas Jefferson, which argued that a state could declare a federal law void, a claim that echoed through the next sixty years.

Four months of neutrality, then four years of war

Kentucky held about 225,000 enslaved people in 1860 and also sold hemp, tobacco and manufactured goods down the Ohio to northern markets. Neither loyalty won outright, so the state tried to opt out.

Roughly 100,000 Kentuckians fought for the Union and somewhere between 25,000 and 40,000 for the Confederacy. Because the state never left, the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to it, and slavery in Kentucky ended only when the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified in December 1865 over the legislature's objection. The state assembly did not get around to a symbolic ratification of that amendment until 1976.

Bourbon, coal camps and a race on the first Saturday in May

Distilling corn into whiskey started in the 1780s, and Congress recognized bourbon in a 1964 resolution as a distinctive product of the United States. National prohibition nearly finished the industry between 1920 and 1933, when only a handful of Kentucky distilleries kept licenses to bottle medicinal whiskey. Churchill Downs ran the first Kentucky Derby on May 17, 1875, won by a colt named Aristides before a crowd of about ten thousand.

Coal shaped the mountains differently. Absentee companies bought mineral rights across eastern Kentucky under broad form deeds that let them mine without the surface owner's consent, and built company towns with company scrip. Harlan County earned the name Bloody Harlan in the mine wars of 1931 and 1932, and struck again at Brookside in 1973 and 1974 in a fight filmed for a documentary that won an Academy Award. Elsewhere the federal government arrived in force: the bullion depository at Fort Knox opened in 1937, Mammoth Cave, the longest known cave system on earth, became a national park in 1941, and the Tennessee Valley Authority finished Kentucky Dam in 1944.

After coal

Toyota opened its Georgetown assembly plant in 1988, and it grew into the company's largest vehicle plant anywhere, pulling a supplier network into central Kentucky. Louisville built its economy around the UPS air hub and the shipping traffic that follows it. Coal employment, meanwhile, fell from tens of thousands of jobs to a fraction of that, and the eastern counties have been losing population for decades.

One court case reshaped daily life more than any of it. In 1989 the Kentucky Supreme Court held in Rose v. Council for Better Education that the entire state school system, not just its funding formula, was unconstitutional. The legislature responded with the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990, which rewrote school finance, governance and testing statewide at once and was studied by other states for years. Muhammad Ali, born in Louisville on January 17, 1942, is buried in Cave Hill Cemetery there.

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