The Historic Period After Statehood

Late-18th Century

The first Euro-Americans and African-Americans to arrive in Kentucky settled in the Bluegrass region in the mid-1770s. Coming on foot and by horseback, thousands of settlers followed the trails through Cumberland Gap and Pound Gap or floated down the Ohio and Kentucky rivers on flatboats. They immediately came into conflict with native peoples, who claimed Kentucky as theirs. The new settlers built defensive residences they called stations and forts to protect themselves. They hunted, kept livestock, and planted crops, struggling to settle the frontier while the Revolutionary War raged around them. With the end of the War and the abatement of the Indian threat in the late 1780s, settlers began to establish towns, mills, iron furnaces, and farms. Settlement spread into the Pennyroyal area and into Appalachia. Kentucky became the fifteenth state in 1792.

John Filson, a land speculator, published a map of the Kentucky frontier in 1784. He included the locations of many of the defensive stations and forts in the central Kentucky area, as well as dwellings, mills, rivers and streams, salt licks, and areas of notable vegetation such as cane.

Fort Boonesborough, established in 1775 by Judge Richard Henderson and the Transylvania Company as the capital of a planned royal colony, was one of the most important frontier sites in Kentucky. Built defensively as a stockaded enclosure of log cabins, it gave sanctuary to hundreds of settlers coming into Kentucky along the Wilderness Road. The site of Fort Boonesborough is recognized as a National Historic Landmark.

Settlers who did not live in a large fort often made their homes in defensive stations, described by one historian as "forts in miniature." Located near permanent freshwater springs, and often on well traveled trails, stations housed several families and usually had some kind of defensive construction such as a stockade or barricadable doors and windows.

With the coming of peace in the 1780s and 1790s, towns like Washington in Mason County were established and their citizens built more commodious homes. Houses were built to last, made out of hewn logs or of stone or brick masonry. Many of the early houses, like those at Washington, are still standing. Kentuckians established trade networks so that they could import goods like English ceramics to use on their dinner tables. Coarse pottery, including locally-made redware, was produced at pottery kilns in the Commonwealth.

As Kentucky society developed, so did the social class system. People like Senator John Brown, who built Liberty Hall in 1796 in Frankfort, the state capital, could afford to buy Chinese porcelain, French wine, and elaborately decorated wine glasses and water goblets. Such expensive wares on his table symbolized his upper class social standing and wealth. Visit the web site for Senator John Brown and his home, Liberty Hall.

Early 19th Century 

With the achievement of statehood in 1792, Kentucky continued to develop a distinctive economic, political, and cultural image. The pre-Civil War, antebellum period saw the establishment of an agricultural economy based on a mix of large plantations dependent on slave labor and smaller family farms. Livestock, hemp, and grains formed the basis for much of the agriculture in the state. Major cities such as Louisville and Lexington grew and flourished, counties multiplied, and the familiar pattern of county seats developed. Industries such as grist and other types of mills, potteries, nitre mines, and iron furnaces were established. Mercantile systems formed in the cities and towns that brought in all types of goods and commodities. Through such political personalities as Henry Clay, Kentucky played an important role in national politics. Major events in United States religious history such as the Great Revival and the establishment of Shakertown also took place in Kentucky.

Free Betty Young: Free Betty Young represents a rare person - a free woman of color - in antebellum Kentucky society. African-Americans comprised almost 25% of Kentucky's population in 1830, numbering 170,130 people. Of this total, less than 5,000 were free. Free Betty Young lived in Lexington where she died during the cholera epidemic of 1833. Little is known of her life except what the artifacts from her house tell us.

Shakertown: The Society of United Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, known to the outside world as "Shakers," was a communal, utopian religious order that established a settlement they called Pleasant Hill in Mercer County in 1805. Their industry and reverence to labor led them to build an elaborate complex of buildings, and made them prominent participants in agricultural innovation and business. Visit the Shaker community at Pleasant Hill web site.

Ashland: Prominent politician Henry Clay was not only an influential man on the national political scene, but also operated a model plantation called Ashland near Lexington. He was a social leader and a leader in agricultural innovations. The coming of the Civil War plunged Kentucky, along with the rest of the nation, into a cataclysmic conflict that irrevocably changed the fabric of society and economy in the Commonwealth. Kentucky's position as a border state, coupled with its decision to stay in the Union despite the pro-slavery sentiments of many of its citizens, made the years of the Civil War tumultuous ones. With the end of the War and the abolition of slavery, Kentucky faced decades of adjustment to the new order. Visit the Ashland and Henry Clay web site.

Camp Nelson: Camp Nelson was a major recruitment center for the Union Army. In 1864, enlistments of African-Americans into the federal army began, and Camp Nelson was one of the most important enlistment sites in the state. Visit the Camp Nelson web site.

Late 19th Century 

The last few decades of the nineteenth century brought many changes to Kentucky. The abolition of slavery released thousands of African-Americans into free society. Many left the state but those who stayed often moved to major cities and away from the farms where they had been slaves. With the collapse of the slave labor system, new ways of operating the agricultural economy had to be developed. A booming market for tobacco, and the rise of the timber and coal industries, figured in the changes that took place.

Kinkeadtown: Freed African-Americans often left the countryside and migrated to the cities where they lived in racially segregated neighborhoods such as Kinkeadtown in Lexington. Established by an abolitionist lawyer named George B. Kinkead, Kinkeadtown was home to working class blacks who owned their homes and worked in the building trades, performed manual labor, took in laundry, and held other unskilled and semi-skilled jobs. Their establishment in Lexington, as elsewhere, marked the post-War shift to racially segregated neighborhoods in urban settings.