At present, the Town Branch weaves under Lexington’s downtown, through its historic and industrial corridor, and passes by a few urban and developing residential neighborhoods on its way to the rolling terrain of horse country and the county line.  The landscape of Fayette County has changed drastically since Lexington’s first settlers laid eyes upon it in 1775.  Maude Lafferty’s description of this first encounter paints a picture of what the settlers found:

 
“They beheld a land of bewildering beauty; a land of running waters, of groves and glades and prairies and canebrakes; a land teeming with game, great herds of shaggy-maned buffalo, the lordly elk, the deer, the bear, and the panther, flocks of wild geese and turkeys and paroquettes—a land literally flowing with milk and honey.”(1)

These men, looking for good land to settle north of the Kentucky River, were said to have followed the Branch until they found a spring flowing into it, and it was there they built their first cabin.  This land has now become known as McConnell Springs, which is owned and operated as a public park by the  Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government.

The dependency upon the Town Branch increased as Lexington grew in size and population.  Upon its banks were built two forts (the first built  by James Patterson in 1779 on the corner of Main and Mill).  The second, built by Colonel John Todd in 1781 contained a moat filled by the waters of the Town Branch.(2)  The creek also provided the town with its source of fresh drinking water, and influenced the physical orientation of its streets and  building lots. Along the banks of the Town Branch (referred to as “the commons”), could be found cane growing three to twelve feet in height, and along which cattle and horses were left to graze in knee-deep wild rye and clover.(3)  Some of the first horse-racing in Lexington took place along the commons.

Despite this early benevolent relationship the settlers had with the Town Branch, it wasn’t long before the creek bed was viewed as an obstacle of progress, and as an outlet for human and industrial wastes.  Bridges were built across its waters beginning in 1788 (first of log, and later of stone and brick), and it was placed in a stone canal to be carried straight through the town.(4)  Eventually it was covered over (sometime near 1810), and buildings were built over top of it.  Ever since, thousands of people pass over it every day, oblivious of its existence and its historical significance.  In the early 1900’s, Woodford County “indicted the city of Lexington for harboring a nuisance in allowing the city’s sewage to pass into the Town Branch and from that stream empty into Elkhorn Creek and pass through Woodford County.”(5)   The Town Branch still receives the city’s sewage today (albeit after passing through the Town Branch Sewage Treatment Plant), but for the past 200 years, the creek has been neglected, abused, polluted by industry, and nearly forgotten.