Harrodsburg, Kentucky

“ Every one has heard of Boone and Kenton; but history has but little to tell of James Harrod, surveyor, pioneer and scout. It is known that, even before Boone penetrated into Kentucky, Harrod had built himself a cabin on the site of the present city of Harrodsburg. Under a gentle and mild exterior, he seems to have been one of the bravest and most resourceful of the group of pioneers who contributed so much to the settling of Kentucky and the Valley of the Ohio. ”

“ A population of some two millions with only one interior town that contains over five thousand white inhabitants. Hence Kentucky makes no impression abroad by reason of its urban population. Lexington, Bowling Green, Harrodsburg, Winchester, Richmond, Frankfort, Mount Sterling, and all the others, where do they stand in the scale of American cities? Hence, too, the disparaging contrast liable to be drawn between Kentucky and the gigantic young States of the West. Where is the magnitude of the commonwealth, where the ground of the sense of importance in the people? ”

“ But in 1774 he had founded Harrodsburg—or Harrod's Fort, as it was known. Daniel Boone visited with him and his thirty. A company was formed of North Carolina and Virginia settlers, who by treaty with the Cherokees purchased all southern Kentucky. In March of the next year, 1775, Daniel Boone led thirty men who with their hatchets blazed a bridle-trail of two hundred miles, from southwestern Virginia across Cumberland Gap and on into the northwest clear to the Kentucky River. ”

“ Nothing stops Americans when their faces are set westward, and the long trail beckons.
The next year Daniel Boone and party went into Kentucky again. They found James Harrod of Virginia building Harrodsburg, south of the Kentucky River in central Kentucky. He had come in from the north; Daniel Boone and companion Michael Stoner from the east.
This James Harrod was a man of valor. At sixteen years of age he was a young soldier in the French and Indian War. He loved the scout trail, and grew up to be one of the best sign-readers among all the "Long Hunters of Kentucky." ”

“ Kentucky showed its essentially American character in nothing more than the diversity of religious belief among the settlers from the very start. They came almost entirely from the backwoods mountaineers of Virginia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, among whom the predominant faith had been Presbyterianism; but from the beginning they were occasionally visited by Baptist preachers, [24] whose creed spread to the borders sooner than Methodism; and among the original settlers of Harrodsburg were some Catholic Marylanders. ”

“ Insistent, however, Dunmore sent out parties of surveyors to fix the bounds of the soldiers' claims. James Harrod, Captain Thomas Bullitt, Hancock Taylor, and three McAfee brothers entered Kentucky, by the Ohio, under Dunmore's orders. John Floyd went in by 114 the Kanawha as Washington's agent. A bird's-eye view of that period would disclose to us very few indeed of His Majesty's loving subjects who were paying any attention to his proclamation. Early in 1774, Harrod began the building of cabins and a fort, and planted corn on the site of Harrodsburg. ”

“ Settlement of Kentucky In 1775, Richard Henderson of North Carolina purchased from the Cherokees the tract between the Kentucky and Cumberland rivers, and at the same time Boonesborough and Harrodsburg were founded by Daniel Boone and James Harrod. As a party of these bold backwoodsmen were encamping near the sources of the southern fork of the Licking, they heard the news of the victory which ushered in the War of Independence, and forthwith gave the name of Lexington to the place of their encampment, on which a thriving city now stands. ”

“ These men gave the settlers no little worry over the ownership of their lands, and because Virginia was engaged in the War of the Revolution little attention was paid to affairs in Kentucky. Finally, in 1776, the settlers [pg 19] in Kentucky called a meeting at Harrodsburg and sent Gabriel Jones and George Rogers Clark to the Legislature of Virginia with a statement that unless Virginia should protect the settlers against the Transylvania Company and others, the people would organize the territory into a separate government, and take their place among the States. ”

“ Lieutenant-Colonel Trigg and Majors McGarry and Harlan led the men from Harrodsburg, who were soonest ready to march, and likewise brought the news that Logan, their County Lieutenant, was raising the whole force of Lincoln in hot haste, and would follow in a couple of days.
These bands of rescuers reached Bryan's Station on the afternoon of the day the Indians had left. The men thus gathered were the very pick of the Kentucky pioneers; sinewy veterans of border strife, skilled hunters and woodsmen, long wonted to every kind of hardship and danger. ”

“ There are two societies in Kentucky, one at South Union, in Logan County, on the line of the Nashville Railroad, and one at Pleasant Hill, in Mercer County, seven miles from Harrodsburg. They are both prosperous. ”

“ The grounds around the houses are not kept in the best order. The typical rural Kentucky housewife does not seem to have any compelling, controlling sense of the beautiful. She invariably concedes something to beauty, but not enough. You will find a show of flowers at the poorest houses, though but geranium slips in miscellaneous tins and pottery. But you do not generally see around more prosperous homes any such parterres or beds as there is money to spend on, and time to tend, and grounds to justify.
HARRODSBURG PIKE.
A like spirit is shown by the ordinary blue-grass farmer. ”

“ The birthplace of Harold and Elizabeth was one of the thousands and thousands of plain American homes in Kentucky and elsewhere that are the breeding-grounds and fortresses of the Republic's impregnable virtue. The house had never taught them a bad lesson; it had never offered them an architectural trait to which their own coarser human traits could attach themselves. It had never uttered a suggestion that there is anything wrong in the human nature dwelling within it or human nature approaching it from without. It was built against one enemy—the climate. ”

“ Harrod, finding the Indian weak from loss of blood, gently assisted him to the shore, tore off a bandage from his own clothing, dressed the wound, and taking him upon his back, carried him several miles to a cave, where he nursed him until he was able to rejoin his tribe.
EARLY KENTUCKY CUSTOMS
When the bands of hardy pioneers pushed into the wilderness and prepared a way into Kentucky they brought with them only the trusty rifle, the ax, the [38] tomahawk, and the "long knife" for protecting themselves from the wily savages and securing food from the game that roamed the woods. ”

“ Hence you may assail the Kentuckian on many grounds, and he will hold his peace. You may tell him that he has no great cities, that he does not run with the currents of national progress; but never tell him that the home life of his fellows and himself is not as good as the best in the land. Domesticity is the State porcupine, presenting an angry quill to every point of attack. To write of homes in Kentucky, therefore, and particularly of rural homes, is to enter the very citadel of the popular affections. ”

“ Here, where the hand of violence shed the blood of the innocent; where the horrid yells of savages and the groans of the distressed sounded in our ears, we now hear the praises and adorations of our Creator; where wretched wigwams stood, the miserable abodes of savages, we behold the foundations of cities laid, that, in all probability, will equal the glory of the greatest upon earth. And we view Kentucky, situated on the fertile banks of the great Ohio, rising from obscurity to shine with splendor, equal to any other of the stars of the American hemisphere. ”

“ When Kentucky came to have a legislature of its own, it decreed that each of the counties in the state should receive six thousand acres of land wherewith to start a seminary; and that all these county seminaries were to train students for this long-dreamed-of central institution. That they might not be sent away—to the North or to Europe. When, at the end of the Civil War, a fresh attempt (and the last) was made to found in reality and in perpetuity a home institution to be as good as the best in the republic, the people rallied as though they had never known defeat. ”

“ Thrice fortunate is the court when it has as one of its members a man who has played a great part in other spheres of our composite national life. Mr. Justice Harlan came from Kentucky, a State in which the patriotism of the people was put to so peculiarly a severe test in the Civil War. In the States of the further North it was easy for the man to make up his mind on which side he would unsheathe his sword. In the States of the further South it was equally easy. In Kentucky the task was a difficult one. ”

“ In the year 1777, the county was duly organized, according to the act of the Virginia legislature. Among the names of the first officers in the new county, we recognize those of Floyd, Bowman, Logan, and Todd.
Harrodsburgh, the strongest and most populous station in the country, had not hitherto been assailed by the Indians. Early in the spring of 1777, they attacked a small body of improvers marching to Harrodsburgh, about four miles from that place. Mr. Kay, afterwards General Kay, and his brother were of the party. The latter was killed, and another man made prisoner. ”

“ You are afraid to touch the negro. You are afraid of Kentucky. The little province of the United States gets down on its knees to the nation of Kentucky. You are afraid that the State will go over to the Rebels, if anything is done about the negro. Now, sir, I know what slavery is; I have lived among it all my days. I know what Secession is,—it means slavery. I know what Kentucky is,—a proud old State, which has a great deal that is good about her and a great deal of sham. Kentucky politicians are no better or wiser than any other politicians. The State is living on the capital of Henry Clay. ”

“ It is enough, however, to embalm their memory in our hearts, and to connect their names with the imperishable memorials of our early history, that they were the first adventurers that plunged into the dark and enchanted wilderness of Kentucky—that of all their contemporaries they saw her first—and saw her in the pride of her virgin beauty—at the dawn of summer—in the fullness of her vegetation—her soil, instinct with fertility, covered with the most luxuriant verdure—the air perfumed with the fragrance of flowers, and her tall forests looming in all their primeval magnificence. ”

“ In the far North, as in the far South, men had but to drift with the tide. Among the Kentuckians, the forces that moulded her sons—Davis and Lincoln—were at war in the State, as they were at war in the nation. By ties of blood, sympathies, institutions, Kentucky was bound fast to the South. Yet, ten years before, Kentuckians had demanded the gradual emancipation of the slave. That far back, they had carved a pledge on a block of Kentucky marble, which should be placed in the Washington monument, that Kentucky would be the last to give up the Union. ”

“ Coming back to the present, the huge yellowish-red stage-coach rolls to-day over the marbled roads of the blue-grass country. Families may be found living exactly where their pioneer ancestors effected a heroic settlement—a landed aristocracy, if there be such in America. Family names come down from generation to generation, just as a glance at the British peerage will show that they were long ago being transmitted in kindred families over the sea. One great honored name will do nearly as much in Kentucky as in England to keep a family in peculiar respect, after the reason for it has ceased. ”

“ Away back in 1780, while every man, woman, and child in the western wilderness ness was in dire struggle for life itself, those far-seeing people had induced the General Assembly of Virginia to confiscate and sell in Kentucky the lands of British Tories, to found a public seminary for Kentucky boys—not a sectarian school. These same broad-minded pioneers had later persuaded her to give twenty thousand acres of her land to the same cause and to exempt officers and students of the institution from military service. ”

“ Even commercial Louisville must find its peculiar distinction in the number of its sumptuous private residences. It is wellnigh a rule that in Kentucky the value of the house is out of proportion to the value of the estate.
But if the towns regard themselves as the provincial fortresses of good society, they do not look down upon the home life of the country. Between country and town in Kentucky exists a relation unique and well to be studied: such a part of the population of the town owning or managing estates in the country ”

“ To provide books, to provide physicians, to provide teachers, to provide halls and gardens of recreations, as stimulants to healthful thought for our madmen and our fools; to this the State is impelled equally by considerations of safety and of economy. Even Kentucky has its State institution for the development of manhood in fools born of white women. ”

“ The fact that the river commerce throve was partly the cause and partly the consequence of the general prosperity of Kentucky. The pioneer days, with their fierce and squalid struggle for bare life, were over. If men were willing to work, and escaped the Indians, they were sure to succeed in earning a comfortable livelihood in a country so rich. "The neighbors are doing well in every sense of the word," wrote one Kentuckian to another, "they get children and raise crops." [Footnote: Draper MSS., Jonathan Clark Papers. O'Fallen to Clark, Isles of Ohio, May 30, 1791.] ”