History of Kentucky

Histories and Source Documents

Location is everything, or at least it has been in the case of Kentucky. To start with, this eastern state, if we look at a relief map, is a western state, our first one: separated from the old states of the Atlantic seaboard by a mountain range very difficult to negotiate, her crops marketable only via the watercourses that flow into the Mississippi, when she sought statehood in the new American Union she met with fierce opposition for several years, only gaining admittance in 1792 after threatening to go over to Spain that controlled that river. Had Kentucky become Spanish, the United States as we know them would never have existed, and the history of the world would have run very differently.

In the great War Between the States that nearly destroyed America in the mid‑19c, Kentucky was a "border state", reproducing within its own confines the fratricidal cleft in the larger nation; its bloody division at the time is strikingly symbolized by the fact that both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis were born here, and though the two men embracing on the seal and the flag of the Commonwealth are just meant to represent in a generic sort of way the frontiersman and the statesman, the motto encircling them is born squarely of the Kentucky experience:

United We Stand, Divided We Fall.

The isolation of the eastern, Appalachian part of Kentucky continues to play a significant rôle in her history: though some of the best coal in the United States was mined in the state in the early 20c, it was also some of the hardest coal to transport to the centers of industry where it was to be used; her coal country is littered with boom towns with once-bright futures, to which the railroads were brought at great expense — and from which the railroads have once again vanished, stranding whole areas in relative poverty and isolation, at least according to recent census figures.

For these and other reasons, the history of Kentucky is interesting, and she was the home of some of the most iconic of American figures: Henry Clay and Daniel Boone, but also Gary Powers and Earl Combs (and on a lighter note Victor Mature and Colonel Sanders). I hope to expand my pages soon to bring some of this rich history onboard.

For now, one of the most enigmatic players in American history, and a quintessentially American town:

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The thumbnail I use to indicate this subsite is of course the central device on the flag of the Commonwealth of Kentucky; for the full flag — and some other flags from Kentucky's history — see Kentucky's State Flag (brought to us by the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives).