Surveyors, land speculators, and settlers followed the long hunters into Kentucky. In the spring of 1774 James Harrod, accompanied by a small group of settlers, established Harrodstown (now Harrodsburg), the first permanent white settlement in Kentucky. Fort Harrod was built near Harrodstown in 1775. In the same year, Judge Richard Henderson of North Carolina, head of the Transylvania Company, engaged Daniel Boone to supervise the cutting of a trail to the Bluegrass region and establish a settlement there. Following in part the old Warriors’ Path, Boone blazed a trail through the Cumberland Gap and on into central Kentucky. The trail, known as Boone’s Trace, was later widened to form a leg of the famous Wilderness Road from western Virginia to central Kentucky.
At the end of his trail, Boone established a settlement, later known as Boonesborough, on the Kentucky River about 72 km (45 mi) east of Harrodstown. Soon other settlements were established in the Bluegrass region and, together with Harrodstown and Boonesborough, began to attract settlers from other colonies.
At this time white settlement west of the mountains without the agreement of the Native Americans was forbidden by proclamation of Britain’s king. Harrod’s party ignored the proclamation. Henderson’s company, however, made a treaty with the Cherokee people, securing control of 6.88 million hectares (17 million acres). The Virginia legislature later reduced this to 80,900 hectares (200,000 acres). In May 1775 Henderson called together at Boonesborough representatives from the various Kentucky settlements. They passed laws, drafted articles vesting governmental power in the Transylvania Company,and petitioned the Continental Congress for recognition of a colony, called Transylvania, that would encompass all the Kentucky settlements and would have status equal to that of the other 13 colonies.
Congress, however, ignored the petition.
Many Kentucky settlers opposed the establishment of an independent colony. Meeting in Harrodstown in June 1776, they dispatched George Rogers Clark and John Gabriel Jones to the Virginia legislature at Williamsburg. Mainly as a result of the influence of Clark and Jones, the legislature declared the Transylvania Company illegal and designated Kentucky a county of Virginia. "Kentucky" © Emmanuel BUCHOT, Encarta, Wikipedia
Photos of European countries to visit
Photos of Asian countries to visit
Photos of America