Jessamine County

The thirty-sixth county in order of formation, Jessamine County is located in the Inner Bluegrass region of central Kentucky. Formed on December 19, 1798, from a portion of Fayette, the 174-square-mile county is bordered by Garrard, Madison, Mercer, Woodford, and Fayette counties. The county was named for Jessamine Creek. The county seat, Nicholasville, was named for George Nicholas, who drew up the first Kentucky constitution.

The topography is gently rolling; the Kentucky River, the county's southern boundary, creates a deeply entrenched valley. In 1987 farms occupied 92 percent of the land area and 74 percent of farmland was in cultivation. The county ranked thirty-ninth in the state in agricultural receipts, from livestock, poultry, hay, corn, vegetables, fruits, tobacco, and nursery and greenhouse crops.

The rich farmland attracted early settlers such as John, Jacob, and Samuel Hunter, who staked out a nine-hundred-acre tract between Hickman Creek and the Kentucky River in the late 1770s. A number of early settlers were of German descent from Pennsylvania and Maryland and others of French Huguenot extraction. Hemp was established as a popular crop around 1796. By 1840 two-thirds of the hemp produced in the state came from Jessamine County, and Nicholasville had a number of rope walks, or hemp factories. As late as 1870, the county was producing 1.8 million pounds of hemp annually.

Whiskey distilling was an early industry. U.S. district court records listed Edmund Singleton, of Jessamine County, as one of the distillers who refused to register his distillery and was fined $250 by Judge Harry Innes on June 30, 1798. In 1801 a Jessamine County farm offered for rent included “a distillery sixty by thirty-four feet with stills and boilers for a house of that size.” Around 1875, at Camp Nelson, the E.J. Curley Distillery was established on the Kentucky River in a complex of connected buildings constructed of limestone, known locally as the Great Stone Manor. In 1884, Curley operated two distilleries, one on each side of the river with a total mashing capacity of 1,100 bushels per day and production capacity of one hundred barrels per day. The distillery ceased operation in 1971.

Camp Nelson, on the Kentucky River, was established in 1863 to recruit Union troops. It was also a haven for black families, some of whom were escaped slaves. A mile and a half above it is Camp Nelson National Cemetery, the burial place of soldiers from the Civil War to Vietnam.

Jessamine County was considered for many years a residential suburb for Lexington's workforce, but by the late twentieth century it had developed its own industrial base. In 1988 twenty-four manufacturing firms employed more than 2,000. In 1957 Faulkner-Fair Company began producing wood fixtures for banks, stores, and hotels. The Hayden Company, established in 1966, builds horse stall equipment and barns. The decade of the 1970s saw a number of industries move into the county: Gulf States Paper's carton division; Donaldson Company; Sargent and Greenleaf, makers of locks; and the automotive trim division of NL Industries. Mainline service is provided by Southern Railway System over the cantilever-designed High Bridge across the Kentucky River, seven miles south of Nicholasville. Highway U.S. 27 is a major north-south route.

Early leaders in education, the county's first schools were private. Bethel Academy was established in 1790; in 1802 Nancy LaFever operated a female academy; in 1859 Neil McDugal Gordon began a boys' school in Keene; and the Jessamine Female Institute was chartered in Nicholasville in 1854 and operated until 1910. ASBURY College and Theological Seminary is located in Wilmore.

Keene, four miles northwest of Nicholasville, grew up around a stone mill in 1794. The Keene Springs Hotel, a Greek Revival-style frame building constructed in 1877, was a popular health spa. Wilmore, three miles west of Nicholasville, the county's second incorporated town, was established by the Cincinnati Southern Railroad in 1876.

The population of Jessamine County was 17,430 in 1970; 26,146 in 1980; 30,508 in 1990; and 39,041 in 2000.