Lincoln County

Lincoln County is one of three counties created by Virginia in 1780. As settlements in Kentucky County of Virginia became increasingly numerous during the late 1770s, the need for seats of government within the vast territory led to the formation of Jefferson, Lincoln, and Fayette counties to replace Kentucky County. The law creating these counties was enacted by the Virginia General Assembly on June 30, 1780, and became effective November 1, 1780. Lincoln County was named for Gen. Benjamin Lincoln, a military commander in the Revolutionary War who was a prisoner of war in British hands when the county was formed.

Two more counties, Mercer and Madison, were formed by Virginia in 1786 from parts of Lincoln County. After Kentucky became a state in 1792, the Kentucky legislature continued to subdivide Lincoln County into smaller counties. Lincoln County assumed its present boundary in February 1843. The county is bordered by Boyle, Garrard, and Rockcastle counties, and has an area of 337 square miles. The first county court session for Lincoln County was held at Fort Harrod (now Harrodsburg) in January 1781. The county seat was moved to Fort Logan (now Stanford) in 1787.

Lincoln County is divided into three distinct topographical areas. The northern half of the county, lying within the southern edge of the Bluegrass region, is known for its excellent farmland and is drained by the Dix River and its smaller tributaries. This area was a prime hunting territory for prehistoric Native Americans, as witnessed by a few scattered Indian mounds and the small artifacts that occasionally turn up in the soil. Stretched from west to east across Lincoln County is the Knobs region of Kentucky; its hills range from one to two hundred feet in height and are mostly covered in woodland, which supported a lumbering industry throughout the middle to late 1800s. The rest of the county lies in the Pennyroyal region, dominated by broad plateau-like areas and ridges separated by deep fertile valleys and streams.

Throughout its history, Lincoln County's economy has been primarily agricultural. Gristmills and steam mills were common in the middle to late 1800s for grinding meal and producing woolens. The fertile land in the Dick's (now Dix) River valley drew the earliest pioneers. Among the first settlements established within the county's present boundary were Isaac Shelby's Knob Lick Station, Logan's Fort (Stanford), Montgomery's Station, Pettit's Station, Spear's Station, McCormack's Station, McKinney's Station, Whitley's Station, Owsley's Station, Barnett's Station, Briggs Station, and Helm's Station. Through the nineteenth century, towns and villages emerged at the major crossroads in the county. The towns included Stanford, Hustonville, Crab Orchard, and Waynesburg. The smaller villages included McKinney, Kings Mountain, Preachersville, Walnut Flat, Milledgeville, Turnersville, Hubble, Turkeytown, Broughtontown, and Dog Walk.

The first railroad built through Lincoln County was the Louisville & Nashville (now CSX Transportation), which entered the county near Knob Lick Creek and passed through Stanford and Crab Orchard. Between 1860 and 1920, thousands of visitors to the Crab Orchard Springs resort patronized this railroad. Passenger service ended in the 1940s. The Cincinnati & Southern Railroad (now Norfolk Southern) was built through Lincoln County in the late 1870s; this railroad became the major north-south line through central Kentucky.

During the Civil War, sympathies in Lincoln County were fairly evenly split between the Union and the Confederacy. The northern half of the county, having many slaveholders, was sympathetic to the Confederates; the south end of the county was strongly Unionist. Three black communities in Lincoln County developed in the post-Civil War era: Bonneyville, Chicken Bristle, and Logantown. During the 1880s and 1890s, the Lincoln Land Company, a private enterprise, encouraged the development of a German-Swiss community, Ottenheim, in south-central Lincoln County. The German, Austrian, and Swiss immigrants were sold rough knobs land, which they quickly turned into some of the best farmland in the county.

In the 1820s, the Restoration movement of Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell was a strong influence in Lincoln County. McCormack's Meetinghouse, initially a mixed congregation of Baptists and Presbyterians, became a member of the Disciples of Christ denomination in 1829 and later a member of the Christian Church denomination. McCormack's Meetinghouse, a brick structure built in 1819-20, is the oldest church building standing in Lincoln County. Catholicism had no major impact in Lincoln County until the 1880s, when the German and Swiss settlements at Ottenheim and Blue Lick were developed.

The county's best secondary education facility was the Christian Church College at Hustonville, established in the 1850s by a joint effort of the Hanging Fork Presbyterian Church and the Hustonville Christian Church. It was a college preparatory institution and like the old Hanging Fork Presbyterian Parochial School it replaced, it had close ties with Centre College at Danville.

The streams of Lincoln County and the Indian and buffalo trails were the first pathways into central Kentucky. A western extension of the Wilderness Road passed from the Hazel Patch to Fort Logan (Stanford) and on to Harrodsburg. (U.S. 150 roughly follows the original Wilderness Road through the county.) Another old trail left Fort Logan and went southwest to near Turnersville, where one fork went south to the Green River settlements and the other went west to the Carpenter's Station area. (KY 78 parallels this trace.) By the late 1860s most of the major county roads were maintained as private turnpikes that travelers paid a fee to use. A few tollgate houses still stand in the county.

Among the influential residents of Lincoln County, Isaac Shelby, Kentucky's first governor (1792-96, 1812-16), settled on Knob Lick Creek in 1779 and called his home Travelers Rest (now a state shrine). It became the center of a vast farming enterprise. Benjamin Logan's Fort, established in 1775, was one of few in Kentucky that did not fall to the Indian attacks of 1777. William Whitley located in the county and built Sportsman's Hill, one of the first brick houses in Kentucky. His home is preserved as a state shrine on U.S. 150 near Crab Orchard and is an excellent example of Kentucky frontier architecture.

The county's population was 16,663 in 1970; 19,053 in 1980; 20,045 in 1990; and 23,361 in 2000.

From: The Kentucky Encyclopedia, edited by John Kleber. University Press of Kentucky. Copyright 1992


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