Scott County

Scott County, the eleventh county in order of formation, is located in north-central Kentucky. It is bounded by Owen, Grant, Harrison, Bourbon, Fayette, Woodford, and Franklin counties and contains 286 square miles. Southern Scott County is part of the Inner Bluegrass region and has rich phosphatic loam soils, watered by Elkhorn Creek. The northern portion is located in the Eden Shale belt in the Eagle Creek watershed. Georgetown, the county seat, is seven miles north of Lexington. Highway and rail connections with Lexington, Louisville, and Cincinnati have given Scott County trade advantages.

Scott County was explored in June and July of 1774 by Virginians locating land warrants for soldiers of the French and Indian War. The party's journal commented eloquently on the natural wealth and beauty of the "Elkhorn country." In July 1774 the Royal Spring tract, including the site of Georgetown, was plotted for John Floyd. In late 1775, John McClelland, of Pennsylvania, and his family built a cabin near the spring. In July 1776, soldiers and explorers, including Simon Kenton, constructed McClelland's Fort on the spring bluff. The fort, attacked by Indians on December 29, 1776, was abandoned in 1777.

In late 1783, Robert and Jemima Suggett Johnson established Johnson Station, Scott County's first permanent settlement, near a buffalo crossing on North Elkhorn Creek. Later known as Great Crossing, it became the county's first commercial center. By 1785 settlers were clearing forests and canelands and establishing farmsteads. Baptists were the dominant religious group, followed by Presbyterians. Around 1786, Catholics from Maryland settled in western Scott County and in 1793-94 organized St. Francis Church, an early center of Catholic missions and the second Catholic parish in Kentucky.

Scott County was one of two counties established by the first Kentucky legislature on June 1, 1792, and was named in honor of Gen. Charles Scott, governor during 1808-1812. Created from Woodford County, Scott County was reduced to its present boundaries in 1819.

Agriculture was Scott County's leading source of income until 1960. Farmers produced cattle, hogs, sheep, horses, and mules, as well as corn, hemp, flax, orchard products, and tobacco. Local industry processed agricultural products into whiskey, flour, meal, linen and woolen cloth, coarse bagging, hempen rope, paper, and lumber.

Georgetown was settled in late 1785 or early 1786 by the Rev. Elijah Craig and Virginia Baptists and was incorporated on December 16, 1790. Craig's mills on Royal Spring Branch were among the first west of the Appalachians to full and card cloth (1789) and the first to manufacture paper (1793). Craig also established an early ropewalk (1789) and a whiskey still. Craig's 1788 classical school became Rittenhouse Academy in 1799. In 1829 Georgetown College was organized with the assets of the Craig/Rittenhouse schools.

Stamping Ground, incorporated in 1834, grew up around a buffalo spring and wallowing ground and was laid out as a village in 1818. Stamping Ground had several taverns for Frankfort-to-Cincinnati travelers. Antebellum industries included a tanyard and woolen mill. Other important crossroads commercial centers were Patterson's Crossroads (present day Oxford), Newtown, and Turkeyfoot.

On November 18, 1861, Scott County native George W. Johnson was elected provisional Confederate governor of Kentucky. On August 8, 1862, James Fisher Robinson, also a Scott County native and a Union Democrat, became governor. Scott County furnished the Union army with 118 white soldiers and the Confederacy with approximately 1,000. After the Civil War, former slaves who remained in the county occupied tenant houses or built dwellings in hamlets such as New Zion, Zion Hill, and Watkinsville; on the edges of villages and towns; and in neighborhoods encircling downtown Georgetown and extending northeast into the all-black village of Boston.

Between 1870 and 1900, burley tobacco replaced hemp as the major cash crop, and air-curing tobacco barns were built. Georgetown's James Campbell Cantrill, congressman from 1908 to 1923, led growers' struggles for market equity.

Railroads brought economic vitality to Scott County, including Lexington-Portland (1835), Cincinnati Southern (now the Norfolk Southern), established in 1876, Kentucky Midland (1888), Louisville Southern (1888), Georgetown Street Railroad (1888, 1895), and Lexington-Georgetown Interurban (1902). Grist and lumber milling, carriage manufacturing, and distilling were leading postbellum industries. Sadieville, on the Cincinnati Southern Railroad, was established as northern Scott County's shipping and commercial center in 1877. Industries that developed along railroads included Stamping Ground's Buffalo Springs Distillery and Georgetown's Blue Grass Cordage (1890), Model Mills (1897), and Indian Oil Refinery (1905-15). Popular use of the automobile brought about improvement of Dixie Highway (U.S. 25) after 1916.

Beginning in 1910, Anne Payne Coffman and the Georgetown Civic League/Woman's Club organized public improvement projects, including the library, health department, and school reform.

Post-World War II industrialization began in 1944-45 with Mallard Pencil Company's plant on Bourbon Street. In 1957 Electric Parts Corporation began manufacturing electric blankets. Construction of I-75 and I-64 between 1960 and 1972 brought more development, which climaxed in 1985 with the establishment of a Toyota Motor Manufacturing plant north of Georgetown.

The population of Scott County was 17,948 in 1970; 21,813 in 1980; 23,867 in 1990; and 33,061 in 2000.