Bracken County, 1796

Boone County, KY · est. 1938

Where a sulphur-and-salt spring seeped to the surface in the Ohio Valley, generations of Ice Age mammoths and mastodons came to lick the minerals — and many died and were preserved, leaving a boneyard that astonished the first Europeans to reach it in 1739. Through the mid-1700s the lick drew a parade of frontier travelers and salt-makers, and by the early 1800s Thomas Jefferson, fascinated by these 'incognitum' giants, dispatched William Clark to gather specimens here. Later collectors like geologist N. S. Shaler hauled away tusks eight to ten feet long, making this quiet Kentucky spring one of the birthplaces of American paleontology.

South Lebanon, OH

In the years just after the Revolution, pioneers pushed into the Ohio country, and the settlement that became Deerfield took root around 1795 in the Little Miami valley of what is now Warren County. Benjamin Stites laid out the town in 1802, and among its first residents were veterans of both the Revolution and the War of 1812, men who had traded muskets for plows on the young republic's frontier. As the community matured it folded into Union Township in 1815, took the name South Lebanon in 1871, and grew an industrial side — powder works and food businesses that gave the village a working economy well into the industrial age.

Hamilton, OH

Industrialist and philanthropist Clark Lane built this octagonal library in 1866 and donated it to the people of Hamilton two years later. A son of a pioneer family that came to the Ohio Country in Northwest Territory days, Lane helped found a machine company that made Hamilton a center of metals manufacturing before turning to charitable works. Battered by the catastrophic 1913 Great Miami River flood and a later fire, the library rebuilt and expanded into a county-wide system serving western Butler County.

Lexington, KY

Robert Patterson built this small cabin around 1780, before his marriage to Elizabeth Lindsay, and over two centuries it served as home, servant's quarters, and tool shed while migrating across many sites, including a stint on his grandson's Ohio farm from 1901 to 1939. Patterson himself was a founder of cities: he chose the site of Lexington, helped erect its fort in 1779 and lay off the town, took part in founding Cincinnati and Dayton, helped charter Transylvania University, and served Fayette County in the legislature.