Bracken County Wine

Augusta, KY

Bracken County, formed in 1796, was named for the frontier hunter and Indian fighter William Bracken, who ranged this country as early as 1773. For its size the county produced an outsized share of firsts: it cradled John Gregg Fee, founder of Berea College; the noted surgeon Joshua Taylor Bradford; and Augusta College, chartered in 1822 as the world's first Methodist college. In 1867 the first White Burley tobacco was grown from Bracken County seed, transforming Kentucky agriculture.

Maysville, KY

Mason County was the only major hemp-producing county in Kentucky outside the Bluegrass, its 1810 crop worth $70,000. By the 1830s Maysville trailed only Louisville in finished hemp goods, its ropewalks—long buildings for spiral-winding fiber—turning out hundreds of thousands of pounds of rope a year. Statewide, hemp was Kentucky's largest cash crop until 1915, when cheap imported jute finally broke the market.

Maysville, KY

Chartered in 1829, the Maysville and Washington Turnpike laid down the first macadamized road in Kentucky—and reputedly the first anywhere west of the Alleghenies—when its opening four-mile stretch was completed in 1830. By 1835 the improved road ran all the way from Maysville to Lexington, threaded with thirteen tollhouses and six covered bridges. It carried the Bluegrass region's goods and travelers over a smooth, engineered surface that muddy frontier tracks could never match.

Monroe Township, OH

In a modest one-story timber cottage in the Clermont County hamlet of Point Pleasant, the future general and eighteenth president of the United States entered the world in the spring of 1822, the first child of a tanner and his wife who had settled along the Ohio River only a year before. Named Hiram Ulysses at birth, the boy would grow up around his father's tannery trade before a clerical error at West Point permanently rechristened him with the initials that history remembers. The Ohio frontier of these years was a rising country of river commerce and small industry, and this humble house marks the starting point of one of the most consequential American lives of the nineteenth century.