Garrard County
Lancaster, Garrard County, Kentucky
Marker Inscription
Garrard County, 1797. Taken from parts of Lincoln, Madison, and Mercer, it was the 25th county formed. Lancaster, county seat, established in 1798. Named for James Garrard, then governor of Kentucky, 1796-1804. A native of Virginia, served as militia officer in Revolution. He came to Kentucky in 1783. Member statehood and Constitution conventions at Danville, 1784-92.
Erected by Kentucky Historical Society
The Story
Garrard County, the 25th formed in Kentucky, was created in 1797 and named for James Garrard, then the state's governor. A Virginia native and Revolutionary War militia officer, Garrard came to Kentucky in 1783 and helped shape its path to statehood at the Danville conventions before serving as governor from 1796 to 1804.
Why it matters
It honors a frontier soldier-statesman who helped turn a western territory into the fifteenth state.
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Related people
- · James Garrard
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Samuel Boone
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Here lies Samuel Boone (1728–1816), eldest brother of the famed pioneer Daniel Boone. Born in Pennsylvania, he came to Kentucky from South Carolina in 1779 and settled at Boone's Station, joining the 1782 defense of Bryan's Station during a period of intense frontier warfare. That same year his son Thomas was killed at the Battle of Blue Licks, one of the last engagements of the Revolution in the West.
Boone's Station
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Daniel Boone surveyed this site in 1774 and by December 1779 was living here with other families in crude shelters, building cabins and a stockade the next year. By 1783 the fortified station sheltered fifteen to twenty families on the Kentucky frontier—but at a cost: Boone's brother Edward, his son Israel, and his nephew Thomas were all killed in the closing violence of the Revolutionary War. Boone remained until 1784, and in the 20th century the land was willed to the state, opening as Boone's Station State Park in 1992.
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In June 1775, frontiersmen led by William McConnell camped on a branch of Elkhorn Creek and, on hearing of the colonists' clash with the British at Lexington, Massachusetts that April, named their campsite Lexington to honor the Revolution's first battle. Fear of attack delayed permanent settlement until 1779, when Colonel Robert Patterson and his companions raised a blockhouse and stockade. The town of Lexington was formally established by the Virginia General Assembly in 1782.
Pioneer Hunters
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In the summer of 1775, long hunters ranging through the Kentucky wilderness made camp at a spring on this ground and, hearing that the first shots of the Revolution had been fired at Lexington, Massachusetts, borrowed that name for their bivouac. The camp they christened would grow into the city of Lexington, one of the earliest permanent settlements west of the Appalachians. This tablet was placed by the city's citizens in 1925, on the 150th anniversary of that naming, to mark where the story began.