Hemp in Mason County

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.

Augusta, KY

In the 1870s this Ohio River county was the nation's leading wine producer, pressing more than 30,000 gallons a year—roughly half of all American wine. German immigrants, finding soil like that of France and Spain, carried grape growing and winemaking to the hills around Augusta. This limestone cellar, its walls three feet thick, is the last survivor of that vanished industry.

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.

Brush Creek Township, OH

In the hills of Adams County, Ohio, Cedar Run once powered a small industrial world. The first mill here rose in 1811 to serve a nearby iron furnace, part of the charcoal-iron trade that dotted the Appalachian foothills before the furnace went cold in 1840. Milling continued when Fisher and Stewart raised a new grist mill in 1844, and a generation later its owners traded the fickle water wheel for a steam engine, its tall brick smokestack marking the arrival of a new industrial age.