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Louisville, Lexington, Frankfort, Jeffersonville, London, Ashland, Bowling Green, Owensboro, Paducah, Somerset, Versailles, Austin, Berea, Bethlehem, Campbellsburg, Campbellsville, Corbin, Danville, Elizabethtown, Franklin, Georgetown, Glasgow, Greenville, Hardinsburg, Hazard, Hopkinsville, La Grange, Lancaster, Leitchfield, Milltown
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Kentucky's
first human inhabitants were descendants of prehistoric
peoples who migrated from Asia over an artic land bridge to
North America as long as 30,000 years ago. Even the earliest
prehistoric Indians made stone and wooden hunting tools.
Archaic people grew squash, and Woodland people expanded by
growing corn and beans. The development of pottery in the
Woodland Period led to new cooking methods that survived
until the arrival of metal cookware.
During the second half of the 17th century, European
explorers - French, Spanish, and English began entering the
region, and by 1749 land companies were being formed to
survey Kentucky and stake claims. After Robert Cavelier,
sieur de La Salle, claimed all regions drained by the
Mississippi and its tributaries for France, British interest
in the area quickened. The first major expedition to the
Tennessee region was led by Dr. Thomas Walker, who explored
the eastern mountain region in 1750 for the Loyal Land
Company. Walker was soon followed by hunters and scouts
including Christopher Gist. Further exploration was
interrupted by the last conflict (1754-63) of the French and
Indian Wars between the French and British for control of
North America, and Pontiac's Rebellion , a Native American
uprising (1763-66).
With the British victorious in both, settlers soon began to
enter Kentucky. They came in defiance of a royal
proclamation of 1763, which forbade settlement west of the
Appalachians. Daniel Boone , the famous American
frontiersman, first came to Kentucky in 1767; he returned in
1769 and spent two years in the area. A surveying party
under James Harrod established the first permanent
settlement at Harrodsburg in 1774, and the next year Boone,
as agent for Richard Henderson and the Transylvania Company
, a colonizing group of which Henderson was a member, blazed
the Wilderness Road from Tennessee into the Kentucky region
and founded Boonesboro. Title to this land was challenged by
Virginia, whose legislature voided (1778) the Transylvania
Company's claims, although individual settlers were
confirmed in their grants.
Kentucky was made (1776) a county of Virginia, and new
settlers came through the Cumberland Gap and over the
Wilderness Road or down the Ohio River. These early pioneers
of Kentucky and Tennessee were constantly in conflict with
the Native Americans. The growing population of Kentuckians,
feeling that Virginia had failed to give them adequate
protection, worked for statehood in a series of conventions
held at Danville (1784–91). Others, observing the weaknesses
of the U.S. government, considered forming an independent
nation. Since trade down the Mississippi and out of
Spanish-held New Orleans was indispensable to Kentucky's
economic development, an alliance with Spain was
contemplated, and U.S. General James Wilkinson, who lived in
Kentucky at the time, worked toward that end.
However, in 1792 a constitution was finally framed and
accepted, and in the same year the Commonwealth of Kentucky
(its official designation) was admitted to the Union, the
first state West of the Appalachians. Isaac Shelby was
elected the first governor, and Frankfort was chosen
capital. Commonwealth, meaning government based on the
common consent of the people, dates to the time of Oliver
Cromwell's England in the mid-1600s. The other U.S.
commonwealths, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia,
were originally British colonies. Kentucky, once part of
Virginia, chose to remain a commonwealth when it separated
from Virginia.
U.S. General Anthony Wayne's victory at the battle of Fallen
Timbers in 1794 effectively ended Native American resistance
in Kentucky.
In 1795, Pinckney's Treaty between the United States and
Spain granted Americans the right to navigate the
Mississippi, a right soon completely assured by the
Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Enactment by the federal
government of the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798) promptly
provoked a sharp protest in Kentucky (see Kentucky and
Virginia Resolutions ). The state grew fast as trade and
shipping centers developed and river traffic down the Ohio
and Mississippi increased.
The War of 1812 spurred economic prosperity in Kentucky, but
financial difficulties after the war threatened many with
ruin. The state responded to the situation by chartering in
1818 a number of new banks that were allowed to issue their
own currency. These banks soon collapsed, and the state
legislature passed measures for the relief of the banks'
creditors. However, the relief measures were subsequently
declared unconstitutional by a state court. The legislature
then repealed legislation that had established the offending
court and set up a new one. The state became divided between
prorelief and antirelief factions, and the issue also
figured in the division of the state politically between
followers of the Tennessean Andrew Jackson, then rising to
national political prominence, and supporters of the Whig
Party of Henry Clay, who was a leader in Kentucky politics
for almost half a century.
In the first half of the 19th cent., Kentucky was primarily
a state of small farms rather than large plantations and was
not adaptable to extensive use of slave labor. Slavery thus
declined after 1830, and for 17 years, beginning in 1833,
the importation of slaves into the state was forbidden. In
1850, however, the legislature repealed this restriction,
and Kentucky, where slave trading had begun to develop
quietly in the 1840s, was converted into a huge slave market
for the lower South.
Antislavery agitation had begun in the state in the late
18th cent. within the churches, and abolitionists such as
James G. Birney and Cassius M. Clay labored vigorously in
Kentucky for emancipation before the Civil War. Soon
Kentucky, like other border states, was torn by conflict
over the slavery issue. In addition to the radical
antislavery element and the aggressive proslavery faction,
there was also in the state a conciliatory group.
At the outbreak of the Civil War, Kentucky attempted to
remain neutral. Gov. Beriah Magoffin refused to sanction
President Lincoln's call for volunteers, but his warnings to
both the Union and the Confederacy not to invade were
ignored. Confederate forces invaded and occupied part of S
Kentucky, including Columbus and Bowling Green. The state
legislature voted (Sept., 1861) to oust the Confederates and
Ulysses S. Grant crossed the Ohio and took Paducah, thus
securing the state was secured for the Union. After battles
in Mill Springs, Richmond, and Perryville in 1862, there was
no major fighting in the state, although the Confederate
cavalryman John Hunt Morgan occasionally led raids into
Kentucky, and guerrilla warfare was constant.
For Kentucky it was truly a civil war as neighbors, friends,
and even families became bitterly divided in their
loyalties. Over 30,000 Kentuckians fought for the
Confederacy, while about 64,000 served in the Union ranks.
After the war many in the state opposed federal
Reconstruction policies, and Kentucky refused to ratify the
Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments to the U.S.
Constitution.
As in the South, an overwhelming majority of Kentuckians
supported the Democratic party in the period of readjustment
after the war, which in many ways was as bitter as the war
itself. After the Civil War industrial and commercial
recovery was aided by increased railroad construction, but
farmers were plagued by the liabilities of the one-crop
(tobacco) system. After the turn of the century, the
depressed price of tobacco gave rise to a feud between
buyers and growers, resulting in the Black Patch War. Night
riders terrorized buyers and growers in an effort to stage
an effective boycott against monopolistic practices of
buyers. For more than a year general lawlessness prevailed
until the state militia forced a truce in 1908.
Coal mining, which began on a large scale in the 1870s, was
well established in mountainous E Kentucky by the early 20th
cent. The mines boomed during World War I, but after the
war, when demand for coal lessened and production fell off,
intense labor troubles developed.
During the early 1900s, a group of tobacco companies held a
monopoly on tobacco buying in Kentucky. A group of farmers
began burning barns and fields of those who sold to these
companies. The Black Patch War (1904-1909) succeeded in
breaking up the monopoly and tobacco auctions were adopted.
People in Kentucky lost work as the demand for coal
decreased during the 1920s. The Great Depression (1929-1939)
also caused many to lose their jobs. In 1933, the federal
government created jobs through the Tennessee Valley
Authority (TVA) program. Dams were built along the Tennessee
and Cumberland Rivers and throughout the state. Many worked
on state highways and others conserving natural resources.
After World War I improvements of the state's highways were
made, and a much-needed reorganization of the state
government was carried out in the 1920s and 30s. Since World
War II, construction of turnpikes, extensive development of
state parks, and a marked rise in tourism have all
contributed to the development of the state. Kentucky
benefited from the energy crisis of the 1970s, when its
large coal supply was in great demand, but recovered slowly
from a decline in manufacturing in the same period.
The attempt of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW) to
organize the coal industry in Harlan co. in the 1930s
resulted in outbreaks of violence, drawing national
attention to “bloody” Harlan, and in 1937 a U.S. Senate
subcommittee began an investigation into allegations that
workers' civil rights were being violated. Further violence
ensued, and it was not until 1939 that the UMW was finally
recognized as a bargaining agent for most of the state's
miners. Labor disputes and strikes have persisted in the
state; some are still accompanied by violence.
World War II (1939-1945) also created jobs with the U.S.
military and supplying weapons and food to U.S. soldiers.
During the 1960s, the coal industry grew rising to second
place nationally. The TVA began building recreational areas
in western Kentucky and a steam-generating plant in
Paradise. And, Kentucky passed the Kentucky Civil Rights
Act, requiring equal employment and housing for all races.
Recently, state leaders have strived to improve Kentucky.
Coal production was creating water and air pollution. Laws
were passed in 1978 to improve the environment. In 1990, the
Kentucky Education Reform Act provided money for better
education. Today, Kentucky is also trying to attract new
businesses to the state while developing its traditional
industries.
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