In the Footsteps of the Pioneers, Part II

by

FROM CRAB ORCHARD TO HARRODSBURG

Picking up where we left off, two roads left Hazel Patch. One went to Fort Boonesborough, and the second, also part of the Wilderness Road and named Skaggs Trace, headed northwest. It winds for 130 miles through what today are the towns of Mount Vernon, Crab Orchard, Stanford, Danville, Bardstown and Shepherdsville, and finally to the Wilderness Road’s ending at the Falls of the Ohio near Louisville. 

Crab Orchard, now a town of 832 residents, was a popular gathering place on the Wilderness Road. Travelers would wait until others arrived to create a group large enough to assure safe passage over the Wilderness Road. The following notice, printed in the Nov. 1, 1788 issue of The Kentucky Gazette, seems to have been common: “A large company will meet at the Crab-Orchard the 19th of November in order to start early the next day through the wilderness. As it is very dangerous on account of Indians, it is hoped that each person will go well armed.” 

On a less alarming note, I was told by diners over lunch at the Past Time Café in Crab Orchard that travelers on the Wilderness Road could smell the sweet fragrance of the area’s wild crab apple trees long before arriving in town, and that children entertained themselves by making “snow angels” in the apple blossoms. 

Two miles down the Wilderness Road off U.S. Hwy. 150 is the William Whitley House State Historic Site. This is a Kentucky treasure. Dubbed the “Guardian of the Wilderness Road” because the Whitleys extended hospitality and protection to all who stopped by, the Whitley house is the first brick home built west of the Alleghenies and was a veritable fortress. The interior was designed in amazing ways that served to protect the family and guests. It was an extraordinary site—and still is. Who would ever guess that such architectural beauty existed so early in Kentucky’s history? 

In 1775, William and Esther Whitley, ages 26 and 20, their two children (nine more were born in Kentucky) and a horse traveled over the Wilderness Road for 33 days from their home in Virginia. Esther and their two daughters rode on the horse, with 3-year-old Elizabeth tied on behind her mother and the infant Isabella in her mother’s arms. 

The Whitley House that we see now was built in 1794. Well-informed guides provide enjoyable tours. Guide Stacy Thomason told me that the house’s “beautiful glass windows were brought from Virginia, packed between mattresses on one of the first wagons to be pulled over the Wilderness Road.” 

Thomason described William Whitley as a caring person who was eager to advise travelers and furnish them with needed supplies. He would go to great lengths to protect Wilderness Road travelers. “And don’t forget,” Thomason continued, “that Esther Whitley was known to be an excellent shot—better than most men of the time. She never hesitated to fire away when threatened!” 

Continuing for several miles along the Wilderness Road on U.S. 150, I biked into the town of Stanford and to the original Presbyterian Church. This treasure was built in 1788 and is preserved inside the Old Presbyterian Meeting House & Museum on Main Street. Another mile or so along the road brought me to the place where Logan’s Station once stood and is being painstakingly reconstructed according to its original 150-by-90-foot size. Logan’s Station, established in 1775, was one of Kentucky’s earliest forts and a popular location for frontier families who sought sanctuary from dangers outside the fort’s walls. Logan’s Station became the town of Stanford. 

Knowing that there was a station or fort nearby when they needed it, settlers would clear land claims of trees and undergrowth, build a cabin and plant crops—usually corn. Chestnut was the most popular wood, since its logs could be used to build cabins and rail fences that protected crops from wild animals. Chestnut also could be split into shingles, and its bark was used to make medicine and tannic acid for tanning and dyeing. In the fall, the chestnut tree’s rich nuts were used to fatten hogs. 

I continued my bike ride over the Wilderness Road by taking U.S. 150 to Danville, where in the 1780s settlers could find stores, taverns, inns and churches. Inns charged 21 cents per day for food and lodging. Stores supplied bacon, cheese, coffee, flour, sugar, raw leather, linen, stockings, blankets, furniture, tools and other necessities. In 1786, the settlement of Danville already included 40 houses. It is said that Bardstown and Louisville each had 50 by then. Kentucky was growing its towns and supporting services. Entering Danville from Stanford, I turned right onto Old Wilderness Road Street, which continues for a few blocks to the intersection of East Lexington Avenue and Kentucky Avenue. That seems to be all that’s left of the original Wilderness Road route in Danville. 

While in Danville, I also discovered a new distillery a couple of miles outside the city on Lebanon Road. It’s named the Wilderness Trail Distillery. Given its name, I hope that in time the distillery will develop a well-researched exhibit that describes the history of the distilling and consumption of spirits along the Wilderness Road. 

As I pedaled over increasingly hospitable rolling hills on U.S. Hwy. 127 to Harrodsburg, I began anticipating a visit to Old Fort Harrod State Park, about which I had heard so much. For years, Fort Harrod was the main destination of the western spur of the Wilderness Road. In fact, it was the first permanent European settlement west of the Alleghenies. In 1774, Capt. James Harrod and 32 others left Pennsylvania and set out for Kentucky to claim land and develop a settlement. After three months of travel, they came upon a place strategically located near a huge spring that provided an “inexhaustible supply of pristine water.” Today, Old Fort Harrod in Harrodsburg is a superbly scaled replica of the original fort and a terrific site to visit. 

I lingered for a couple of hours, stepping inside the fort’s cabins and blockhouses that look like they did in Fort Harrod’s early days. Knowledgeable guides dressed in period clothing were eager to describe the lives of late-18th century settlers. The guides performed tasks such as gardening, weaving, woodworking, broom making, blacksmithing, soap making and doll making. I was especially intrigued by a rare collection of pioneer tools and utensils. John Curry, a loquacious resident historian, described in amazing detail the lives of the 319 men, women and children who depended on Fort Harrod for protection when life on their small farms outside the fort was threatened by American Indian attacks. Settlers didn’t travel all the way to Kentucky just to live inside crowded, dirty forts. Fort Harrod and other stations along the Wilderness Road were sanctuaries of last resort when life in the wilderness became too dangerous. 

KENTUCKY’S CATHOLIC PIONEERS

The Wilderness Road continues on Ky. Route 152 from Harrodsburg to Springfield and then to Bardstown over U.S. 150. As I biked past Springfield, I recalled reading that a group of 25 Catholic families decided to leave Maryland in 1785 and migrate to the American wilderness, where they’d be free to worship as they wished. They made their way through dangerous American Indian territory to what would become Holy Cross in Marion County. How dangerous was this area? Later, it was reported by Catholic Bishop John Lancaster Spaulding that tribes killed 1,500 Catholic pioneers between 1783 and 1790. 

It’s understandable that the Catholic settlement at Holy Cross would become a center of frontier Catholicism for those who survived. The area’s wonderfully fertile land supported those industrious farmers, builders, distillers and, I might add, prodigious procreators. When Leonard Mattingly, one of the original Holy Cross settlers, died in 1805, he was said to have left more than 300 descendants.

The history of Holy Cross includes the story of the Rev. William de Rohan, a Catholic priest, who drifted through the wilderness delivering Mass to frontier Catholics. One day, de Rohan stumbled upon the community of Catholic families gathered near Holy Cross and began ministering to them. When Archbishop John Carroll, who was back in Baltimore, learned that unsupervised de Rohan was in Kentucky, he instructed the priest to return to Baltimore. De Rohan (insubordinate when drunk, which might have been a lot of the time) adamantly refused and instead devoted himself in 1792 to helping the settlers at Holy Cross construct the first Catholic church in Kentucky and west of the Alleghenies. Today, a grotto in the cemetery behind the church marks where this log structure once stood. I found that the church, which was erected in 1823, was open, so I entered and quietly prayed for pioneers who settled the area. Down the road, in nearby Loretto, is the first religious order of women west of the Alleghenies that was established in 1796 to provide care for widows and orphans left homeless along the Wilderness Road. 

Observing the diminishing presence of trees as I biked westward on U.S. 150 to Bardstown, I wondered how much of 18th-century Kentucky was tree-covered. All? Most? Some? When I asked about this, David Strange, retired director of the Bullitt County History Museum, told me that “there was a large area in north-central Kentucky that was more prairie-like than forest. It was not ‘far-as-you-can-see’ prairie land such as seen in the central U.S.,” he explained, “but large areas, interspersed with forests and large cane.” 

One can imagine the overpowering joy that travelers experienced when they came upon Kentucky’s more welcoming land and fertile soil. They had read words such as “paradise,” “land that is delightful and fertile beyond conception” and “Garden of Eden” that were written to describe where they now actually stood. The promotional brochures that marketed Kentucky to European emigrants had nailed it!

BARDSTOWN-BOUND AND ON TO THE FALLS OF THE OHIO

I arrived in Bardstown looking for two sites. One was a segment of the original Wilderness Road that can be found across the street from Bardstown’s magnificent Civil War Museum and Old Bardstown Village. After fording the Beech Fork River on the east side of Bardstown, travelers had to climb a steep incline to enter the town. In 1790, to make the difficult climb a little easier, the original path was covered with rough cobblestones. The steep, tree-canopied roadway is too rugged and uneven to bike, so I walked to the top that ends at the intersection of North 1st Street and East Flaget Avenue. One can readily imagine pioneers using this crude road to enter Bardstown.

I stopped for something refreshing to drink at the Old Talbott Tavern, my other Bardstown destination, just off the town’s courthouse roundabout. It’s possible that some of the hype surrounding Old Talbott is inaccurate (such as that it was built in 1797, not 1779 as is engraved on the building), but it’s true that the tavern provided lodging and food services for Wilderness Road travelers. The place is still going strong, and there’s enough left of the original 2-foot-thick stone walls and heavy ceiling timber structure to get a feel for the old Wilderness Road taverns and inns.

I enjoyed sitting at the Old Talbott bar visiting with out-of-state tourists, but the Wilderness Road was calling me. I headed out of Bardstown to Shepherdsville on Ky. Route 245. A couple of miles east of Shepherdsville on Ky. Route 44 is a sign that marks the site of Brashear’s Station, which for many years was the sole station along the Wilderness Road between Harrodsburg and Louisville. Brashear’s Station, located on the Salt River that flowed from the Ohio and near where Wilderness Road travelers crossed at its shallow places, provided an important sanctuary for hunters and Wilderness Road travelers.

In 1776, while the Continental Congress was meeting in Philadelphia, members of the Brashear family traveled from Pennsylvania down the Ohio River to the Falls of the Ohio. They were looking for land in the wilderness that they could call their own. From the Falls, they followed one of the buffalo paths that led southward to the Salt River. It was here that they built a shelter, cleared land and planted corn. 

A couple of years later, the Brashears returned to the Falls, where they convinced 18 others to help them establish a small station close to where Ky. Route 44 crosses Floyd’s Fork today. Sadly, William Brashear’s body was discovered near the station in 1781. He had been killed, scalped and mutilated. Brashear’s Station continued for a while, but as the American Indian danger lessened, its occupants moved out to settle their own land outside the fort. All that remains is a historical marker.

Brashear’s Station was near a major salt-producing area named Bullitt’s Lick. Salt was critical to survival in the wilderness—for animals and humans alike. For both, salt added essential minerals to their diets. For humans, salt also was used to preserve food. Many Wilderness Road travelers rejected more direct routes from Harrod’s Fort (Harrodsburg) to the Falls of the Ohio (Louisville) so they could pass by Bullitt’s Lick and obtain valuable salt. Three miles west of Shepherdsville on Ky. Route 44 is a historical marker that notes the location of Bullitt’s Lick and its salt works, which began in 1777.

Salt licks were muddy pits that sprung naturally from the ground. Buffalo and deer would aggressively lick the salt-infused ground. Pioneers would find these sites (countless salt licks existed throughout Kentucky), dig wells, draw the salty water into kettles and boil away the water to retrieve the salt. It typically took 300 gallons of water to make one bushel of salt. At the height of production at the Bullitt’s Lick salt works in the early 1800s, 100 20-gallon kettles were arranged in a row over a long fire pit. What a sight that must have been. Because salt works operated 24 hours a day, providing sufficient supplies of salt water and firewood was a major challenge. 

As I pointed my bike north of Shepherdsville on Ky. Route 61, I was aware that the original Wilderness Road might have followed several different buffalo paths to, or perhaps from, Louisville. Access to commerce on the Ohio River and the salt works in Shepherdsville required that the northern segment of the Wilderness Road be completed. Professional hunters—traveling on the Ohio River from as far west as St. Louis and laden with precious furs and skins that would sell for astronomical prices on the East Coast and Europe—disembarked at the Falls and made their way down the Wilderness Road to Bullitt’s Lick, Fort Harrod, Hazel Patch and eventually through the Cumberland Gap. Heavy traffic moved over the Wilderness Road in both directions.

Most of the Wilderness Road that winds its way from Shepherdsville to Louisville is now Ky. Route 61 and Preston Highway. Due to urban sprawl, commercialization and the development of modern roadways that serve Bullitt and Jefferson counties, the original Wilderness Road was long ago covered up and abandoned. A historical marker at the intersection of Preston Highway and Blue Lick Road in Okolona indicates that the original Wilderness Road passed there and continued northward to the Ohio River.

The Wilderness Road’s northern ending point was at West Main and 7th Street in Louisville, close to what is now the Fort Nelson Park. Fort Nelson was built in 1781 under the direction of George Rogers Clark. Marking the site today is a sign noting that the 1-acre, wood- and earth-reinforced walled fort was all there was to Louisville in 1781. Outside the fort were the frontier and the Wilderness Road. Realizing that my adventure over the historic Wilderness Road from the Cumberland Gap to Louisville was finished, I patted my bike on its tires for a job well done.

THE WILDERNESS ROAD CREATED THE PLACE WE LOVE

Kentucky became a state in 1792, and its new legislature began to invest in improved roadways. As a result, the Commonwealth experienced amazing growth: 74,000 inhabitants in 1790; 221,000 in 1800; and 407,000 in 1810. By 1810, the population of Kentucky exceeded all but four of the original colonies. Ten percent of the nation’s entire population had crossed the Appalachians into Kentucky.

The Kentucky Gazette announced in 1796 that “The Wilderness Road from the Cumberland Gap to settlements in Kentucky is now completed. Wagons loaded with a ton of weight may pass with ease with four good horses. Travelers will find no difficulty in procuring such necessities as they stand in need of on the road, and the abundant crop now growing in Kentucky will afford the emigrants a certainty of being supplied with every necessity of life on the most convenient terms.” 

It cannot be doubted that the Wilderness Road was the single most influential development in the history of our Commonwealth and helped to create the place we love. 

Kirk’s Favorite Places to Visit on Kentucky’s Wilderness Road

• Cumberland Gap National Historical Park and Pinnacle Overlook Park – South of Middlesboro on U.S. Hwy. 25E, these are the best places to learn about the Wilderness Road and view Cumberland Gap. nps.gov/cuga/contacts.htm

• Trailhead for the Wilderness Road – U.S. Hwy. 58 near the town of Cumberland Gap, Tennessee, the trailhead features excellent signage describing the Wilderness Road experience.

• Levi Jackson Wilderness Road State Park – South of London on Ky. Route 229, the park boasts terrific hiking trails and camping facilities.

• Fort Boonesborough State Park – North of Richmond on Ky. Route 627, the fort is an enjoyable way to learn about life in the late 18th century. The park has excellent camping facilities and is not far from Hall’s on the River restaurant. fortboonesboroughlivinghistory.org, parks.ky.gov, hallsontheriver.com

• William Whitley House State Historic Site – South of Stanford off U.S. Hwy. 150, the site offers tours of the house, and visitors can enjoy the nearby town of Crab Orchard. parks.ky.gov

• Old Fort Harrod State Park – On U.S. Hwy. 68 in Harrodsburg, the park has a terrific reconstructed Wilderness Road fort and includes re-enactments of activities from the late 18th century at Kentucky’s first settlement. parks.ky.gov

• Holy Cross Catholic Church – Northwest of Loretto on Ky. Route 49, the grotto that marks the location of the first Catholic Church west of the Alleghenies is located at the back of a large and interesting cemetery behind the current church.

• Bullitt County History Museum – Located in the county courthouse in Shepherdsville, the museum features interesting artifacts and exhibits that describe Kentucky’s early history. bullittcountryhistory.org

Acknowledgments:

Ellen Eslinger, editor, Running Mad for Kentucky: Frontier Travel Accounts, 2004.

John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer, 1992.

John Filson, The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucky, 1793.

Neal Owen Hammon, “Early Roads Into Kentucky,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 68, 2, 1968.

Joseph Hardesty, Kentucky history and genealogy librarian, Louisville Free Public Library, for identifying key books and maps.

Robert L. Kincaid, The Wilderness Road, 1955.

Karl Raitz (Department of Geography, University of Kentucky), Nancy O’Malley (Webb Museum of Anthropology, University of Kentucky), et al., Kentucky’s Frontier Trails: Warrior’s Path, Boone’s Trace and Wilderness Road, 1795, 2008.

David Strange, former director of the Bullitt County History Museum, for providing valuable information.