This is a timeline of Kentucky history.

Early history

Seven Years War / French and Indian War

  • 1754 The Piqua, of the Shawnee nation, abandoned Eskippakithiki, "place of blue licks" - or Little Pict Town as the European traders called it. This may also have been the town that the Wyandot (of the Iroquois nations) referred to as Kentucky[4] or "Meadow" and so the name for the nearby river came to serve as the name for the whole area. Eskppakithiki was probably the last permanent non-European town in the area that became Kentucky; later European-American settlers called the well-kept farmlands around the stockaded village location the "Indian Old Fields."
  • 1767 Daniel Boone led his first band of hunters as far west as what is now Floyd County, Kentucky and hunted along the Big Sandy River.
  • 1769 Judge Richard Henderson financed a venture proposed by John Finley to find the Cherokees' Warriors Path through a gap in the Cumberland Mountains; Finley convinced his friend Daniel Boone to lead a hunting party on a long hunt in Kentucky, including John Stewart, Boone's brother-in-law; they cleared a trail through the Cumberland Gap; on December 22, a Shawnee war party confiscated their store of pelts, warning them not to return, but Daniel Boone, his brother Squire and John Stewart remained in Kentucky for two more years, exploring and hunting - tales of these exploits drew the attention of easterners eager for new lands to settle.[5]

Lord Dunmore's War

Revolutionary War

Between the wars

  • October 1, 1789 • Jenny Brevard Wiley, mother of four children and pregnant with her fifth at the time, was kidnapped from her home in Virginia by a war party of Cherokees, Shawnees, Wyandots and Delawares; forced to work for her captors at Little Mud Lick Creek in Johnson County, Kentucky, she escaped and returned to her husband, eventually returning to live with her new family in the same area where she had been held as a slave. Jenny Wiley State Resort Park near Dewey Lake in eastern Kentucky and the Jenny Wiley Stakes thoroughbred race at Keeneland Race Course in Lexington, Kentucky are named after her.
  • June 1, 1792 • Kentucky became the fifteenth state to be admitted to the union and Isaac Shelby, a military veteran from Virginia, was elected the first Governor of the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
  • 1795 • Free Frank McWorter builds and manages a farming settlement in Pulaski County, Kentucky while enslaved by his father, George McWhorter; his saltpeter factory becomes highly profitable during the War of 1812 and by 1817 he had earned enough money of his own to purchase his wife Lucy from her master, and in 1819 bought his own freedom from his father, earning the moniker Free Frank; he traded his saltpeter plant in 1829 in exchange for the freedom of his eldest son Frank and moved with his family to Illinois, continuing to purchase the freedom of his relatives.[8]
  • December, 1811 through February, 1812 • A series of very large or great earthquakes strike the New Madrid Seismic Zone creating a "Hell on Earth" scenario for early Kentuckians, both native and European.
  • 1818 • The portion of Kentucky west of the Tennessee River was purchased from the Chickasaw by U.S. President Andrew Jackson, hence the name of this region — The Jackson Purchase.
  • May 27, 1830 • A veto by President Andrew Jackson prevented the federal funding of refurbishing of the Maysville Road from the Ohio River to Lexington since, according to Jackson, the bill only benefited the Commonwealth of Kentucky; this was a personal and political blow to Henry Clay and the Whig Party's American System.
  • February 2, 1833 • Kentucky's legislature passed the Non-Importation Act was part of a national trend to strengthen the laws regarding slavery and the rising efforts for personal liberty, including the increased efforts within the Underground Railroad freedom movement[9] in which the state of Kentucky focused as an important crossroads. The act was repealed in 1849 as part of the work in building the state's new constitution.
  • January 1856 • Margaret Garner led seven members of her family out of slavery in Kentucky, walking across the frozen Ohio River from the Covington side to Cincinnati, Ohio; but they are pursued by federal marshals and Archibald K. Gaines who surround the cabin where they are hiding; she tried to kill her two children and herself rather than surrender but succeeds only in killing her daughter Mary before being captured; her story became widely known and was immortalized in Toni Morrison's 1987 novel Beloved.[10]

Civil War

See Timeline of Kentucky in the Civil War

Post Civil War period

  • January 31, 1865 • The Constitutional Amendment ending slavery in the U.S. is passed and enough states ratify it by December[11] - Kentucky's legislature, not under federal "reconstruction," refused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment until Kentucky woman legislator, Mae Street Kidd won this battle in 1976.
  • May 17, 1875 • The first Kentucky Derby was won by a colt named Aristides ridden by African-American jockey, Oliver Lewis in front of an estimated crowd of 10,000 people.

Twentieth century

Twenty-first century

See also

Cities

Notes

  1. ↑ Teaching materials are available at the Kentucky Heritage Council website, http://heritage.ky.gov/kas/projects/curriculum+materials.htm
  2. ↑ "KY Coal Facts - History of Coal". www.coaleducation.org. Retrieved 2021-12-31.
  3. ↑ Christopher Gist, Ohio History Central; read Christopher Gist's journals online via the University of Toronto's Roberts Library
  4. ↑ "Kentucky," Online Etymology Dictionary
  5. ↑ "The Adventures of Daniel Boone Chapter One". www.varsitytutors.com. Retrieved 2021-12-31.
  6. ↑ For more on this iconic frontierswoman, see Nuckols, Mrs. S.V., "The History of William Page and his Wife, Ann Kennedy Wilson Poague Lindsay McGinty," Register of the Kentucky State Historical Society 10 (1912). See an image of her gravestone at Digital Collections, University of Louisville Libraries
  7. ↑ See the history of Old Fort Harrod State Park Archived 2007-08-28 at the Wayback Machine
  8. ↑ Walker, Juliet E.K. Free Frank: A Black Pioneer on the Antebellum Frontier. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983.
  9. ↑ See more on this at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center and see online the Kentucky Educational Television's documentary, "Kentucky's Underground Railroad—Passage to Freedom."
  10. ↑ Weisenburger, Steven. Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South. New York: Hill and Wang, 1998. See also the webpage on essays and articles for Margaret Garner: A New American Opera. Accessed 11 December 2010. www.margaretgarner.org.
  11. ↑ See the Library of Congress primary documents

References

Further reading

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