Jessamine County KyArchives History - Books .....Dedication And Preface 1898
************************************************
Copyright.  All rights reserved.
http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm
http://www.usgwarchives.net/ky/kyfiles.html
************************************************

File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by:
Joy Fisher sdgenweb@yahoo.com August 4, 2007, 7:58 pm

Book Title: A History Of Jessamine County, Kentucky


TO
My Father, Robert Young,
AND
My Mother, Josephine Young,

I DEDICATE THIS VOLUME.

    My father was a resident of Jessamine County for sixty-five years. He was
honest, upright, patriotic, public-spirited, and always the friend of the poor
and suffering. My mother—God bless her name and memory!—had a heart full of
human sympathy and tenderness, and also of the love of Christ, whose teachings
she faithfully followed for sixty years, in the midst of the people of
Jessamine. Descended from Revolutionary sires, they both ardently loved the
freedom of this free land with an unquenchable love, and taught their children,
as the noblest aim of life, to serve God and be true to the glorious liberty
their ancestors had so courageously fought to win. They sleep in the cemetery at
Lexington. Ky., and I trust they have a kindly remembrance with the people among
whom they lived and died.

PREFACE.

   Jessamine county is one of the few great counties of the state whose history
remains unwritten. For a long time after its beginning, it was overshadowed in
many ways by Lexington, Danville, Paris, Harrodsburg, and Winchester. The county
had no postoffice until 1801. Mails were infrequent and carried by hand.
Lexington was the great town south of the Ohio and west of the Alleghenies. When
the county was organized, Lexington had a population of nearly 2,000, while
Cincinnati had less than 500, and was buying its merchandise in Lexington; which
was already the seat of a university; it had churches and schools, and was the
great trading point for a large part of Kentucky, and portion of Ohio, Indiana
and Tennessee.

   Brick houses had begun to be erected, and newspapers had been published for
eleven years, and being only twelve miles from Nicholasville, it was inevitable
that it should draw to it a very large share of the trade of Jessamine.
Lexington was then, and remained for many years thereafter, the political,
intellectual, and commercial metropolis of Kentucky, and it necessarily dwarfed
the surrounding towns and attracted the best trade from the counties within a
radius of fifty miles.

   Lexington, too, had the first railroad in the west. The line to Frankfort was
finished and operated in December, 1835, and by 1851, trains were run through
from Louisville to Lexington. In 1854, a train ran from Covington to Lexington,
and from Lexington to Paris in 1853. These railways diverted the trade from the
steamboats on the Kentucky river, and they made Lexington a great center.

   The enterprise and courage of her people received a just and ample reward.
Fayette county and Lexington always exhibited great enterprise as well as the
highest public spirit, and in commerce as well as education they attained high
rank, because they had the sagacity and the enterprise to improve the
opportunities which presented themselves.

   Jessamine county had no railway .until 1857. From that time Nicholasville
assumed a new importance. Long the terminus of the Kentucky Central, there came
to it both travel and trade, and it began to improve. The loss of slaves and the
destruction of values; the result of the war of 1861-65, greatly affected both
the town and the county, but after the period necessary for a recuperation from
these troubles, the county and town have developed with steady and constant
growth, and both are now taking the position to which their natural advantages
entitle them.

   Jessamine county has never lacked in public spirit. She has liberally
responded to all calls for public improvement. She never repudiated any of her
obligations. She always paid what she agreed to pay, and her subscription to the
Kentucky Central Railroad, to the Cincinnati Southern Railroad, to the
improvement of the Kentucky river, and to the Richmond, Nicholasville, Irvine
and Beattyville line; is highest evidence of her sagacity and generosity, and
placed the county in the best possible position for the development of all its
resources.

   Looking back one hundred years, the people of Jessamine can feel a glow of
honest pride at what a century has accomplished. The smallest, except fifteen,
of the one hundred and nineteen counties in the state, with an area of only 158
square miles, it has always maintained a prominent place among the rich and
large agricultural counties. For its population it is surpassed in wealth by
only a very few counties, and it ranks as one of the great producing counties of
Kentucky. Its land, per acre, has always, for taxation, been valued at a very
high rate.

   In 1846 it was the sixth county in value of lands per acre, and in 1870,
notwithstanding the great cities in other counties, it stood ninth; and still
maintains that place.

   Led by the guiding hand of fate to make my home in the greatest of all
Kentucky's counties, Jefferson, I have never lost my love for Jessamine, and its
capital city, Nicholasville; and oftentimes there creeps into my heart a longing
to spend the evening of life where I first saw the light, and an absence of
thirty-seven years, has neither destroyed nor dimmed my love for the people who
have always remembered me in my comings to the old home place, with such
generous hospitality and unchanging kindness.

   No one else offering to write a history of the county, I have undertaken the
task. The work has been done hurriedly and while under the pressure of a busy
professional life; but it is a labor of love, and if the story of the
sacrifices, courage, and patriotism of our forefathers who settled and organized
the county, shall be efficient in creating upon the present and future sons and
daughters of Jessamine higher love of their ancestors, great devotion to
Kentucky, and better apprehension of the cost and value of the freedom of our
country, I shall be more than repaid for the labor and cost of producing this
volume. It docs not contain all that a history of the county should include, but
it does for the first time put in permanent form the leading facts connected
with the organization of the count}- and accounts of the men who first cut down
the forests, grubbed the cane brakes and drove out the savages who disputed its
possession, and it will, at least be a help to those who may hereafter desire to
write a more extended history of Jessamine and of its people.

   Mr. S. M. Duncan, of Nicholasville, has for more than forty years been
gathering notes of the history of the people who have lived in Jessamine. He has
done more for the preservation of its history than any one man who ever lived in
the county. He has generously given me the use of all his facts. I have by
research gotten others and verified his, and I have, as is his just due, placed
his name upon the title page of this book as associate author. Although the
preparation and publication was assumed by me, I consider it both a privilege
and a duty to thus connect Mr. Duncan with the first history of the county.

   I beg to acknowledge with gratitude the assistance of Col. R. T. Durrett.
Rev. E. O. Guerrant Samuel D. Young, Miss Henrietta W. Brown. Mrs. Virginia
Noland, Robert G. Wright, Miss Jessie Woodson. Mrs. Anna Meade Letcher, Dr. L.
B. Todd, J. Willard Mitchell, Dr. Chas. Mann, Miss Josephine Mann, John S.
Bronaugh, N. L. Bronaugh, Henry Glass, Melancthon Young, Wm. L. Steele, B. M.
Arnett. and Emil TIhardt, the skillful photographer, who have spared no effort
to help me place in durable form the important events in the history of the county.
                                  BENNETT H. YOUNG.
    Louisville, Ky., Sept. 16, 1898.


Additional Comments:

Extracted from:

A HISTORY OF JESSAMINE COUNTY, KENTUCKY,
FROM ITS EARLIEST SETTLEMENT TO 1898.
By BENNETT H. YOUNG,
PRESIDENT POLYTECHNIC SOCIETY; MEMBER FILSON CLUB; MEMBER CONSTITUTIONAL
CONVENTION, 1890; AUTHOR HISTORY OF THE CONSTITUTIONS OF KENTUCKY, OF "BATTLE OF
BLUE LICKS, ETC, ETC.

S. M. DUNCAN, ASSOCIATE AUTHOR.

Every brave and good life out of the past is a treasure which cannot  be
measured in money, and should be preserved with faithfullest care.

LOUISVILLE, KY.: COURIER-JOURNAL JOB PRINTING CO., 1898.


File at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/ky/jessamine/history/1898/ahistory/dedicati240gms.txt

This file has been created by a form at http://www.genrecords.org/kyfiles/