the British Crown. Undeveloped land was plentiful and strongly desired in the 1760s.
This active period of movement in the early second half of the eighteenth century was pivotal, as we shall see, in setting in motion the saga of Buffalo Trace Distillery. On May 10, 1773, the five members of the McAfee Company, James, George, and Robert McAfee along with John McCoun and James Pawling, made their way west from Botetourt County, Virginia, into the verdant Bluegrass region for the purpose of finding suitable land on which to settle. Soon after reaching the 97-mile long Kanawha River in what is now West Virginia, the three McAfees dispatched McCoun and Pawling back to their Virginia homesteads with their mounts and encountered Hancock Taylor's group of surveyors. Taylor, like so many other commissioned surveyors, was en route to traverse the Ohio River westward to its joining with the Mississippi River, exploring the adjacent countryside along the way. Together on June 1, 1773, at the mouth of the Kanawha, the McAfees and Taylor met up with Thomas Bullitt, who led a large contingent of 40 men for the Ohio Land Company.4 Bullitt's mission was likewise to sail down the Ohio River looking for suitable places on which to build outposts and defensive blockhouses. For reasons of safe passage and shared information, the three companies allied, creating a formidable armada with more than 50 able-bodied men. They floated down the tricky currents of the Ohio River in bark canoes and crude pirogues, or dugouts. Once the flotilla reached the mouth of Limestone Creek, later to become the settlement of Maysville, Kentucky, Robert McAfee, against cries of sibling protest, strode off alone to explore on foot the riverside expanse on the Ohio's desolate south bank. After days of exhausting solo exploration, traveling with deliberation west/southwest along the rocky banks of the Ohio, McAfee, in full possession of his scalp, rejoined his brothers, Hancock Taylor, and Thomas Bullitt at the mouth of the 303-mile-long Licking River.5
Days later, the trio of companies beached where the Kentucky River merged with the much larger Ohio. There on July 4, 1773, Hancock Taylor and the McAfees separated from Thomas Bullitt's Ohio Land Company after deciding instead to paddle their pirogues laden with flour, gunpowder, beans, and salted pork up the placid, 259-mile-long Kentucky River in search of suitable terrain to survey for homesteading. Meanwhile, Bullitt and his party continued on their westward journey down the wide Ohio River.
Following days of slow exploration negotiating the numerous blind twists and hairpin turns of the Kentucky River, the McAfees and Taylor on July 16 waded across the shallows, probably a sandbar, to a low-banked spot that was doubtless a broad, beaten-down buffalo trace. The men hiked up the gentle incline through billowing clouds of fine dust to view an elevated bottomland pasture that was fragrant with white clover, bluegrass, and buffalo grass. This locale would later become the settlement of the city of Frankfort. Using the day's topographers' tools, primarily compasses and Gunter's chains, the legally recognized metal-linked measuring devices, James and Robert McAfee and Hancock Taylor surveyed plots of land in sizes of hundreds of acres for the future settlement of the McAfee family in what was then still considered Fincastle County, Virginia.
What they didn't know in the sweaty mid-July heat and humidity of 1773 was that their comrade, Hancock Taylor, would one year later, in late July 1774, be shot by hostile Native Americans and die of his wounds on August 1. Taylor in 1774 was, like Thomas Bullitt, surveying for the Ohio Land Company. He was surveying near the great buffalo trace when the rifle shot that would kill him rang out from among the woodland shadows. Taylor's cousin, Willis Lee, accompanied him on that Kentucky River survey. With Willis Lee's initial presence in 1774 at that precise location, the course of that site's history would forever be altered. One year later, in 1775, Willis Lee and his brother Captain Hancock Lee III, a civil engineer, plotted out the first mappings of what would become Leestown.
The Birth of Leestown and the Gift of “a Rattlesnake skin”
The family roots of brothers Hancock III and Willis Lee, the founders of Leestown, are believed to go back to the time of William the Conqueror in eleventh-century Europe. One family account, recorded in 1903 in the Register of the Kentucky State Historical Society, claims that Launcelot Lee of Lourdes, France, “…was a trusted officer of William the Conqueror when he went on that wonderful free-booting [looting] expedition to England.”6 Most probably in the late 1600s or early 1700s, Launcelot Lee's descendants made their way from Great Britain to the New World, settling in Northumberland County, Virginia. Existing historical records do not disclose whether they “wonderfully free-booted” across the Atlantic Ocean. The eighteenth-century Lee brothers were the offspring of Hancock II and Mary Willis Lee.
Brothers Hancock and Willis Lee were hardly the first colonial land speculators to set foot upon the great buffalo trace crossing site, as various accounts show that other adventurers preceded the Lees across its shoals. They were the pioneers, however, whose reconnoiters bore the most fruitful consequences. The great buffalo trace crossing was one of the few low spots along the otherwise steeply banked Kentucky River, making its location advantageous. A topographical assessment dated from 1794 confirmed this, saying, “The banks of Kentucky River are remarkably high; in some places 300 and 400 feet, composed generally of stupendous perpendicular rock; the consequence is, there are few crossing places; the best is at Leestown…”7
Among the earliest Euro-American surveyors to disturb the ankle-deep dust of the great buffalo trace were the previously cited Dr. Thomas Walker and Christopher Gist, who in 1750–1751 visited the Bluegrass on behalf of the Ohio Land Company. The breakout in 1754 of the French and Indian War, with the British combating the French and their native tribal allies for nine blood-soaked years, made exploratory excursions through Fincastle County hazardous up to the mid-1760s. Other pre–Lee era explorers to pass along this route included fur traders and friends John Findley and Daniel Boone in 1766–1767. By 1770–1772, the Shawnee and Cherokee hunting parties that routinely used the crossing encountered, with disturbing regularity, the footprints made by colonials' leather boots. Yet the dogged persistence of the Euro-Americans to explore and settle the Bluegrass continued in the same vein as a relentless horror film monster that just keeps coming, no matter how many times it is blasted with gunfire.
In June of 1774, former Pennsylvanian James Harrod, accompanied by 37 men, founded Harrods Town (the name was later changed to Harrodsburg), 39 miles to the west of the Kentucky River. Harrodsburg was the initial stockade community to be founded in Kentucky. Less than one year later in April 1775 at a site located 48 miles to the east of Harrodsburg, a group of 30-plus axmen, led by Daniel Boone, established Fort Boone, later renamed Boonesborough. This settlement was established after the troop hacked a trail through the woodlands with a starting point at Long Island of the Holston in eastern Tennessee. Likewise in 1775, Benjamin Logan founded St. Asaph (a.k.a. Logan's Fort and later to become Stanford, Kentucky) situated to the south of Leestown by roughly 60 miles. In 1776, the Virginia legislature introduced the wonderfully named Corn Patch and Cabin Rights Act that promised ownership of 400 acres in the untamed District of Kentucky to anyone willing to brave the weeks'-long journey to erect a log cabin, cultivate corn in Virginia's westernmost region, and survive the attacks by tribal war parties.
British explorer Nicholas Cresswell provided one of the more striking accounts of life on the Kentucky River through his daily journal, written in the years 1774–1777. In several passages from 1775, Cresswell addressed the presence of the Lee brothers in the vicinity of the site of present-day Buffalo Trace Distillery. Cresswell's account on May 23, 1775, reads as follows, “Proceeded up the [Kentucky] River, found several rapids which obliged us to get out and haul our vessel up with ropes. The current stronger than yesterday. Saw several roads that crossed the River which they tell me were made by the Buffaloes going from one lick to another. (These licks are brackish or salt springs which the Buffaloes are fond of.)”
The next day, May 24, Cresswell wrote, “Camped at a place where the Buffaloes cross
