time in making progress.
In 1783, legislation in the Virginia General Assembly allowed Hancock Lee to build a warehouse, declaring, “… the erection of a warehouse for the inspection of tobacco, in the county of Fayette [formerly Fincastle], at Leestown, on the Kentucky River, on the lands of Hancock Lee, will be of public benefit …”12 Whether Lee's actual warehouse was ever erected that year at the great buffalo trace even with the blessing of the Virginia General Assembly remains unclear. A previous log structure, referred to as a “blockhouse,” was erected sometime after the Mingo raid of 1776 more as a means of defense than of stock storage. Later county records do prove beyond the shadow of a doubt, however, that warehouses were built in time as Leestown's prime low-bank location served it well as a commercial depot on the bustling Kentucky River in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Hancock Lee, meanwhile, was the recipient of good news about three years after his return from the war. He was bestowed clear title in 1786 to the land claims that he had inherited from his cousin Hancock Taylor and his brother Willis after their tragic murders. This legal action solidified Hancock's control of the plot on which Leestown was built.
But even with such an advantageous position on the bank of a major tributary of the Ohio River, Leestown stayed little more than a modest municipality, dotted with a few cabins and small warehouses made of logs. Its positional strength was as a serviceable river landing, but not necessarily as a desirable residential location. The ravages of the war in the east altered the directions of peoples' lives in the west. George Rogers Clark, Lee's deputy surveyor, for example, never returned to Leestown despite his earlier declarations, later settling in what would become the state of Ohio after leading troops in the violent Indian Wars (1775–1783). Leestown's population thus remained small while other nearby communities grew.
Then later in 1786, a blustery tornado twisted and corkscrewed its way through the Bluegrass. That storm had a name. General James Wilkinson. And with Wilkinson's appearance, life in Leestown would be forever changed.
Notes
1 1 Boston Rare Maps. www.bostonraremaps.com.
2 2 Library of Congress. American Revolution and Its Era: Maps and Charts of North America and the West Indies:1750–1789.
3 3 Steve Preston. “Our Rich History: John Filson: First Kentucky Historian, Forgotten Cincinnati Founder.” Northern Kentucky Tribune, June 18, 2018.
4 4 Kentucky Kindred Genealogical Research. The McAfee Brothers – Early Kentucky Pioneers. May 19, 2019.
5 5 Ibid.
6 6 Mary Willis Woodson and Lucy C. Lee. History of the Lee Family. Register of Kentucky State Historical Society, Vol. 1, No. 3, September 1903.
7 7 Dr. Jedidiah Morse's The American Geography Map, London 1794, Kentucky Atlas & Gazetter.
8 8 Image 91 of The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, 1774–1777, Library of Congress.
9 9 udge Samuel M. Wilson. Address titled “Leestown – Its Founders and Its History,” July 16, 1931, p. 392.
10 10 Ibid.
11 11 Lowell H. Harrison and Kames C. Klotter. A New History of Kentucky. The University of Kentucky Press, 1997, p. 33.
12 12 Wilson, “Leestown,” p. 392.
3 “… As Crooked as a Dog's Hind Leg …”
IN 1894, FUTURE U.S. president and then New York governor Theodore Roosevelt minced no words in his searing assessment of the personality of General James Wilkinson, writing in his book The Winning of the West: From the Alleghenies to the Mississippi, “In character, he [Wilkinson] can only be compared to Benedict Arnold, though he entirely lacked Arnold's ability and brilliant courage. He had no conscience and no scruples; he had not the slightest idea of the meaning of the word honor … In all our history there is no more despicable character.”1 Noted early twentieth-century historian of the western United States Frederick Jackson Turner, author of the essay Frontier Thesis: The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893), accused Wilkinson of being “the most consummate artist in treason the nation has ever possessed.”2 As if those words of condemnation composed long after Wilkinson's death in 1825 weren't enough, in 1908, Alfred Henry Lewis, the author of An American Patrician, or The Story of Aaron Burr, piled on, depicting Wilkinson via a supposed conversation between Burr and a Samuel Swartwout as being “… as crooked as a dog's hind leg.”3
So then, aside from being an alleged colossal falsifier of facts, a purported traitor, and a notorious scoundrel, who was James Wilkinson? And, further, what bearing did Wilkinson and his flamboyant exploits have on the flight path of Buffalo Trace Distillery and its surrounding community?
Born in Maryland Colony in 1757, the exuberant James Wilkinson rose rapidly through guile, charm, a quick wit, and alleged dishonesty in the ranks of the Continental Army. To the consternation of many fellow officers who were more deserving and longer serving, Wilkinson became a brigadier general at the age of 20. He served, perhaps tellingly, for a short period in Canada as an aide under the American general and eventual traitor Benedict Arnold. The infamous Arnold, of course, later commanded the strategically vital fortress at West Point, which overlooked the Hudson River in New York, before defecting to join the British forces in 1780. Arnold's betrayal, which involved his planned surrender of West Point and thereby critical control of the Hudson River to the British, was heightened by the fact that he eventually fought against the American forces he once commanded.
Leaving Arnold's command in August 1776, Wilkinson then served as an aide to the well-respected general of the Continental Army, Horatio Gates. When General Gates sent Wilkinson on a time-sensitive mission to update Congress with official dispatches concerning the victory of American forces over the British at the Battle of Saratoga, Wilkinson famously kept the anxious members of Congress waiting reportedly for hours while he tended to his own private affairs in Philadelphia. Later on, he was involved in an unsuccessful conspiracy and cabal to oust George Washington as supreme commander of the Continental Army. Wilkinson's plan to replace Washington with Horatio Gates crumbled in failure as support for such a treacherous action disappeared. Appalled and outraged, General Gates forced his wayward aide to resign. But somehow through his disarming demeanor, unshakable self-confidence, and cunning, Wilkinson was able to maintain his army career until he was again forced to resign his later commission in 1781 when he ineffectively served as clothier-general
