Augusta, Kentucky: Raiders and Runaways

Augusta, Kentucky was founded in seventeen eighty-six on the southern bank of the Ohio River by Philip Buckner, who named it for Augusta County, Virginia. The Augusta Ferry began carrying passengers across to Ohio in seventeen ninety-seven, making this one of the earliest Ohio River crossings in the region. The river that made Augusta prosperous also made it politically charged: it was the line between slave state and free state, and Augusta's population included many antislavery sympathizers who helped freedom-seekers cross to Ohio.

On September twenty-seventh, eighteen sixty-two, Confederate Colonel Basil Duke led seven companies of John Hunt Morgan's cavalry to the heights above the town and engaged the Union militia garrisoned there. About a hundred and fifty Union defenders held off about four hundred and fifty of Morgan's Raiders before the militia eventually surrendered. The town still contains some of the best-preserved nineteenth-century streetscapes on the Ohio River.