Boone Station
Near Lexington, Kentucky
Just a few miles east of here, on Christmas Day of seventeen seventy-nine, Daniel Boone led his family across a frozen Kentucky River to stake a new claim in the wilderness. He had decided that Boonesborough, the fort he helped build just years earlier, was already too crowded. At its peak, Boone Station sheltered fifteen to twenty families who spent that first brutal winter constructing rough half-camp shelters in the bitter cold.
The community lasted barely four years. By seventeen eighty-one, a legal dispute invalidated Boone's land title, and by seventeen eighty-three he had moved on to Maysville. He eventually left Kentucky for Missouri altogether in seventeen ninety-nine.
The site was long a Kentucky state historic site, now owned by a local church, marking the spot where America's most famous frontiersman tried to outrun civilization.
