Bryan Station
Near Lexington, Kentucky
Just north of Lexington stood Bryan Station, a frontier stockade that endured one of the last violent episodes of the American Revolution in the West. In August of seventeen eighty-two, several hundred British Rangers and allied Shawnee, Delaware, and Huron warriors surrounded the fort before dawn.
The garrison was desperately short of water. Knowing the spring lay outside the walls, the defenders sent their women and children out to fill buckets, betting the attackers would not strike until the trap was set. They were right. The women walked out, filled their vessels, and most made it back before the firing began. The siege failed, but the raiders then withdrew and ambushed Kentucky militia at Blue Licks, the bloodiest frontier defeat of the entire Revolutionary War. Bryan Station today is a suburb of Lexington, the spring and stockade long gone beneath the grass.
