Campbellsburg, Kentucky

Campbellsburg, in Henry County, has the curious distinction of having been renamed within three weeks of its founding. The Kentucky General Assembly incorporated it in eighteen forty as Chiltonsville, in honor of a local trustee named Charles Chilton. But before the ink had dried, community sentiment shifted and the legislature renamed it Campbellsburg, for another prominent local family.

The same year the post office at nearby Benevola also took the new name. Decades later the Louisville, Cincinnati and Lexington Railroad arrived in eighteen sixty-nine, and its tracks divided the town so sharply that residents ended up with two communities, Old Campbellsburg and New Campbellsburg, and New Campbellsburg incorporated separately in eighteen seventy-six. They eventually merged back into one.

Henry County itself was named for Patrick Henry, the revolutionary-era orator who declared give me liberty or give me death.