Cynthiana: Named for Two Sisters

The small city you are passing through has a name that carries a quiet story of frontier gratitude. Early settler Robert Harrison came to this bend in the South Fork of the Licking River shortly after the American Revolution and carved out a homestead on land that would become the center of Harrison County. When the county was established in December of seventeen ninety-three , the year after Kentucky became the fifteenth state , Harrison donated approximately one hundred fifty acres of his land to create the county seat. He named the new town for two daughters: Cynthia and Anna. He joined both names together, and that compound has stayed on the map ever since.

Cynthiana grew into a prosperous small city on the strength of two Kentucky staples: bourbon whiskey and burley tobacco. At the height of the bourbon era, Harrison County was home to more than thirty distilleries, making it one of the most productive whiskey-producing counties in the state. The Licking River provided water, the rolling limestone-rich farmland provided grain, and the regional rail connections provided distribution.

The Civil War struck hard. Confederate General John Hunt Morgan attacked Cynthiana twice , in eighteen sixty-two and again in eighteen sixty-four , and on both occasions Federal forces ultimately held or recaptured the town at considerable cost. The second battle, in June of eighteen sixty-four, was Morgan's final major Kentucky operation before his death two months later.

Today Cynthiana's downtown preserves a core of nineteenth-century commercial architecture along Pleasant Street and Court Street, and the Harrison County Courthouse anchors the square where the town has conducted its business for more than two centuries. The population is a little over six thousand , small by most measures, but large enough to keep the name alive that Robert Harrison gave to the daughters he wanted remembered.