Dover, Kentucky: A Virginia Merchant's River Town

Dover is a small Mason County town on the south bank of the Ohio River, founded in eighteen eighteen by Arthur Fox Jr., a Virginia-born settler who had inherited twenty-two hundred acres of Ohio River bottomland from his father. Fox laid out the town and named it, possibly for Dover, England, his father's ancestral home. The post office opened in eighteen thirty-three, and Dover was incorporated in eighteen thirty-six.

The town sits in one of the oldest settled parts of Kentucky. Mason County was created in seventeen eighty-eight from Bourbon County , then still a Virginia county before Kentucky statehood , and named for George Mason, the Virginia statesman known as the Father of the Bill of Rights. Dover's position on the Ohio River made it a small but active ferry crossing and trading point in the early decades of Kentucky settlement. Today the town has fewer than four hundred residents, and the Ohio bottomland Arthur Fox farmed is given largely over to soybeans and corn.