Elizabethtown, Kentucky

Elizabethtown, the seat of Hardin County, was laid out in seventeen ninety-three and legally established in seventeen ninety-seven and named for Elizabeth Hynes, wife of one of the town's founders. It sits along the old Louisville-to-Nashville trace, a corridor that made it a natural stopping point for travelers, soldiers, and commerce moving between the Ohio River and Tennessee. During the Civil War the town changed hands multiple times, and it was near here that Confederate raider John Hunt Morgan swept through Kentucky in December of eighteen sixty-two.

Today Elizabethtown is best known as the home of a major Ford Motor Company truck transmission plant that arrived in nineteen sixty-nine and anchored the local economy for decades. Abraham Lincoln's father, Thomas Lincoln, lived in Elizabethtown after his marriage in eighteen oh six.