Fort Wright, Kentucky

In September of eighteen sixty-two, Confederate generals Edmund Kirby Smith and Braxton Bragg were pushing through Kentucky, and Cincinnati was in a panic. Union commanders threw up an eight-mile chain of earthwork fortifications across the hills of northern Kentucky to stop them. A later earthwork, begun in eighteen sixty-three and never finished, dug into the ridge above the Ohio River in what is now Kenton County, was named for General Horatio G.

Wright, commander of the Union Department of the Ohio. The Confederates never came. The fortifications went unused in battle.

After the war the earthworks slowly disappeared into the landscape. The city of Fort Wright was not incorporated until nineteen forty-one, nearly eighty years later, when the suburban spread from Cincinnati finally reached the old military ridge. General Wright later went on to oversee completion of the Washington Monument.