Glencoe, Kentucky

The small Gallatin County town of Glencoe takes its name from one of the most notorious episodes in Scottish history. In eighteen forty-eight, when settlers here applied for a post office, they named it for Glen Coe in the Scottish Highlands, the site of the sixteen ninety-two Massacre of Glencoe, where government soldiers killed thirty-eight members of the MacDonald clan in a pre-dawn raid. Why choose such a dark name?

Scots-Irish immigrants carried old country place-names westward as a form of memory, honoring the land they had left. Glencoe sits on Eagle Creek about eight miles southeast of Warsaw, the Gallatin County seat. It was formally incorporated in nineteen sixty and sits on a stretch of road that follows old buffalo traces through the Kentucky river bottoms.