Hanson, Kentucky: Tobacco Town Built by an Engineer

Hanson was founded in eighteen sixty-nine on a fifty-acre parcel donated jointly by a judge named Robert Eastwood and a pastor named Roland Gooch, specifically to provide a station stop on the Evansville, Henderson, and Nashville Railroad. The town was named for Henry B. Hanson, the civil engineer who drew up its plan.

It was incorporated in eighteen seventy-three. Hanson quickly grew into a tobacco-trading center. Then fire struck: a blaze in eighteen eighty-nine largely destroyed the town, and the historic district that stands today dates from the rebuilding afterward.

Hanson never became large, but it remained a tightly knit Hopkins County community.