Hartford: Where Ohio County Began

Hartford is the county seat of Ohio County, Kentucky, one of the earlier counties to be carved from the early Virginia-era territory west of the Appalachians. Ohio County was established December seventeenth, seventeen ninety-eight, from land taken from Hardin County, and named for the Ohio River, which originally formed its northern border. Hartford became the county seat in seventeen ninety-nine.

The town name is often traced to a deer crossing, a hart ford, on the Rough River, though the true origin is uncertain. Hartford was incorporated in eighteen oh eight and has served as the administrative center of Ohio County ever since. The county later gave birth to six additional Kentucky counties as settlement spread westward, including Grayson, Breckinridge, and Butler. Coal mining shaped the county's economy through much of the twentieth century. Today Hartford is a small city of about two thousand seven hundred, the steady, modest anchor of rural western Kentucky.

The town began as Fort Hartford before seventeen ninety, on a four thousand acre Virginia grant to Gabriel Madison, and it sits at the head of navigation on the Rough River. On December twentieth, eighteen sixty-four, Confederate General Hylan Lyon burned the second courthouse. The railroad came in nineteen oh nine, and eighteen locations around the courthouse square now make up the Downtown Hartford Historic District.