Henderson County, Where Audubon Learned to See

Henderson County was established in seventeen ninety-eight along the Ohio River and named for Richard Henderson, the land speculator who bought vast Kentucky lands from the Cherokee. A dozen years later, in eighteen ten, a young French-American naturalist named John James Audubon arrived from Louisville with his wife Lucy and their infant son. Audubon lived and worked in Henderson for nine years.

He ran a store and operated a mill, and spent every spare hour in the bottomland forests along the river, sketching and studying birds. These Kentucky years were formative. The forests of Henderson gave Audubon the material that would eventually become The Birds of America, the monumental work he began assembling after leaving in eighteen nineteen.

Henderson today honors that connection at John James Audubon State Park, which preserves the landscape where his eye and his art were sharpened.