Leitchfield: The Courthouse the Confederates Burned

Leitchfield is the county seat of Grayson County, named for Major David Leitch, the original owner of the town site whose estate donated land for the county seat when Grayson County was organized in eighteen ten. The site was chosen for its freshwater springs, particularly Big Spring. Grayson County itself was named for William Grayson, a Revolutionary War colonel and United States Senator from Virginia.

On Christmas Eve of eighteen sixty-four, Confederate General Hylan Lyon's raiders burned the Leitchfield courthouse, destroying county records , part of a December raid in the final months of the war in which several Kentucky courthouses were burned. The town was formally incorporated just two years later, in eighteen sixty-six, and rebuilt its public records as best it could from what survived. Today Leitchfield is a small city of about sixty-four hundred serving western Kentucky's timber and agricultural economy.