Levi Jackson Wilderness Road Park
Kentucky
South of London, Kentucky, Levi Jackson Wilderness Road Park preserves a surviving stretch of the path Daniel Boone blazed in seventeen seventy-five through the Cumberland Gap. More than two hundred thousand settlers traveled this corridor between seventeen seventy-four and seventeen ninety-six to reach Kentucky from Virginia. The park takes its name from an early settler, and its eight hundred ninety-six acres include the site of the worst pioneer massacre in Kentucky's history.
On the night of October third, seventeen eighty-six, the McNitt Party camped here without posting a guard. Shawnee warriors attacked before dawn, killing at least twenty-four men, women, and children. A pregnant woman survived by crawling into the hollow of a tree, where she delivered her baby and hid until morning.
The park, established in nineteen thirty-one, marks this ground with the somber care it deserves.
