Princeton: The Trail of Tears Camped Here, Then the Night Riders Came

Princeton, Kentucky is a small city in the western part of the state, and its history holds two episodes of extraordinary national significance, separated by nearly seventy years.

The first came in the winter of eighteen thirty-eight. The forced relocation of the Cherokee Nation from their homelands in the southeastern United States, the event history calls the Trail of Tears, sent eleven of thirteen Cherokee detachments along a northern route through Kentucky. Thousands of men, women, and children traveled on foot or in wagons through bitter cold. Several detachments paused here at Big Springs, a natural limestone spring in what is now the center of Princeton, using the clean cold water to rest and recover. Researchers confirmed the stop through journal entries and through receipts, including a receipt for a coffin for a child who died here. The site is now a commemorative park, formally recognized by the National Park Service as part of the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, featuring a monument inscribed in both English and Cherokee and a garden shaped like a teardrop.

Seventy years later, Princeton became the center of one of the most dramatic episodes of rural insurgency in American history. The western Kentucky and northwestern Tennessee tobacco country grew a variety of dark fired leaf called Black Patch tobacco, and by the early nineteen hundreds, the American Tobacco Company had established a near-total monopoly over its purchase price. Farmers who had no alternative buyers watched the price collapse. In September nineteen oh four, growers organized the Planters Protective Association, pledging to boycott the company. When the company refused to negotiate, a more militant wing formed a paramilitary organization that became known as the Night Riders.

On the night of December first, nineteen oh six, roughly two hundred masked and armed Night Riders rode into Princeton, seized the fire station and the telegraph office to cut communications, then dynamited and burned the tobacco warehouses in town, destroying the company's stored inventory. It was the most dramatic single action of what historians call the Black Patch Tobacco War, which continued into nineteen ten and eventually pressured American Tobacco into raising its prices.

Princeton today preserves both memories. Big Springs park holds the Cherokee monument. The courthouse square and the surrounding streets carry the architectural traces of the tobacco boom that both enriched and convulsed this corner of Kentucky.