Rockcastle County, Kentucky

Rockcastle County, formed in eighteen ten from parts of Lincoln, Pulaski, Madison, and Knox counties, takes its name from a river that takes its name from a rock. In seventeen fifty, explorer Thomas Walker passed through and named it the Lawless River; the hunter Isaac Lindsey later renamed it for its castle-like rock formations. The county seat of Mount Vernon grew up along the Wilderness Road, which reached the town in seventeen ninety-two and carried settlers into Kentucky. The county had more than five thousand residents by eighteen sixty, pulled along by the steady migration flowing down the Wilderness Road.