Sanders, Kentucky

The Carroll County community of Sanders sits along one of Kentucky's oldest routes. Long before the town existed, this was Buffalo Trace country, a trail worn smooth by bison moving between the Licking River and Drennon Springs, later followed by Native Americans and then settlers. The first European business here was a salt lick trading post run by a man named Risler, and the settlement was called Rislerville.

Nathaniel Sanders opened a grist mill and post office in eighteen sixteen, and the place became known as Sanders Mill. When the railroad came in eighteen sixty-seven, the station was called Liberty Station for a time. Nathaniel's son George Washington Sanders carried on the mill, and his grandson Larkin Sanders, a state senator, later had the family name restored.

In eighteen seventy-four the name Sanders stuck officially. By the early nineteen hundreds the town had reinvented itself as a small resort, drawing visitors to healing mineral wells nearby. Today it counts fewer than two hundred residents, a quiet comma on the old trace.