Sonora, Kentucky: A Name from Mexico

Sonora is a small Hardin County town about thirteen miles south of Elizabethtown, and it owes its unusual name to the Louisville and Nashville Railroad. The line was built through this stretch of central Kentucky in the mid-eighteen hundreds, and the name Sonora was possibly given for Sonora, Mexico, the home of a railroad contractor, after the camp was first called Bucksnort. The post office opened in eighteen fifty-nine, and the town incorporated in eighteen eighty-five. Sonora has never grown large, but it sits at the point where the railroad dictated settlement patterns across the Bluegrass borderlands, one of dozens of small stops whose names record the eclectic human traffic that built the American rail network.