The Naming of Lexington — June Four, Seventeen Seventy-Five

Near a spring close to this spot, on June fourth, seventeen seventy-five, a party of pioneer hunters made camp in the Kentucky wilderness. Word had just reached them of the Battle of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, fought six weeks earlier on April nineteenth. Inspired by the news, they named their campsite Lexington, and the name stuck to the settlement that grew here afterward.

It was one of the earliest permanent Euro-American settlements in what would become Kentucky. The settlement was chartered by Virginia in seventeen eighty-two, ten years before Kentucky separated from Virginia to become its own state. A tablet marking the spot was erected by the citizens of Lexington on June fourth, nineteen twenty-five, exactly one hundred fifty years after that campfire naming.