Williamsburg, Kentucky

Williamsburg has been the seat of Whitley County, Kentucky, since eighteen nineteen, when a settler named Samuel Cox donated the land for a courthouse and sold town lots so the new county would have somewhere to do its business. The county itself was carved from Knox County the year before, in January of eighteen eighteen, and named for William Whitley, a veteran of the Indian Wars who was killed at the Battle of the Thames in eighteen thirteen while fighting alongside William Henry Harrison. The first courthouse went up in eighteen nineteen for twenty-eight hundred dollars. Williamsburg sits near the Tennessee state line in the Cumberland Mountains, close to the gap that I-Seventy-Five now threads through, giving the small city a history tied to the movement of people and goods through the southern Appalachian ridges.