Williamstown, Kentucky

Williamstown sits at the crossroads of Grant County, chosen as county seat when Grant County was formed in eighteen twenty and named for William Arnold, an early settler who donated land for the courthouse square. The town incorporated in eighteen twenty-five and grew as a modest stopping point on the old buffalo trace that once connected the Ohio River valley to central Kentucky. Today Williamstown is home to roughly four thousand people, and it gained unexpected national attention when the Ark Encounter theme park opened in town in twenty sixteen, drawing visitors to a full-scale replica of Noah's Ark stretching five hundred ten feet long. The town itself remains a quiet county seat, its Victorian-era courthouse anchoring a downtown that still echoes the unhurried pace of nineteenth-century Grant County.