Lexington, Kentucky: Named for a Battle Hundreds of Miles Away

In June 1775, hunters camped in the Kentucky woods got word of the first battle of the Revolution and named their campsite Lexington, after the Massachusetts town. The fighting at Lexington had happened on April 19. The news took weeks to reach them, and there was no town yet, just a camp and a name.

A campfire vote

George W. Ranck tells the scene in his 1872 History of Lexington, Kentucky. A small party of hunters out of the fort at Harrodsburg camped for the night around June 5 by a spring, on a spot later known as McConnell’s Station, and decided this was where they’d settle. Then they talked over a name. One man suggested “York,” another “Lancaster,” but, Ranck writes, both were dropped “with a shout” for Lexington as talk turned to the news from Massachusetts. His footnote for that detail points to a source he calls “Bradford’s Notes.”

Keep in mind that Ranck was writing almost a century later and liked a good scene. You can enjoy the shout, but treat the exact words as his telling, not a transcript.

“A very pretty romance”

Lewis and Richard H. Collins took on the same story in their 1874 History of Kentucky, and they were blunt about how it sounds. “If it be romance,” they wrote, “it is certainly a very pretty romance.” The version they quote comes from a speech former Governor James T. Morehead gave at Boonesborough in 1840: hunters camped on a branch of Elkhorn Creek heard about the fighting near Boston, and “in commemoration of the event they called the spot of their encampment Lexington.”

Then the Collinses defend it. “There is no reasonable ground to doubt that such was the origin of the name,” they write, because the story was told and printed while the hunters were still alive, and they went along with it. They also place two companies of hunters in the area between June 5 and June 9, 1775, the days the news is said to have arrived.

Which campsite, exactly

This is where the old books trip over each other. On one page, the Collinses argue that William McConnell’s cabin wasn’t built until April 1776, so it’s “not probable” that his spot was the first Lexington. Later in the same volume, describing Mason County, they call McConnell’s cabin the place where the city “was so happily named, in the June preceding.” Ranck, for his part, says flatly that “the frail and hastily-built little hut of McConnell gave Lexington her name.”

So the who and the why hold up. The precise spot is fuzzier than any of these authors liked to admit.

Other Lexingtons

Kentucky’s wasn’t the only one. Henry Gannett, compiling place names for the U.S. Geological Survey in 1905, counted a county in South Carolina “and twenty-seven other places, most of them having been named in commemoration of the Revolutionary battle.” If you want a much later example, Lexington, Nebraska took the same name in 1889.

A name waiting for a town

For a few years, the name was about all there was. Ranck says no one actually settled until four years after McConnell’s cabin went up. The Collinses print sworn statements from 1804 about the spring of 1779, and one of them, from Col. Benjamin Harrison, says he “never could learn that Lexington did really exist” when Col. John Bowman’s expedition set out in May of that year. The hunters had picked the name in 1775. The town took a while to catch up.

Sources & further reading

• Lewis Collins and Richard H. Collins, History of Kentucky, vol. 2 (1874). Morehead’s 1840 account, “a very pretty romance,” “no reasonable ground to doubt,” the June 5–9 dates, the doubt about McConnell’s cabin and Harrison’s deposition (pp. 178–179); McConnell’s cabin as the place the city “was so happily named” (p. 551).
• George W. Ranck, History of Lexington, Kentucky (1872), pp. 18–21. The camp near the spring, “York,” “Lancaster,” the shout for “Lexington,” the hut of McConnell, and the four years before settlement.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905). The other Lexingtons, “most of them having been named in commemoration of the Revolutionary battle.”
• GNIS feature 496343 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Lexington, which notes the 1974 merger of the city and Fayette County governments.