Isaac Shelby was a military leader, statesman, and early Kentucky settler whose decisions at the Battle of King’s Mountain in 1779 helped secure a critical American victory during the Revolutionary War. Before that war ended, he had served in the North Carolina legislature and held several official commissions. After arriving in Kentucky in 1782, he became active in the movement for statehood and, aided by his reputation and influence, became Kentucky’s first governor in 1792. After a four-year term, he returned to Traveler’s Rest, the estate he had established near present-day Lincoln County, but the War of 1812 called him back to service as governor and major general of militia aiding General William Henry Harrison. He left office in 1816, declined appointment as President Monroe’s secretary of war, and in 1818 joined Andrew Jackson in negotiating the Jackson Purchase, by which the Chickasaw ceded lands west of the Tennessee River within the limits of Kentucky and Tennessee to the United States, bringing his public career to a close. Born in Maryland, Shelby had first come to Kentucky in 1775 as a surveyor for the Henderson Company, claimed the land that became Traveler’s Rest, returned to settle there permanently in 1782, and married Susannah Hart at Boonesborough in 1783. Together they built a prominent family and estate in the Bluegrass region, where Traveler’s Rest, completed by 1786 as one of the first stone houses in Kentucky, became known for hospitality, productive agriculture, and the labor of a large enslaved workforce. Shelby bought, sold, and bequeathed enslaved people as property; his taxable property in 1804 included 42 slaves. His plantation produced livestock, grain, tobacco, hemp, whiskey, cider, and brandy, and his landholdings expanded through grants, preemptions, military warrants, inheritance, and purchase to nearly 14,000 acres claimed with his father as early as 1789. His will in 1826 kept land, slaves, and personal property within the family. He died that year and was buried at the spot where he had first pitched his tent and claimed the land; Susannah died in 1833 and was buried beside him.