Historic Burlington, KY

Boone County was established in 1799, and at the County Court’s first meeting in June the seat of justice was fixed on 74 acres offered by Robert Johnson and John H. Craig. Initially known as Craig’s Camp, the site was laid out as a town named Wilmington the following year. Jefferson Street marked the north-south boundary between the two men’s land and originally stopped at Union Square, which surrounded the town’s public square, so travelers on Washington had to go around it. The two main streets did not meet until nearly 1820, after the county sold the western half of the public ground. By then the town had been renamed Burlington, and the original log courthouse had been replaced in 1817 by a more substantial brick house of justice. Tanner’s Station was Boone County’s first settlement, and by 1820 Burlington was its most populous town, though that would change as transportation changed. In the late 1700s and into the mid-1800s, the Ohio River was the county’s main highway, and the earliest settlers built homes closer to the river in the northern and western extremes of the county, often using dismantled flatboats for housing. Dozens of ferry bonds were issued as people, livestock, and goods moved between Boone County and the shores of Indiana and Ohio, and after steamboat traffic began on the Ohio in 1811, riverboats regularly stopped at Boone County towns such as Taylorsport, Petersburg, Belview, Hamilton, and Rabbit Hash. Well before 1850, roads opened the county’s interior and settlement spread across it. Florence was chartered by 1830, Union followed in 1838, and Walton in 1840. Important roads were mostly turnpikes with tolls, better funded and maintained than most roads but slow and inconvenient for travelers by horse and wagon or buggy, with blacksmith shops at many crossroads. The busiest was the Covington-Lexington Turnpike, and three major toll roads converged at Burlington: Petersburg-Burlington, Burlington-Belview, and Florence-Burlington. By the early 20th century, turnpikes were becoming obsolete as people tired of tolls and horseless carriages required better surfaces. In 1915 the county began buying turnpikes and assembling the road system known today, while state and federal governments took over most larger roads. The Covington-Lexington Turnpike became U.S. 25, and the Burlington-Florence and Burlington-Belview pikes were combined into KY 18. Population and business centers shifted repeatedly with transportation: Petersburg led during the height of the steamboat era, Florence became the biggest town by 1870 as the turnpike system matured, railroads through southwestern Boone County shifted activity toward Walton, which was the county’s largest town until 1900, and development of Interstates 71 and 75 and the airport in the 1950s cemented Florence as the county’s most densely populated area. Through all these changes, Burlington remained the seat of county government despite occasional calls to move it elsewhere.

Burlington, Kentucky · United States