In 1810, John James Audubon, the famed ornithologist and painter, his wife Lucy, and infant son Victor arrived in Henderson on a skiff from Louisville, Kentucky. He loved Henderson's frontier spirit in the early 1800's, roaming the woods and observing and painting the many species of birds abundant there. Few of his paintings from his time in Henderson survive because each year on his birthday he edited his work and destroyed pieces that did not meet his current standards, and many of those he kept were later lost when rodents built a nest in the box where his work was stored during a long family absence from Henderson. He later said that this loss forced him to replace the works with ones using a much better technique. Two of the Audubons' four children were born in Henderson, and baby Lucy is buried there. The family left Henderson in 1819 when he began work on his publication of The Birds of America.