George Nicholas, born in Virginia in 1743, served as a colonel in the Revolutionary War and was a zealous advocate of Virginia's adoption of the Federal Constitution in 1788. He came to Kentucky in 1790 and was called the "brightest luminary" in Kentucky's first constitutional convention. He became the first Attorney General of the state and the first law professor at Transylvania, while also being an extensive landholder who invested in cloth manufacture and an iron furnace.