Historic Burlington, KY

From its earliest days, Burlington was the hub of a farming community, and before World War II most people in Boone County lived and worked on farms while many others depended on farm-related livelihoods. By the mid-19th century, crossroads towns commonly had a blacksmith and general store, while larger towns such as Burlington also supported a feed mill, tavern, post office, town doctor, and, as county seat, many lawyers. Burlington, along with places such as Petersburg and Walton, could sustain several businesses, and Boone County’s larger settlements included banking, printing, carpentry, shoe repair, and tobacco and drug sales. As Boone County’s center of business and economic activity, Burlington later attracted distinctive industries and residents, especially in the mid-20th century. Tastee Foods Corporation built a potpie factory on North Jefferson Street that produced up to 50,000 pies a day. Renowned Kentucky artist Caroline Williams lived in a log house just west of Burlington from 1945 to 1988. Inventor Dr. George S. Sperti operated a large experimental farm in Burlington from the late 1930s until his death in 1991 while searching for a cure for cancer. Burlington’s commercial life also included long-running general stores, taverns and inns, hotels such as the Central House Hotel and the Boone House, specialized shops including shoe repair, a carding mill, a cabinetmaker, a chair making shop, and a tobacco factory, and the county newspaper of record, The Boone County Recorder, which began in 1875 after the short-lived Burlington Advertiser. Inventor Frank S. Milburn built a machine shop in Burlington in 1938, and during World War II he and his employees quietly made parts for the top-secret Norden Bombsight before he later coached thousands of would-be inventors there. Burlington’s first bank was chartered in 1818 but failed in the Panic of 1819; the Boone County Deposit Bank began in 1886, the People’s Deposit Bank followed in 1905, and the two merged in 1927 after the Boone County Deposit Bank opened a new building in 1925. With the rise of the automobile in the 1910s, many blacksmith shops shifted to auto repair, though blacksmithing had long been one of Burlington’s earliest and most essential trades, making and repairing tools, hardware, farm equipment, wagons, wagon wheels, and shoeing horses and other animals.

Burlington, Kentucky · United States