On the Kentucky River in Madison County, this site preserves Fort Boonesborough, founded by Daniel Boone and his party in April 1775 and developed by Richard Henderson as one of Kentucky’s earliest and most important frontier settlements. It hosted Kentucky’s first representative government in May 1775, grew into a fortified outpost during the American Revolutionary War, and withstood the Great Siege in 1778. Afterward it became a waypoint for migrants and tobacco trade before declining and being abandoned. The area also preserves evidence of much earlier Native American occupation, including a Fort Ancient village around 1400, and is now valued for both reconstruction and archaeology.