Sumner County, Tennessee, was established in 1796 and named in honor of Major Gen. Jethro Sumner, an officer in the French and Indian War who served in the defense of Charleston in 1776, in the Battles of Brandywine and Germantown, and in the army at Valley Forge; his last service was in the defense of North Carolina against Cornwallis. Kentucky, an Iroquois word meaning Meadow Land, was visited by Indian tribes from as far west as the Rocky Mountains before 1750. The first white settlement was at Harrodsburg in 1774. Kentucky was the second district west of the Alleghenies to be settled and the first, in 1792, to become a state.