Historical Timeline 12,000 BC

12,000-8,000 BC

Paleo-Indian Period: Native hunters sought game at salt licks, leaving behind stone tools.

8,000-1,000 BC

Archaic Period: The human population of Kentucky gradually grows, and specific camps are used for long periods as seasonal hunting bases. The archaeological evidence indicates some agriculture, artistic development, and ceremonial burials.

1,000 BC-1000 AD

Woodland Period: Cultural diversity increases. In present-day Boone County and elsewhere throughout the Ohio Valley, the Adena (500-100 BC) and Hopewell (200 BC-400/500 AD) built complex burial mounds and earthworks.

1000-1650 AD

The Fort Ancient culture developed in Eastern Kentucky. Fort Ancient sites include a mound in Campbell County.

1739 (possibly earlier)

An expedition led by Baron Charles Le Moyne de Longueuil discovers the largest concentration of prehistoric fossils ever found in the Americas at Big Bone Lick. The baron ships some of the giant bones to France, where Benjamin Franklin studies them and declares that elephants once lived in America.

1744

Local trader Robert Smith finds additional bones at Big Bone, confirming Longueil’s discovery.

1751

Christopher Gist, an agent of the Ohio Company, becomes the first white man known to have set foot on the Point—the juncture of the Ohio and Licking rivers at what is now Covington.

1754-1763

During the French and Indian (Seven Years) War between the British and the French, most Native American tribes aligned with the British in the hope that they would stem the tide of white migration west of the Alleghenies. At the end of the war, the Royal Proclamation of 1763 forbade settlement west of the Appalachian crest. But the proclamation proved impossible to enforce in the face of increasing migration and Britain’s preoccupation with the rising tide of rebellion in its American colonies

1755

Mary Draper Ingles is captured by the Shawnee along with her sons George and Thomas, her sister-in-law Betty Draper, and others. Their captors bring the group into present-day Kentucky. Mary eventually escapes, and her 850-mile trek back to her home is celebrated in news stories and a dramatic interpretation. She is traditionally held to be the first white woman in Kentucky.

1768

In the first Treaty of Fort Stanwix, the Iroquois ceded land south of the Susquehanna and Ohio rivers to British authorities in return for a promise that they would be able to hold their ancestral lands in New York.

1774

Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, sends the provincial militia against the Indians of the Northwest Territory. The brief but fierce Lord Dunmore’s War resulted in a tentative agreement by the Shawnee to stay north of the Ohio River.

1780 and 1782

George Rogers Clark organizes volunteers at the Point before crossing into Ohio to attack the Shawnee. In the second expedition, staged to avenge the Battle of Blue Licks, five Indian towns are destroyed.

1784

The new American government won more concessions from the Iroquois in the second Treaty of Fort Stanwix, in which the tribe gave up its claim to lands in Ohio and western Pennsylvania. But many Native people believe the treaty to be invalid because of the circumstances under which it was signed, and the battle for the territories of the Ohio Valley will rage for nearly 30 more years.

1785

Baptist preacher John Tanner from North Carolina establishes Tanner’s Station (present-day Petersburg), the first settlement in Boone County

1788

John Filson and partners bought land on the north side of the Ohio River, founding what would become Cincinnati as Losantiville, meaning “town opposite the mouth” (of the Licking River).

1791

Thomas Kennedy begins operating a farm, tavern, and ferry at the Point.

1792

James Taylor, a cousin of James Madison, founded Newport. Kentucky becomes the 15th U.S. state.

1794

Campbell County, Kentucky’s 19th, is created from parts of Scott, Harrison, and Mason counties.
Bullittsburg Baptist Church is founded in the North Bend Bottoms area of Boone County. Now the oldest continuously active church in the county, it still holds services in its 1819 sanctuary.

1798

Boone County was formed from a portion of Campbell County. It is Kentucky’s 30th county.

1803

At the direction of President Thomas Jefferson, who had himself written a scientific paper on the unidentified fossil bones of a giant mammal, Meriwether Lewis stops at Big Bone Lick on his way to meet William Clark. He sends Jefferson a box of bones and a lengthy letter. The animal described in Jefferson’s paper, a giant ground sloth, will eventually be named Megalonyx jeffersonii in his honor.

Newport Barracks was established to supply soldiers for the Indian Wars.

1804

John Grant, James Taylor, and John Breckinridge form a company to extract salt from licks in Northern Kentucky.

1805

Gaines Tavern is built near Walton in Boone County.

1806

German Lutherans from Virginia founded the Hopeful Lutheran Church in Boone County.

1807

President Jefferson sends William Clark back to Big Bone Lick in the first organized vertebrate paleontology expedition in the U.S.

1815

John Gano, Thomas Carneal, and Richard Gano purchase land from Thomas Kennedy and lay out a city at the Point. They named it Covington for War of 1812 general Leonard Covington.

1817

The Benjamin Piatt Fowler House is built near Union, and the Anderson Ferry carries its first goods across the Ohio. The ferry is still in operation six miles west of downtown Covington.

1818

The Carneal family builds Elmwood Hall, the first permanent residence at Ludlow in Kenton County.

1828

The Burlington Cotton Factory was built in Covington.

1834

The Kentucky General Assembly establishes the Covington and Lexington Turnpike Road Company, leading to the chartering of Covington by the state. By this time, the city has a nail factory, two cotton factories, a sawmill, five tobacco and cigar factories, two distilleries, and a brewery. The population is 1,500.

1835

The Farmers Record and Covington Literary Gazette, believed to be Covington’s first newspaper, begins publication.
Sydney Sherman raises a company of Northern Kentucky volunteers to assist Texas in its struggle for independence from Mexico. The Newport Volunteers (sometimes called the Kentucky Rifles) participated in the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21, 1836. The next day, Newport Volunteer color bearer James Austin Sylvester is largely responsible for the capture of Mexican general Santa Anna.

1838

The first school term is established in Boone County.

1840

Kenton County, Kentucky’s 90th, is created from Campbell County. It is named for Simon Kenton, a frontiersman who explored vast tracts of what is now northern and central Kentucky in the 1770s and 1780s, eventually settling in Maysville.

1841

German immigrants founded the community of Camp Springs and the Mother of God church.

1854

The completion of the Covington & Lexington Railroad opens up new Northern markets for Kentucky agricultural products. Cincinnati becomes known as “Porkopolis” because of its concentration of meat-packing plants.

1856

Construction begins on a Covington-Cincinnati bridge designed by John Roebling.

A group of Northern Kentucky slaves, including Margaret Garner, her husband, and their four children, escaped across the frozen Ohio River to Cincinnati. But there they are surrounded by authorities, and Garner kills one of her daughters rather than see the child returned to slavery. Dubbed the “modern Medea,” Garner becomes a cause célèbre among abolitionists.

1861

St. Elizabeth’s Hospital opens.

1862-1863

A Confederate invasion of Kentucky leads to the construction of numerous fortifications and batteries. Two brief Civil War skirmishes take place at Florence and at Snow’’s Pond near Walton.

1863

Confederate raider John Hunt Morgan causes panic when he disobeys Gen. Bragg’s orders not to cross the Ohio River, enters Indiana, and skirts Cincinnati.