Lexington’s founding in the 1770s: a wilderness settlement built after independence

Lexington, Ky., did not look like the city it is today when the United States declared independence from Britain in 1776, according to a new WKYT report on local history. The early settlement, the report said, began about a year earlier than independence and initially consisted of people carving out a foothold in what was described as largely wilderness country, before the area developed into a built-out town and, later, a major Kentucky city.

WKYT cited Mandy Higgins, executive director of the Lexington History Museum, who said that settlers came from Virginia in the summer of 1775. Those settlers eventually settled near what is now McConnell Springs. Higgins described the conditions as not “a town, in any way,” adding that the landscape included “large cane breaks” and meadows and fields associated with the region, but with few of the structures and industries that would define Lexington much later.

At the time of the founding, WKYT reported, European settlement had not yet begun across the region and many Indigenous people were living and hunting in the area. The report also stated that conflict over land contributed to Indigenous people being pushed out, framing the founding period as one marked by displacement tied to competing claims to territory.

In Higgins’ account, daily life in the early years was shaped by immediate needs rather than agriculture, commerce, or manufacturing. WKYT said that survival activities such as hunting for food, finding clean water, and staying healthy were central to life for settlers in the wilderness. Higgins also contrasted that early period with what residents associate with Lexington today, saying that the industry that would later include large hemp fields, bourbon production, and the horses Lexington is known for had not arrived.

The report also described the timing of when the revolution’s outcome reached Kentucky. Higgins told WKYT that it was not until five years after independence was declared that news of American independence reached the region in a meaningful way. She said Kentuckians participated in two of the last skirmishes of the Revolution, underscoring that Kentucky’s connection to the war and its consequences continued beyond the 1776 declaration.

Once people believed America was free, Higgins said, they left earlier fortified systems and started building what would become downtown Lexington. WKYT reported that Lexington became a city before Kentucky became a state, and it referenced the Commonwealth of Kentucky being established in 1792. Higgins’ remarks in the report also gave a sense of the scale of growth over time, contrasting the early founding-era expectations with Lexington’s later population.

The WKYT report was published alongside a museum timeline presented as part of the Lexington History Museum’s interpretation of the period, illustrating how the area’s shift from wilderness settlement to growing civic center unfolded over decades. For readers, the account connects the founding-era reality of survival and land conflict to later institutional development, while placing Lexington’s early years in the broader sequence of American independence and Kentucky’s own statehood timeline.