MAYSVILLE
from Pittsburgh, Pa., and 60 miles upriver from Cincinnati. Maysville was the original gateway to the nation’s West. The Cumberland Gap opened up Kentucky, but people traveling west soon discovered that the Ohio River was a more effective route, and for those settlers Maysville was an early gateway. European exploration of the region dates to the 1600s. It was Pennsylvanian Simon Kenton who was the key to settling Limestone, the nearby town of Washington, and the county. Another explorer of the area was Robert McAfee, who arrived in June 1773. John Hedges gave the site its original name of Limestone earlier in 1773. But it was Kenton, on his fourth visit in 1775, who found Limestone cove and the canebrakes three miles south of Limestone that became part of pioneer legend. Here Kenton built his cabin and began promoting the area. The site of Limestone was locked between the river and hills with insufficient land for farming and vulnerable to Indian attacks. Most settlers moved to the hills above Limestone or migrated farther to the west. In 1776 numerous exploring parties came to Limestone, and Kenton welcomed them and helped guide them to their destinations. Local tradition holds that he urged only those visitors he found especially promising to stay in the area. Indian attacks kept most settlers away before 1784, the year Kenton returned to Limestone with 60 men. William Bickley, Edward Waller, and John Waller of that party built at the mouth of Limestone Creek a block house that was the beginning of Maysville. Limestone was named a tobacco inspection site in 1787, establishing a relationship of that crop to the town that was especially important over the next two centuries. On December 11, 1787, the Commonwealth of Virginia established the town of Maysville in what was then Bourbon Co., “on the lands of John May and Simon Kenton.” The name Maysville was chosen instead of Limestone because John May was considered a founder of the town and owned the land with Kenton. Daniel Boone was among the original trustees, whose job it was to lay out the streets and build the town. The next year, 1788, Mason Co. was established, and nearby Washington was made the county seat. Washington’s prominence was shortlived, however. Maysville grew after Mad Anthony Wayne’s victory in northern Ohio at Fallen Timbers in 1794 largely eliminated the Indian threat. Another factor in Maysville’s favor was its prime location on the river. By 1789, 30 flatboats were landing at the town each day. Although small, Maysville was seen by early travelers “as the most important landing place on the river.” The first paved (macadamized) road in Kentucky was completed on November 7, 1830, between Maysville and Washington. It later extended to Lexington (see Maysville and Lexington Turnpike), opening with six covered bridges and 13 tollhouses in 1835. The road had been the subject of national debate as Congress voted $150,000 in 1830 for its construction. During the congressional debate, U.S. senator Richard M. Johnson, a Kentuckian, called the Maysville road the most
traveled in the nation other than roads on the East Coast. The road was a pet project of Henry Clay, who wanted to build the nation through internal improvements. However, President Andrew Jackson (1829–1837) vetoed the Maysville Road Bill because he considered the road an internal improvement that would benefit only one state. Between 1810 and 1830 the population of Maysville grew sixfold to more than 2,000; by the end of the Civil War, its population was 4,700. In the 1820s steamboats largely replaced the flatboats. Maysville became the region’s cultural and economical center, a status illustrated in many ways. In September 1824, Rev. Alexander Campbell, a founder of the Disciples of Christ denomination, preached in Maysville. When the great Choctaw chief Mingo Pusksbunnubbe died accidentally in Maysville in October 1824 on his way to the nation’s capital, he was given a grand funeral here with full military honors. On May 21, 1825, the French general the Marquis de Lafayette visited, and merchants literally laid down red carpets for this hero of the Revolutionary War. Henry Clay was a frequent visitor as he traveled back and forth to Washington, D.C. In 1827, 2,500 people gathered for a dinner for Clay to show their support after he had been accused of a “corrupt bargain” that gave John Q. Adams the presidency. President Adams (1825–1829) was also given a warm welcome when he visited Maysville on November 4, 1843. When the parents of the future president Ulysses S. Grant (1869–1877) wanted to give their son the best education, they sent him to Maysville in fall 1836 to attend the Maysville Academy. This prominence led to Maysville’s incorporation as a city in 1833, and then in 1848 the Kentucky legislature moved the county seat to Maysville. An impressive Greek Revival building that had been built in 1845 became the county courthouse. As the community grew, so did its businesses, industry, and public institutions. Examples in the 1840s and 1850s included the Maysville Manufacturing Company, new gas and coal companies, ropewalks that made rope from the local hemp, and telegraph lines: one to Nashville, Tenn., and another to the north, passing through a cable laid under the waters of the Ohio River. Maysville reflected the state and the nation in cultural and social issues in the antebellum period. The cholera epidemic in 1833 took the lives of both the first mayor of Maysville, Charles Wolfe, and Capt. John Langhorne, who had entertained famous individuals and others locally at his Eagle Tavern. There were several other cholera outbreaks during the 1840s and 1850s. Despite some antiCatholic sentiment in the community, Irish and German immigration led to the establishment of a Catholic parish and the St. Patrick Catholic Church in 1847. The bank issue of the 1820s was played out locally, too: one of the controversial state branch banks had been established in the town in 1818, and the politician in the middle of the controversy, Kentucky governor Joseph Desha (1824–1828), was a resident of the county. Like many Kentucky towns, Maysville’s citizens were split on the issue of slavery. On the one
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hand, a slave who had bought his freedom, Elisha Green, established the Bethel Baptist Church in 1845 for the African American citizens of the community and continued as the church’s pastor for 52 years. On the other hand, in the decades before the Civil War, a slave pen was located near the site of the first block house built in Maysville. In 1838 an Ohio minister, John Mahan, was prosecuted in Maysville for helping slaves escape from Mason Co. Since it could not be established that Mahan had committed any crime in Kentucky, he was found not guilty. His actions were an example of Underground Railroad operations in the area. Meetings were held in Maysville in 1845 condemning Cassius Clay’s Lexington newspaper the True American and those who helped slaves escape. On February 12, 1849, there was a meeting in the city to discuss the gradual emancipation of slaves. Soon after the start of the Civil War, two Union camps were set up near Maysville, Camp Lee and Camp Kenton. Confederate general John Hunt Morgan’s men raided Maysville in 1862, 1863, and 1864. During the 1864 raid, James Conrad tried to cross the Ohio River for help and was killed. A former mayor of Maysville, William Casto, fought Col. Leonidas Metcalfe, a son of Kentucky’s governor, in a duel on May 8, 1862, over Civil War issues. Casto had been imprisoned for his Southern sympathies and blamed Metcalfe for his arrest. The participants fought the duel in nearby Bracken Co. to escape Maysville’s officials. Casto was killed in the fight (see Casto-Metcalfe Duel). When the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in January 1863, by President Abraham Lincoln, one Maysville Union Army officer and prominent citizen, Col. John C. Cochran, resigned his commission in protest. African Americans have always constituted a significant part of the population in Maysville. They faced special challenges after the Civil War. Freed slaves who could not show evidence of having a job were subject to arrest. Local black minister Elisha Green responded to the tensions by staying in Maysville and fighting for civil rights. He was active in the state Republican Party. In 1883 he took a white man to court for physically abusing him when Green refused to give up his seat on the train while traveling from Maysville to Paris, Ky., to preach. Many talented African Americans left the city, however. James Mundy, for example, the son of a former slave, moved to Chicago in the 1920s and became one of the most famous choir directors in the nation. His choirs were invited to perform at the dedication of the Navy Pier and at the closing of the 1933 World Fair in Chicago. The worst manifestation of racism in this period was lynching. The public burning of Richard Coleman in 1899 in the city was so horrendous, with hundreds of participants, that it was condemned in the New York Times. By 2005 the percentage of blacks in Maysville was approximately 11.5, or around 1,000, a number that had decreased since 1865. After the Civil War, the nation was becoming more industrial, but Maysville continued to be largely dependent on its surrounding agricultural base. The stockyards, for example, were located