Bowling Green takes shape on the Barren, 1798

In the mid-1790s brothers Robert and George Moore settled by a big spring, and when Warren County was created they donated land for a log courthouse and jail—today's Fountain Square.

On more than thirty additional acres the county court laid out a town in early 1798 and named it Bolin Green, recalling New York's Bowling Green where patriots had pulled down King George's statue. The settlement won the county seat in 1809 and incorporated in 1812, growing into south-central Kentucky's commercial hub on the river and later the Louisville & Nashville road.