Capt. Billy Bush and the Bush Settlement

Capt. William “Billy” Bush organized the Bush Settlement (opens in a new tab) on Lower Howard’s Creek in what became Clark County. He located the land for himself and others. Beginning January 7, 1783, despite difficult January weather, he piloted and marked the lines while Daniel Boone, acting as a deputy surveyor, ran the first eleven surveys for him. Those surveys totaled 6,147 acres and became the legal basis of the settlement.

Surveying on the Kentucky frontier was dirty, cold, and dangerous work; Boone earned substantial income at it from 1783 to 1797, making legal surveys in six Kentucky counties, and these eleven tracts for Bush were among his earliest.

Baptist families from Virginia and North Carolina began settling the creek valley in November 1784. Providence Church on Lower Howard’s Creek became the nucleus of the community. The church and the farms around it gave the Bush Settlement its lasting shape—clusters of related households clearing ground, raising stock, and worshiping together a few miles from the older forts on the Kentucky River. Without surveyors like Boone and settlers like the Bushes, Clark County’s early map would have looked very different.

Bush had come west with Boone’s party in 1775, but his lasting mark is this Clark County settlement and its church, not a fort. The settlement sat upstream from the mouth of Lower Howard’s Creek. It should not be confused with Boonesborough or with Holder’s Station. Col. John Holder planted his station near the creek’s mouth in 1782 and later ran a store, tavern, ferry, mill, and boatyard there.

Bush’s people and Holder’s station shared the same valley; they were not the same place. This story stays on the Bush Settlement; the Holder story covers the station and mills.

Through the 1780s and 1790s the Bush Settlement filled in as the danger of raids eased and more Baptist kin arrived. Providence Church remained the center. The pattern—survey first, then kin and congregation—was repeated across the Bluegrass, but few settlements keep both the surveyor’s and the captain’s names as clearly as this one. Kentucky Historical Marker #2531, dedicated in January 2018, stands in Clark County to mark both Boone’s surveying and the Bush Settlement.

Local historian Harry Enoch was a driving force behind the marker; the dedication crowd retreated to Boonesborough’s interpretation center out of the cold to hear the remarks. The marker text credits Bush with locating the land and serving as pilot and marker while Boone ran the surveys.