Hartford: Fort Hartford on the Rough River

Hartford (opens in a new tab) sits on a bluff above the Rough River (opens in a new tab), a long tributary of the Green River that early settlers called Rough Creek. The land was part of a 4,000-acre Virginia grant to Gabriel Madison, and it was surveyed in 1782. The state historical marker for Fort Hartford (opens in a new tab) says there is evidence of a settlement here that same year, the first fortified place in the lower Green River Valley.

The frontiersman William Smeathers later wrote that he and other settlers helped build “a fort at Hartford on Rough Creek” in 1782–83. Local tradition calls it the first permanent settlement in Ohio County. The stockade and its small log buildings are believed to have stood on the bluff where the town’s water plant is today.

The marker also says the fort was “often scene of bloody strife with Indians.” Shawnee and other nations north of the Ohio had never accepted the loss of their Kentucky hunting grounds, and to them stations like this one were an invasion. In April 1790 raiders struck nearby Barnett’s Station (opens in a new tab), killing two children and carrying off ten-year-old Hannah Barnett, who was held captive for six months.

The General Assembly created Ohio County in December 1798 from Hardin County and named it for the Ohio River (opens in a new tab), then its northern border. The county marker (opens in a new tab) dates the first county court to 1799, and Hartford became the seat after Madison gave land for the town. Its first public building, a two-story log courthouse and jail, went up in 1799–1800.

That courthouse had a raised bench for the court and a rail for the lawyers, but it collapsed in 1813. According to the First Public Building marker (opens in a new tab), the salvaged timber was burned to celebrate Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry (opens in a new tab)’s victory on Lake Erie. The post office opened as Hartford Court House in 1801, and the legislature incorporated the town in 1808.

No one is sure where the name came from. The Fort Hartford marker says it comes from the river ford where animals crossed, and “hart” is an old word for a male deer. Other accounts point to an early settler who ran a ferry here, and travelers used the ford or a ferry until the first covered bridge across the Rough River was built in 1823.

Kentucky today

Hartford is still the Ohio County seat, and its welcome sign famously greets visitors to the “Home of 2,000 happy people and a few soreheads.” The Ohio County Historical Society museum at 415 Mulberry Street fills the 1880 John C. Thomas House, on land Madison gave the town in 1799, and markers there honor Smeathers and the preacher William Downs, who was born in the old fort in 1782. Smeathers went on to become the first settler at Yellow Banks, today’s Owensboro, and the Chiggerville shell midden is a reminder that people lived along Ohio County’s rivers thousands of years before the fort.