Kentucky's Road to Statehood

On June 1,1792, Kentucky became the fifteenth state in the new nation and the first west of the Alleghenies. Lowell Harrison reviews the tangled and protracted process by which Virginia's westernmost territory achieved statehood. By the early 1780s, survival of the Kentucky settlements, so uncertain only a few years earlier, was assured. The end of the American Revolution curtailed British support for Indian raids, and thousands of settlers sought a better life in the ""Eden of the West."" They swarmed through Cumberland Gap and down the Ohio River, cleared the land for crops, and established t.