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227 22 Blue Licks Mile 21.0 The old turnpike road, the Blue Licks cutoff, ran to the left here on its southern approach to the Licking River crossing. To follow the old route, turn left and cross Stony Creek on the concrete bridge. At the junction with SR 1244 stands a small frame building at the corner; a Freemason emblem is attached to the front facade. The upper story now serves as Blue Licks Lodge no. 495. The stone foundation and an unusual water-control structure behind the building suggest that it was once a hillside mill, although it is not clear how water would have reached the building. The structure’s facade intimates that the original building was modified into a store. About a mile and one-half from U.S. 68, an iron bridge—now closed—carried the old road across the Licking River. On the river’s north side, the embanked roadbed crosses the Licking’s broad floodplain. A few houses and a large two-story commercial building, now used for storage, is all that remains of the old Blue Licks settlement here. The current U.S. 68 crosses the Licking River on a modern bridge to the east, or right, of the saline springs. In the 1790s Isaac Drake of Mayslick traveled here to the salt-boiling operation to barter for salt. Though the area later attracted visitors seeking cures for their physical ailments by drinking and bathing in the mineralized springwater, the water’s saline content was relatively low for efficient salt recovery. Drake bartered for salt with corn or hay, because the surrounding area produced neither. By bringing as much meadowgrass hay as two horses could pull, he could obtain one bushel of salt in trade.1 The mineral-rich water attracted large numbers of herbivorous animals and their predators (including humans) from the Pleistocene era to historic times. In addition to creating a trail network that focused at the lick, large numbers of bison, deer, elk, and other animals trampled and uprooted vegetation for a considerable distance around the lick in search of salt deposits. Animal grazing and rooting may have discouraged tree growth and encouraged the formation of glades or tree-fringed open areas colonized by grasses and other herbaceous plants. One plant that apparently adapted to such unusual environmental conditions was Short’s goldenrod (Solidago shortii). This rare goldenrod species was initially discovered by Charles W. Short on Rock Island at the Falls of the Ohio at Louisville in 1840. After engineers built the lock and dam there in the 1920s, the species was thought extinct. In the 1930s the ecologist E. Lucy Braun 228  The Maysville Road: A Landscape Biography found the species growing on barren, overgrazed hillside pastures around Lower Blue Licks, and plant ecologists have documented several Short’s goldenrod populations that survive in the area, especially along the old buffalo trace and along both the old and new sections of U.S. 68.2 The Blue Licks Battlefield State Resort Park sponsors a Short’s Goldenrod Festival each September, when the goldenrod blooms. Many Pleistocene animals became trapped in the mire surrounding the lick; excavations of their fossilized bones began at Lower Blue Licks as early as 1784, when entrepreneurs erected saltworks here. Subsequent saltworks proprietors continued to find fossilized bones as they attempted to improve the salt springs by digging them deeper and enlarging them. The proprietors of the summer hotel at the Licks in 1897 hired a local resident, Thomas W. Hunter, to dig a series of trenches near the salt springs in the hopes of determining why the water volume was declining. Hunter assembled the bones that he found in an extensive collection that was eventually installed at the Blue Licks State Park museum.3 Prehistoric and historic peoples alike boiled down Blue Licks water to extract the salt, a necessary mineral nutrient for good health and a fundamental requirement for food preservation. The spring’s strategic location and value is pointed up by several incidents, including a visit by Daniel Boone and a party of settlers who came here in 1778 to boil water to obtain salt for the settlers living at Fort Boonesborough in present-day Madison County, Kentucky. Boone’s work crew produced several hundred bushels of salt during weeks of difficult work in miserable winter weather. In early February, while Boone was hunting with his son-in-law Flanders Callaway and Thomas Brooks, they encountered a large party of...

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