Kentucky's Frontier Highway: Historical Landscapes along the Maysville Road

20. Millersburg

203 20 Millersburg Mile 8.0 U.S. 68 crosses Hinkston Creek entering Millersburg from the southwest. In 1950 the highway followed the old track that crossed the river upstream of the dam spillway and stands left, or west, of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad bridge. Upon crossing the creek, the road followed an S-curve that connected to the old turnpike route, later renamed Main Street.1 Millersburg is in Bourbon County, just south of the Bourbon County–Nicholas County boundary. The town was established on land owned by Major John Miller. A native of Pennsylvania, Miller emigrated to Kentucky in 1775 with his brothers, Robert and William, William Steele, William McClelland, and others seeking suitable land for farming. After completing their surveys and planting corn crops under the duress of continual Indian harassment, the party returned to Pennsylvania to prepare their families for permanent emigration. The group made their return trip by flatboat down the Ohio River, which was, given the ongoing Indian threat, a dangerous gauntlet for emigrants. The trip proved fatal for Robert Miller, who was killed by Indians shooting at the party from the river’s north bank. The tragedy compelled the Miller party to bypass landing at Limestone (Maysville), choosing instead to continue downriver to the Beargrass settlements (later Louisville), where they stayed until the conclusion of the Revolutionary War. When the Millers returned to the Millersburg area, the Indian threat had not been completely extinguished. The surviving brothers and their fellow settlers erected defensible log buildings to house and protect their families as they began developing their land claims into prosperous farms. John Miller built the first mill for grinding grain and sawing logs on the east bank of Hinkston Creek at the Limestone Trace crossing. The mill was operating before Bourbon County was legally organized. Farmers often paid an in-kind milling fee of 10 percent of the flour or meal that mill operators ground for them. In this way millers accumulated substantial flour and meal stocks that they could sell locally; provided farm production was sufficient, they could ship their surplus downriver to New Orleans for sale there. After Bourbon County and its court were established, William Miller petitioned the court in 1788 for permission to erect a water-powered gristmill on the Hinkston “where the waggon road [Limestone Trace] leading from Bourbon Courthouse [Paris] to the Blue Licks crossed the creek,” opposite his brother’s mill.2 Millersburg  205 William Allison attached fulling equipment to this mill and in 1797 advertised his fulling business at this location. Because fulling mills typically processed wool cloth by pounding it in a slurry of potash soap and fuller’s earth to remove lanolin and thicken and felt the fabric, area farmers were doubtless producing sheep in numbers sufficient to warrant mill construction before the turn of the nineteenth century. Needham Parry passed through the settlement in 1794 and found the Hinkston Creek banks bustling with millworks. “There is,” he noted, “a dam & on one side of it there is a grist mill & saw & on the other side, right opposite, there is a grist & fulling mill: all of which are supplied out of the same head, one dam answering the whole.”3 Mills operated here throughout the nineteenth century under various owners. The Kentucky General Assembly authorized the establishment of Millersburg on December 19, 1796. The town was not laid out until 1798, following an order by the Bourbon County Circuit Court. The town site of choice was similar to Paris’s: astride the Limestone Trace and at the point where the road traversed an important regional perennial stream. Millersburg’s original plat was lost but was redrawn by Alfred N. Gilbert in 1857. The town plan aligned with the Limestone Trace, which gave North Main Street a bearing of north 30 degrees east. North Main Street later became part of the Lexington-Maysville Turnpike. Main Street had three flanking streets, West Back Street on the westerly side and South Main and East Back streets on the east. The cross streets carried numbers, Second through Eleventh. An extension of Eleventh Street leading to the town cemetery was later surveyed and named Cemetery Street. The town plan comprised a total of 132 in-lots and twenty-two out-lots. The plat allowed for a public square bordered by North Main, Fifth, East Back, and Sixth streets. Between 1891 and 1897 Millersburg’s major street names were...