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By Carl Keith Greene / Staff Writer
He was perhaps not the first American from east of the Allegheny Mountains to blaze a trail into Kentucky, but he was the first known to build a permanent house.
Dr. Thomas Walker of Charlottesville in Albemarle County, Va. had left home on March 6, 1750, to explore the area west of the Alleghenies and arrived alongside what he would name the Cumberland River.
By April 13, 1750, he had passed through what is now called Cumberland Gap. He described it this way, “This gap may be seen at a considerable distance and there is no other that I know of, except one about two miles to the north of it, which does not appear to be so low as the other. The mountain on the north side is very steep and rocky, but on the south side, it is not so. We called it Steep Ridge.”
He arrived on April 20 at what would become the site of the first known house in Kentucky and made plans to cross the river there. The next day, he and his companions, Ambrose Powell, Colby Chew, William Tomlinson, Henry Lawless and John Hughs, completed the canoe they had begun the day before and tested it.
He wrote, “About noon it began to thunder, lightning, hail and rain. It continued about two hours.”
The next day being Sunday, they rested and chose two of the men, Powell and Chew, to accompany Walker across the river and explore more of the land.
On Monday, the trio crossed the river in the canoe, leaving the other three to “provide and salt some bear, build a house and plant some peach stones and corn.”
For the next five days, Walker, Chew and Powell explored about 35 miles to the west and returned on Friday the 28th.
When they arrived back at the camp, they found a 12x8-foot house, a spot of broken ground where the peach stones and corn had been planted and the cured meat of several bears.
For another week, they examined the area around the house and then departed.
The long hunters apparently followed Walker and his group into the area and the earliest documented group hunted the Stinking Creek area in 1763. Three years later, Daniel Boone came to the area, camped at Stinking Creek and spent the winter of 1770 there.
His next trip was in 1775 when he was blazing the Boone Trace for the Transylvania Land Company.
Boone and 30 armed and mounted men came through the Cumberland Gap to Flat Lick up the ancient Warrior’s Path.
At Flat Lick, Boone’s people bore to the left and cleared the trace created by hunters beginning around 1769.
It led east of Barbourville to Turkey Creek, Fighting Creek, Little and Big Richland creeks and through Raccoon Springs in what is now Laurel County between KY 229 and U.S. 25 east of the Lily community.
