When the transformer across the street blew late Wednesday night, it emitted a shower of purple light, and it took my power with it. The sky was light and there was a bunch of lightning, it seemed fitting. Watching, I thought, man, this would be beautiful if it wasn’t 2am.
My transformer was one of many others that blew that night, LG&E estimated that approximately 125,000 people lost power because of that ice storm. When I stepped outside Thursday morning, the sky was still unnaturally light and there were so many tree limbs down. I left for work early, but it took forever to get there because of all the traffic lights not working. The traffic crawled, I shivered, and all I could think about was the Wilderness Road.
The Appalachian Mountains are huge, and in the mid/late 1770s, they were a considerable barrier for anyone on the East Coast hoping to come west. There were only a few ways through that barrier, one of them being the Cumberland Gap. After years of kicking around in Kentucky, Daniel Boone was commissioned to blaze a path that cut through the Cumberland Gap and up into central Kentucky. In March of 1775, Boone and a few dozen dudes with axes left Kingsport, Tennessee following a path Boone was familiar with, a path originally cut by grazing bison. Their mission was to clear and widen that trail. Today, we know that trail as the Wilderness Road.
I took a roadtrip to Kingsport this summer; I started at the very beginning of the Wilderness Road and followed it back to Louisville as closely as I could. I took it slow, marveling at the wide, clear roadways and how pretty the views were, but I doubt it resembles the land Boone and his men traveled very much. Even so, it seemed like something of them remained.
It rained almost my entire time there, so I had pretty much the whole thing to myself. The route Boone and his men followed was described as being narrow and dangerous. I felt like it was better, more truthful, to see it in less than ideal conditions. Having it to myself allowed me to really take my time, to align to the wavelength of the rain and the trees and the absence of noise and light pollution.
The wavelength was a compelling one. I visited the Wilderness Road State Park, and I marveled at how the precipitation surrounding the mountaintop made it look like they were on fire.
Once I left, I visited the Cumberland Gap National Historic Park, my goal was to see the Pinnacle Overlook. Reaching the Pinnacle Overlook means traveling the Skyland Highway- at an elevation change of roughly 1,400 feet within 4 miles of loops and switchbacks, it is not for the faint of heart. When walking from the parking lot to the Overlook, you encounter a path with a horizontal line. If you place one foot on each side, you will be in 2 states simultaneously- Kentucky and Virginia.
On a clear day, the Pinnacle Overlook is astounding, you can see for miles and miles. On the day I was there, it had been raining so hard for so long that it was solid white, you couldn’t see anything except some rocks immediately beneath the platform. I have never experienced anything like it in my life. If there has ever been a clearer symbol of the disconnection modern day humans feel from our surroundings, from the things the people of our past had to go through to survive their daily lives and to move us forward as a people, I haven’t seen it.
If you stand in Fort Nelson Park, located at the intersection of 7th and Main Street in Louisville, and you turn to face the Ohio River, if it weren’t for the floodwall, I-64, and the passage of time, you would see where Louisville began.
What we now know as Louisville began in a place named Corn Island, on the Ohio River north of the intersection of 7th and Main Street, next to the Falls of the Ohio.
In 1778, George Rogers Clark was a General, and he was all of 25 year old. By this time, he had already been in the military for several years, and he was responsible for protecting Kentucky (then known as Kentucky County, Virginia) after having requested Kentucky be formally created. General Clark, men from his militia, and some civilian settlers landed on Corn Island in late May, deciding not to come onto the mainland because they thought it too vulnerable to attack from Native Americans. General Clark and his militia stayed there for about a month before leaving for the next leg of General Clark’s involvement in the Revolutionary War. Before the militia left, they cleared some land for the settlers who would remain, built them some cabins, and built a fort complete with a stockade for later use by the militia. When they left Corn Island, a few members of the militia remained with the civilians, who began planting food.
The situation developed quickly, and it turned out that the settlers and militia wouldn’t stay on Corn Island for very long. The very next year, in 1779, they came ashore at General Clark’s direction, he wanted them to build a bigger fort on the mainland. That fort, Fort-on-Shore, was located between 1th and 12th Streets, at the intersection with Rowan Street. Its historical marker is literally within a stone’s throw of the floodwall, if you wind up and throw hard.
Fort-on-Shore was the very first settlement on Louisville’s mainland. Its fort was bigger than Corn Island’s, but there was a war going on, and they realized that even though it was bigger, it still wasn’t big enough. It was clear that they’d need a bigger fort, and 3 years later, in 1782, Fort Nelson was built. Stretching roughly from 6th Street to 8th Street, Fort Nelson’s footprint was much larger.
Such a large footprint, especially during wartime, required logistical support- munitions, food, clothing, lots of supplies. The infrastructure simply wasn’t there to support it.
Yet.
The Wilderness Road was built in a few different stages, and has a few different branches. The last stage of the main branch was built mostly to support General Clark, his militia, and Fort Nelson, but in the coming decades the Wilderness Road would also prove an invaluable path for America’s travelers.
The last stage of the Wilderness Road comes up to Louisville from Harrodsburg. Once in Louisville, Preston Highway/KY Route 61 follows the Wilderness Road pretty closely for much of the way, and there is a historical marker at the intersection of Preston Highway and Blue Lick Road to commemorate it.
The Wilderness Road ends at the gate of Fort Nelson, near the intersection of what is now 7th and Main Street.
Early on, those who wanted to build in Louisville quickly realized that Corn Island had lots of limestone, which they took for use in buildings and paving some of Louisville’s first roads, including Main Street. As people began taking its limestone, Corn Island began to shrink. In the 1920s, a dam was added nearby to generate electricity for Louisville’s growing population, forcing the water level to rise. What remains of Corn Island, Louisville’s dawn, now lies permanently underwater.
Fort Nelson no longer exists. In its place, Fort Nelson Park now stands, a little postage stamp of a park nestled in the heart of a bustling Downtown Louisville too busy to notice it. When standing in Fort Nelson Park and facing away from the Ohio River, the downtown Mussel and Burger Bar location is diagonally opposite you to your left, behind Morton’s The Steakhouse. They paved paradise and put up a Mussel Bar.
By the time I made it to work Thursday morning, I’d just about thawed out. It was a relief to get up and moving, but even surrounded by lights and laptops and the hallmarks of modern-day America, the psychic chill of the Wilderness Road, of what I had seen and heard the night before, remained.
Did you know that trees and plants communicate with each other? It isn’t what humans would recognize as sentience, but plants and trees have been demonstrated to have communication networks. Specifically, trees have demonstrated the ability to send sustenance and nutrients to nearby trees via a similar type of network. Even when a tree within the network has been cut down to its stump, other trees in that network will sometimes continue to send it sustenance to keep it alive. (If you would like more information about this, I highly recommend Peter Wohlleben’s book The Hidden Life of Trees.)
I was up at 2am Wednesday night to see the transformer explode because I couldn’t sleep, as cold and tired as I was. I couldn’t sleep because my ears were full of the screams of the tree branches as they cracked under the weight and fell to the ground.