Kentucky History Treasures- Bryan Station

Doug High shares a story of Bryan Station's fort in Fayette county, where women helped to shape history there.

Week's kentucky history treasures.

Doug high: life on the kentucky frontier was hard, brutal.

It required men and women of fortitude to stand against great violent opposition.

We'll examine just one example at brian's station and discover how exceptionally brave women in that community gave them a fighting chance.

Dana zinger: brian's station was a fort, founded about 1776 in fayette county in what was then virginia.

It consisted of about 40 cabins in a parallelogram, and some of the inhabitants included close relatives of daniel boone as well as the future vice president of the united states, richard mentor johnson, when he was an infant.

The night of august 15th, 1782, the fort was surrounded by a group of about 500 native americans, british and canadian rangers, led by two british captains.

And this was during the end of the revolutionary war.

So a lot of people don't realize fayette county had a connection to the revolutionary war.

The group of attackers, they were concealed among the corn, the hemp crop at that time, and the forest that surrounded the fort.

The attackers were not aware that the settlers knew their presence.

So, the settlers spent the night preparing for an attack silently and then the very next morning they knew they had to have water in order to survive an attack.

Business as usual, not to alarm the attackers because fetching water at that time was a chore of women.

So, if the men went out there, the attackers would know that they were aware of their presence.

They sent the women and the women without hesitation grabbed their buckets, went out, and the very nerve wracking long process, fetched the water.

Nerve wracking because they knew concealed just mere feet away were attackers ready to go.

Bravely they fetch the