Kentucky

Lexington, Kentucky: horse farm

Kentucky, constituent state of the United States of America. Rivers define Kentucky’s boundaries except on the south, where it shares a border with Tennessee along a nearly straight line of about 425 miles (685 km), and on the southeast, where it shares an irregular, mountainous border with Virginia. Flowing generally northwestward, the Tug and Big Sandy rivers separate Kentucky from West Virginia on the east and northeast. On the north, Kentucky’s boundary follows the Ohio River to the Mississippi, meeting the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois en route. The Mississippi River then demarcates Kentucky’s short southwestern border with Missouri. The capital, Frankfort, lies between the two major cities—Louisville, which is on the Ohio River, and Lexington.

Kentucky was long the home of various Native American peoples before the arrival of Daniel Boone and other European frontiersmen in 1769. Its name perhaps derives from an Iroquois word for “prairie.” By 1792, when Kentucky was admitted as the 15th state of the union—the first west of the Appalachian Mountains—it had drawn nearly 73,000 settlers. By 1800 this number had grown to roughly 220,000 and included some 40,000 slaves.

Kentucky evokes myriad contrasting images: coal mines, bourbon whiskey (named for Bourbon county, where it was developed), mountaineers, moonshiners (distillers of illegal liquor), white-suited colonels and ladies sipping mint juleps on summertime verandas, horse breeding, and the Kentucky Derby. Kentucky curiously encompasses a mixture of distinct regions and characters. The seemingly endless landscape of white fences, paddocks, tobacco fields, and pastures in the rolling Bluegrass region around Lexington suggests an unhurried and genteel way of life that is more reminiscent of Kentucky’s ties with the antebellum South than it is reflective of the state’s position in the fast-paced economy of an industrialized country. By contrast, northernmost Kentucky, with its predominantly German heritage, its suburban pattern of development, and its orientation toward metropolitan Cincinnati, Ohio, is a reminder of the state’s link to the urban North. Kentucky has always existed in the middle: as a state looking back and ahead, as a crossroads for westward expansion, and as a territory with divided allegiance during the American Civil War (1861–65). Indeed, the Civil War presidents Abraham Lincoln of the Union and Jefferson Davis of the opposing Confederacy both were born in Kentucky. Area 40,408 square miles (104,656 square km). Population (2020) 4,505,836; (2022 est.) 4,512,310.