Hon. Richard Henderson "Kentucky Colonel"

Col. Richard Henderson 

Colonel Richard Henderson (April 20, 1735 – January 30, 1785) was an American jurist, land speculator and politician who was best known for attempting to create the Transylvania Colony in frontier Kentucky. Henderson County and its seat Henderson, Kentucky are named for him. He also sold land to an early settlement that went on to become Nashville, Tennessee.

Henderson was born in Virginia Colony, but his family moved to Granville County, North Carolina when he was a child. There he studied law and became a member of the bar. He married in Elizabeth Keeling, an Englishwoman, in 1763 and had 6 children. Henderson was appointed judge in 1768, but retired in 1773 to pursue land deals. In 1774, he formed the Transylvania Company for that purpose. Between 1775 and 1783, he pursued various land deals in Kentucky, Tennessee and southwestern Virginia, including the Transylvania Purchase and Colony in western Kentucky and north central Tennessee. The extra-legal deals collapsed by 1783 when voided by the Virginia and North Carolina colonial governments. Henderson's Transylvania settlement was one of the early triggers of the Cherokee-American wars.

Colonel and Judge Richard Henderson is credited with the beginning of Kentucky
Col. Richard Henderson

The Transylvania Company and Colony

After a brief career in law, on 27 August 1774, Henderson organized a land speculation company with a number of other prominent North Carolinians. Originally called Richard Henderson and Company, the company name was first changed to the Louisa Company, and finally to the Transylvania Company on January 6, 1775.

The Transylvania Purchase

The Transylvania Purchase at Sycamore Shoals in Elizabethton, Tennessee and The Wilderness Road into Kentucky. In March 1775, Henderson gathered chiefs of the Cherokee Indians and negotiated the Treaty of Watauga at Sycamore Shoals at present day Elizabethton, Tennessee, during which time he purchased all the land lying between the Cumberland River, the Cumberland Mountains, and the Kentucky River, and situated south of the Ohio River.

The land thus delineated encompassed an area half as large as the present state of Kentucky. In order to facilitate settlement, Henderson hired Daniel Boone, who had hunted extensively in Kentucky, to blaze the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap and into the Transylvania land purchase. Henderson also purchased the land known as the Path Grant that allowed access to the Transylvania lands. That purchase is described on the Path Grant Deed.

To appease other prominent early explorers, Henderson held out other rewards. He offered Joseph Martin, founder of Martin's Station on Martin's Creek in present-day Rose Hill, Lee County, Virginia, a spot as an agent and entry taker for the company, in charge of keeping tabs on settlers moving westward; Henderson offered Martin's brother Bryce a tract of 500 acres (2.0 km2) adjacent to the Cumberland Gap.

The Transylvania Compact

The Transylvania Constitutional Convention, May 23, 1775, at Boonesborough. Anonymous sketch: "On May 23, 1775 a convention of the people in the deep wilderness of Kentucky gathered in a constitutional convention, meeting under the shade of a huge elm tree (the limbs of which extended at least a hundred feet wide), and which its president, Richard Henderson, called "our Church, State-house, Council Chamber, etc."

Henderson followed Boone to a site that came to be called Boonesborough, located on the southern bank of the Kentucky River, Henderson encouraged the few settlers there to hold a constitutional convention.

In May 1775, under the shade of a huge elm tree, a compact organizing a frame of government was drafted. The intended government entailed executive, legislative, and judicial branches. After concluding the Transylvania Compact, Henderson returned to North Carolina and on behalf of his fellow investors in the land scheme petitioned Congress seeking to make Transylvania America's fourteenth colony. Despite those efforts, Congress was unwilling to act without the consent of Virginia and North Carolina, both of whom claimed jurisdiction over the region in question.

In June 1776 the Virginia General Assembly prohibited the Transylvania Land Company from making demands on settlers in the region and in December 1778 declared the Transylvania claim void. North Carolina invalidated the remaining Tennessee portion of the purchase in 1783. Henderson and his partners instead received a grant of 200,000 acres on the Ohio River below the mouth of Green River.