Daniel Boone surveyed 1,000-acre Meadow Creek tract in Owsley County
Daniel Boone's 1797 Meadow Creek survey still lines up with the Owsley County Stockyards, tying a working livestock site to a 1,000-acre frontier claim.
The Owsley County Stockyards sit on ground that Daniel Boone, George Boone and Nathan Boone surveyed for a 1,000-acre tract on Sept. 14, 1797. The land ran along Meadow Creek on the South Fork of the Kentucky River, and the old survey fixed its corners with a large meadow, an Indian horse pen, white oaks, a maple-and-beech corner and a huckleberry hillside.
That tract was not isolated. It touched Boone’s own tract, James Craig’s 4,225-acre survey and William Gilliam’s 2,000-acre tract, placing the Meadow Creek claim inside a wider frontier map of overlapping warrants and marked boundaries.
Boone left Kentucky in 1799 without disposing of the land, then gave it verbally to his son Daniel Morgan Boone. On Feb. 2, 1819, Daniel Morgan Boone, then living in Missouri, had his attorney, Jesse Boone of Greenup County, sell the tract to William Strong by quitclaim deed. The Owsley County Historical Society says no protest to the title is known. Nearly all of the 1,000 acres later came into the hands of Robert Rose and his wife Ester, extending the paper trail well beyond Boone’s lifetime.
Booneville, the county seat, sits on the South Fork of the Kentucky River at Kentucky Route 11 and Kentucky Route 30. The site was once called Boone’s Station, and the Kentucky Historical Society marker on the Booneville courthouse lawn says Boone and his party camped near there in 1780 and 1781. Elias Moore donated land for the county seat in 1843, the Owsley Court House and post office opened in 1844, and the town was incorporated as Booneville in 1846.
Owsley County itself was organized in 1843 from parts of Clay, Estill and Breathitt counties, and later boundary changes helped form Jackson County in 1858, Wolfe County in 1860 and Lee County in 1870. The 2020 census counted 4,051 residents. Another local landmark near Exton Creek carries the same frontier imprint: a boulder there is known as Boone’s Rock because Boone used it as a landmark on a 1784 survey for James Moore and Col. John Donelson.
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