Step back in time this holiday season with a visit to Fort Boonesborough in Richmond, Kentucky to celebrate an 18th Century Christmas!
A visit to Fort Boonesborough is always educational and entertaining but, if you can make it during the 18th Century Christmas exhibition, you're in for a real treat!
Fort Boonesborough was a frontier fort in Kentucky, founded by Daniel Boone and his party of 31 men who were charged with the difficult task of clearing a path through the Cumberland Gap.
Creating a unified track through what was, at the time, nothing more than hunter's traces and game trails, was no easy feat but Boone and his men, cutting through the hoary wilderness hand-axes, achieved it. Working through some of the roughest terrain around, the path they created was roundly considered one of the worst roads in the country for decades - but the opening of the Wilderness Trail was one of the bigger factors in the exploration and settlement of the Midwest.
At the end of their task, in April of 1775, Boone and his men settled in at a site by constructing some temporary log huts, which they named “Fort Boone,” the seed for Boonesborough - Kentucky's second oldest European-American settlement. Fort Boonesborough saw a lot of action during the American Revolutionary War as well as in the war between European settlers and America's indigenous peoples.
Reconstructed in 1974, Fort Boonesborough has since served as a museum of Living History, with re-enactments of the 18th century way of frontier life educating and attracting visitors from all over Kentucky, the US, and the world.
During the 18th Century Christmas at Fort Boonesborough, the fort will be lit by candlelight and decorated as it would have been during an 18th century Christmas. A Living History museum, you will be entertained and educated by period-interpreters who will demonstrate and explain their various traditions as you travel from cabin to cabin. English, German and Dutch traditions will be shown, along with how the inhabitants of a typical, lone frontier cabin might have celebrated as well.
Bonfires, Christmas guns, traditional music and dance, plus food, refreshments, and crafts for the kiddies, make the 18th Century Christmas at Fort Boonesborough a wonderful and unique way to ring in the season!
