www.kentuckyknifemakers.com

Our Heritage

The pioneering spirit has always been a part of Kentucky. Since our earliest settlers, Kentuckians have shown the resourcefulness to make the tools that they needed.

Kentucky's legacy includes many famous names who are commonly linked to the knives they carried and depended on every day.

From the Kentucky long rifle to bluegrass music to the wildlife paintings of John James Audubon, Kentuckians are known around the world for their craftsmanship and artistic talents which are often passed on through generations.

It is in this proud tradition that we Kentucky knifemakers work at our craft of making fine knives.

Our Legacy

Daniel Boone was an American pioneer and hunter whose frontier exploits made him one of the first folk heroes of the United States. Boone is most famous for his exploration and settlement of what is now the U.S. state of Kentucky, which was then beyond the western borders of the Thirteen Colonies. Despite resistance from American Indians, for whom Kentucky was a traditional hunting ground, in 1778 Boone blazed the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap and into Kentucky. There he founded Boonesborough, one of the first English-speaking settlements beyond the Appalachian Mountains. Before the end of the 18th century, more than 200,000 people entered Kentucky by following the route marked by Boone.

Boone was a Militia officer during the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), which in Kentucky was fought primarily between settlers and British-allied American Indians. Boone was captured by Shawnees in 1778 and adopted into the tribe, but he escaped and continued to help defend the Kentucky settlements. He was elected to the first of his three terms in the Virginia General Assembly during the war, and fought in the Battle of Blue Licks in 1782, one of the last battles of the American Revolution.

The legend of Daniel Boone includes his carving "D. Boon Cilled a Bar" into trees during his long hunting expeditions.

George Rogers Clark (November 19, 1752 – February 13, 1818) was a soldier from Virginia and the highest ranking American military officer on the northwestern frontier during the American Revolutionary War. He served as leader of the Kentucky militia throughout much of the war. With the support of the young Revolutionary government, George Rogers Clark led a small but fierce army west from Virginia to conquer all the territory between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Clark is best-known for his celebrated capture of Kaskaskia (1778) and Vincennes (1779), which greatly weakened British influence in the Northwest Territory. Because the British ceded the entire Northwest Territory to the United States in the 1783 Treaty of Paris, Clark has often been hailed as the "Conqueror of the Old Northwest."

"Long Knives" was the name given by the Indians to the American Rangers who patrolled the Ohio river Valley during the Revolution and Clark himself was known among the Indians as "Long Knife".

William Clark (August 1, 1770 – September 1, 1838) was an American explorer, soldier, Indian agent, and territorial governor. A native of Virginia, he would also grow up in pre-statehood Kentucky before later settling in what later became the state of Missouri. Along with Meriwether Lewis, Clark led the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1803 to 1805 across the Louisiana Purchase to the Pacific Ocean. Before the expedition he served in a militia and the United States Army, while afterwards he served in a militia and as governor of the Missouri Territory. From 1822 until his death he held the position of Superintendent of Indian Affairs

The Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–1806) was the first overland expedition undertaken by the United States to the Pacific coast and back. The expedition team was headed by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and assisted by Sacajawea and Toussaint Charbonneau. The expedition's goal was to gain an accurate sense of the resources being exchanged in the Louisiana Purchase. The expedition laid much of the groundwork for the westward expansion of the United States.

James "Jim" Bowie (April 10, 1796 – March 6, 1836), a 19th-century American pioneer and soldier, played a prominent role in the Texas Revolution, culminating in his death at the Battle of the Alamo. Countless stories of him as a fighter and frontiersman, both real and fictitious, have made him a legendary figure in Texas history and a folk hero of American culture.

Born in Kentucky, Bowie spent most of his life in Louisiana, where he was raised and later worked as a land speculator. His rise to fame began in 1827 on reports of the Sandbar Fight. What began as a duel between two other men deteriorated into a melee in which Bowie, having been shot and stabbed, killed the sheriff of Rapides Parish with a large knife. This, and other stories of Bowie's prowess with the knife, led to the widespread popularity of the Bowie knife.

 

 

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Zachary Taylor (November 24, 1784 – July 9, 1850) was an American military leader and the 12th President of the United States.

Known as "Old Rough and Ready," Taylor had a 40-year military career in the U.S. Army, serving in the War of 1812, Black Hawk War, and Second Seminole War before achieving fame leading U.S. troops to victory at several critical battles of the Mexican–American War.

During his youth, he lived on the frontier in Louisville, Kentucky, residing in a small cabin during most of his childhood, before moving to a brick house as a result of his family's increased prosperity.

 

 

 

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And of course our most famous Kentuckian, Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865), served as the 16th President of the United States from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through its greatest internal crisis, the American Civil War, preserving the Union.

Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, to Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, two farmers, in a one-room log cabin on the 348-acre Sinking Spring Farm, in southeast Hardin County, Kentucky (now part of LaRue County), making him the first president born in the west. His ancestor Samuel Lincoln had arrived in Hingham, Massachusetts from England in the 17th century. His grandfather, also named Abraham Lincoln, had moved to Kentucky, where he owned over 5,000 acres, and was ambushed and killed by an Indian raid in 1786.

When Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1865, he was carrying two pairs of spectacles and a lens polisher,  a watch fob, a linen handkerchief, a brown leather wallet containing a five-dollar Confederate note and nine newspaper clippings, and a pocketknife.

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