Washington, Kentucky

Washington is a neighborhood of the city of Maysville located near the Ohio River in Mason County in the U.S. state of Kentucky. It is one of the earliest settlements in Kentucky and also one of the earliest American settlements west of the Appalachian Mountains. It played a significant role in the lead-up to the Civil War, producing two civil war generals (one Union and one Confederate) and an escaped slave whose legal case established Canada as a safe haven for escaping slaves. It also provided the site where Harriet Beecher Stowe witnessed a slave auction. It has since been annexed by Maysville, and is sometimes now referred to as Old Washington. The community is in Area 606 served by the 759 exchange.

Washington was founded in 1786 by Arthur Fox, a Revolutionary War soldier from Virginia, and William Wood, a Baptist preacher, also from Virginia. The first trustees included Daniel Boone. The land on which it was laid out was purchased by Fox and Wood from Simon Kenton, the original explorer and settler of the area who at that time lived close by. The town was founded as Washington, Virginia since in 1786 Kentucky did not yet exist as a separate state. It is believed that Washington is the first settlement named for George Washington.

Many of the original settlers were revolutionary war veterans and 17 such veterans are known to be buried in Washington. The 1790 Census listed 462 residents, including 21 slaves and was the second largest town in the future state of Kentucky. Only Lexington was larger. One of the early settlers was Captain Thomas Marshall, a revolutionary war soldier and brother of John Marshall, who later became Chief Justice. Captain Marshall's father and mother later joined him in Washington and they all lived and eventually died at the Marshall Home, which is still standing on Green Street.

The first post office in the region was established in Washington in 1789. This post office initially served the whole Northwest Territory including Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. The third postmaster was William Murphy, who built a large house which is still standing (the Murphy-Lashbrooke-Wood-Moose House) on Old Main Street. The original post office was in the front yard but was torn down in 1948.

Thornton Blackburn was a slave of William Murphy and lived in his house between 1815 and 1824. He later moved to Hardinsburg, Kentucky and then Louisville, from which he escaped with his wife to Detroit. In Detroit, he was arrested as a fugitive slave but after a riot he and his wife escaped to Canada, across the Detroit River. While Canada did not accept slavery, it did return criminals to the US. His owners tried to get him back from Canada by arguing in a Canadian court that he was a criminal for having escaped and participated in the Detroit Riot. However, they lost this case which also established the precedent that it would be very difficult to show that escaped slaves charged as criminals in the US had done sufficiently serious crimes for them to be returned to the US as slaves. Thus Thornton's case confirmed that escaped slaves were free and safe once they got to Canada and that it was a safe terminus for the underground railroad. Also this was the first piece of refugee law ever established on Canadian soil and is foundational to Canadian extradition law today. After confirming his freedom in Canada, Thornton moved to Toronto, where he set up the first horse-drawn taxi service and was moderately affluent. Even today the Toronto City Public Transport uses the colors, yellow and red, that Thornton established for his taxi service.

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