Daniel Boone's Grave Historical Marker

While visiting Frankfort Cemetery, see the headstone of a man, myth, and legend of KY. Every American schoolchild knows the name of Daniel Boone. Not for me then to give you the story of his life: how this Pennsylvanian spent most of his life exploring the new West and blazing trails into it from the old colonies, including the Cumberland Gap which for many years would be the gate to American continental expansion, pushing ever westward. (The details of his story are beautifully and accurately told by Constance Skinner in Pioneers of the Old Southwest, chapters 5 and 11.) True to himself then, late in life — finding his new home state "crowded", with fewer than two hundred thousand people spread over more than a hundred thousand square kilometers! — he emigrated to Missouri, to die there in 1820 at the age of 85; and so was buried there, on his new farm near Marthasville. Yet Dan Boone had become identified with Kentucky. Much of his life had been spent there, exploring, fighting Indians during the Revolutionary War, surveying, farming, and publicizing it in one of the most successful pieces of literary boosterism in American history. It was only natural that he should be buried here, in the state capital of Kentucky; and so his remains were brought to Frankfort in 1845, along with those of his wife Rebecca who had died in 1813.