Bryan Station

Frontier settlement in Kentucky

Bryan Station (also Bryan's Station, and often misspelled Bryant's Station) was an early fortified settlement in Lexington, Kentucky. It was located on present day Bryan Station Road, about three miles (5 km) northeast of New Circle Road, on the southern bank of Elkhorn Creek near Briar Hill Road. The settlement was established in the spring of 1776 by brothers Morgan, James, William (married to Mary Boone, sister of Daniel Boone), and Joseph Bryan, and brother in law William Grant (married to Elizabeth Boone, also a sister of Daniel Boone), all from Yadkin River Valley, Rowan County, North Carolina. After a disastrous winter and attacks by Native Americans, all the Bryan family survivors abandoned the station and returned to the Yadkin River Valley in August 1780. Falling under the command of Elijah Craig, the remaining occupants withstood several American Indian attacks.

Captain William Bryan (b. 1733) along with his brothers and a settler party from Rowan County, North Carolina, entered this frontier land in the spring of 1776 and began pitching the station. The site was located on high ground near the southern bank of Elkhorn creek. On this initial expedition, the party built a few cabins, planted sixty acres of farmland, and cleared many acres of the surrounding forest, which boasted a variety of blue ash, black walnut, honey locust, and sycamore trees. A spring flowed and meandered nearby, which served as the water supply for the station and would be center place for much of the literature and history involving this fort. The parallelogram was distinctively elongated, with its width considerably shorter than its length, a design choice tailored to its inhabitants' desire to have a handsome amount of space in between the roughly forty or so cabins that would eventually be constructed.

The most important attack on the settlement occurred in August 1782 during the American Revolutionary War, when they were besieged by a force consisting of warriors from the Wyandot, Lenape and Shawnee tribes, along with a detachment of Butler's Rangers led by Captain William Caldwell and Simon Girty. In Col. Daniel Boone's estimation, the force numbered 400–500 strong. Bryan Station was located a short distance from a spring that the camp used for drinking water. There were no Bryans' living in the garrison at the time of the siege. The Indians had no compunction attacking women, as they had done at nearby Ruddell's and Martin's Stations where even children were slaughtered two years earlier, and so the bravery of the women of Bryan Station is all the greater. At the time of the siege, the militia did not realize just how many Indians were waiting for them outside of the fort or that these Indians had some support from the British. This attack was a surprise, and the militia in the fort were thus unprepared. The attackers lifted the siege after Indian scouts reported that a force of Kentucky militia was on the way. The militiamen pursued Caldwell's force but were defeated three days later at the Battle of Blue Licks, about 33 miles (53 km) northeast.

The Lexington chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution erected a monument in August 1896 to commemorate the importance of a nearby spring in helping preserve the fort from the attack by Indians and Canadians. The pioneer women, led by Mary "Polly" Hawkins Craig (wife of "The Travelling Church" patriarch Toliver Craig, Sr.), fetched water from the spring to not only prevent dangerously weakening dehydration in the unusually hot summer, but also to defend against the use of burning arrows by the attackers. If the defenders had succumbed to heat exhaustion or the fort had burned, the attackers could have reached the women and children sheltering there. A flaming arrow stuck in the cradle near the head of the infant who later became Col. Richard Mentor Johnson. Johnson would later be credited in all the earliest accounts of the War of 1812's Battle of the Thames with the slaying of Tecumseh, using a pistol loaded by his orderly Capt. Elijah Craig, who had also been present as an 18 year old defender during the siege of Bryan Station. Located a couple of miles south of the fort's site, Bryan Station High School was named in its honor. The athletic teams compete under the name "Defenders."