Fort Boonesborough and the Transylvania Colony

Last spring (2025) was not only the 250th anniversary of the beginning of the American Revolution, but it was also the 250th anniversary of the founding of Fort Boonesborough and the colony of Transylvania in Kentucky. 

Richard Henderson, who had worked as a lawyer and judge, came up with a plan to begin the 14th colony in what is now Kentucky. The Iroquois had ceded their claims to the land south of the Ohio River to the British in the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, and the Shawnee had ceded their claims to that land after Lord Dunmore’s War in the 1774 Treaty of Camp Charlotte. And so on March 17, 1775, at Sycamore Shoals (present day Tennessee), Henderson and his Transylvania Company concluded treaty negotiations with the Cherokee and purchased the land from them. At the same time, Daniel Boone, working with Henderson, led a party to blaze the wilderness trail through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky. Henderson caught up with Boone along the Kentucky River around April 20th. The settlers began surveying and allotting the land. On April 29th, construction began on Fort Boonesborough.

On May 8th, in response to some disputes with and among other parties of settlers, a plan for government was proposed that was agreeable to the several groups. On May 23rd, eighteen delegates from four settlements assembled at Boonesborough to form the House of Delegates. On May 24-27, the first legislative assembly of the colony was held under a very large elm tree.

The assembly adopted a committee’s recommendation to name the colony Transylvania (which means “beyond the forest”). Daniel Boone served as a delegate and proposed bills for “Preserving Game &c” and “Improving the breed of Horses.” His brother, Squire Boone, proposed a bill to “Preserve the Range.” Rev. John Lythe had opened the meeting in prayer. He was a minister of the Church of England, possibly the one who had baptized Daniel Boone and his family a few years earlier. He also served as a delegate and proposed a bill “to Prevent Profane Swearing and Sabbath Breaking.” These and other laws (a total of nine) were passed on the third reading by that assembly. A functioning government was established with courts, laws, and militia. The assembly also produced a compact between the proprietors (members of the company) and the people (who were represented by their delegates). You can read the minutes of the assembly here. 

On the following day, Sunday, May 28th, divine service was led by Rev. Lythe before the delegates returned home. On the next day, May 29th, a letter arrived at Boonesborough with an “account of the battle of Boston” (i.e. the battles of Lexington and Concord). 

While Henderson thought the legality of this colony would stand, it was disputed by the governors of North Carolina and Virginia, both of which claimed the lands west of them. Transylvania sought recognition by the Continental Congress, but it did not receive that recognition and was soon incorporated into Virginia.

The Baptism and Faith of Daniel Boone

Daniel Boone’s religious beliefs have been an object of interest to most Boone biographers, but there is one important event that has been generally overlooked - his baptism.

Daniel Boone had been raised as a Quaker until his mid-teens when his family left Pennsylvania. Many of his family members became Baptist, but he remained unbaptized while in North Carolina. His wife Rebecca also came from a family that originally was Quaker, although the grandparents who helped to raise her hosted Presbyterian services at their home in Virginia.

In 1772, Daniel Boone and his family took a significant step in their relationship with God. Even though as an old man he later said, “I always loved God ever since I could recollect,”[1] it was at this point that he decided to be baptized. That year, Daniel Boone and his family were living on the Watauga River (in what is now eastern Tennessee), living near James Robertson,[2] later known as the "Father of Tennessee." Robertson's children later wrote to historian Lyman Draper that "a traveling Episcopalian clergyman" baptized Daniel Boone, his wife Rebecca, and their seven children, and three of the Robertson children at the Robertson's house.[3]

Since the Quakers did not practice baptism, this was an important link in the shift Daniel and his family underwent from his Quaker upbringing to mainstream Protestantism. It is also an indication of their Christian faith that they would desire baptism for themselves and their children. 

We have some of Daniel Boone's own words about his faith in a letter he wrote late in life to Sarah Boone, his sister-in-law. He said, "all the Relegan I have to love and fear God beleve in Jeses Christ, Do all the good to my Nighbour and my self that I Can and Do as Little harm as I Can help and trust on God's marcy for the rest and I Beleve God neve made a man of my prisepel to be Lost" (October 19, 1816).[4]

The account of the baptism of Daniel Boone and his family fits with what Daniel's youngest son, Nathan Boone, said about his father.

In his latter years my father was a great student of the Bible. He was seldom seen reading any other book and fully believed in the great truths of Christianity. He seemed most partial towards the Presbyterians, although he disliked the unkind differences too frequently manifested by different Christian sects. He had all his children, when he could, regularly christened. His worship was in secret, and he placed his hopes in the Savior. Whenever preaching was in his neighborhood, he made it a point to attend and well remembered what he heard and read.[5] 

Three more children were born to Daniel and Rebecca after 1772, so the reference to having their children "regularly christened" (that is, baptized after they were born) makes sense. Nathan, born in 1781, was probably thinking especially of his own baptism. 

Robert Morgan, in his biography of Boone, briefly mentions this account of Daniel Boone's baptism, but dismisses it as "almost certainly untrue."[6] Yet his piece of evidence against it is that Anglicans were not called Episcopalians until after the American Revolution, which is not a convincing argument. The letters to Draper that call the minister an Episcopalian were written in 1854 and 1855, and it would have been natural for Robertson's children to call the denomination by its current name. The event is not something of which they were unsure. They wrote that "such events are rarely forgotten" and that one of them had "heard her mother relate it so frequently that she has no doubt of it."[7]

In fact, there is a likely candidate for the identity of this traveling minister: Rev. John Lythe. Even Draper, in his short bio of Rev. Lythe in The Life of Daniel Boone, refers to him anachronistically as "of the Episcopal Church."[8] He was a traveling Anglican minister from Virginia. He spent a year in South Carolina in 1767 and he shows up in Harrodsburg, KY in 1775 as the first clergyman in Kentucky.[9] He was a delegate to the first legislative assembly held in Kentucky at Fort Boonesborough in 1775 and served as its chaplain. He proposed a bill "to prevent profane swearing and Sabbath-breaking" and the next day held the first Christian worship service in what would become Kentucky.

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[1] Account from Rev. James Welch, quoted in John Bakeless, Daniel Boone, 368.

[2]  My Father, Daniel Boone: The Draper Interviews with Nathan Boone, ed. Neal O. Hammon, 38. Lyman Draper, The Life of Daniel Boone, 284, 295. John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone, 88.
[3] Letters from Felix Robertson (James Robertson's son) to Lyman Draper, quoted in William Curry Harlee, Kinfolks: A Genealogical and Biographical Record, 3 vols. New Orleans: Searcy & Pfaff, 1935-1937, 3:2500, 2513.
[4] Quoted in Ella Atterbury Spraker, The Boone Family, 578.
[5] My Father, Daniel Boone: The Draper Interviews with Nathan Boone, ed. Neal O. Hammon, 139.
[6] Robert Morgan, Boone: A Biography, 431.
[7] Letters from Felix Robertson (James Robertson's son) to Lyman Draper, quoted in William Curry Harlee, Kinfolks: A Genealogical and Biographical Record, 3 vols. New Orleans: Searcy & Pfaff, 1935-1937, 3:2500, 2513.
[8] Lyman Draper, The Life of Daniel Boone, 569.
[9] The Churchman's Year Book, with Kalender for the Year of Grace 1870, compiled by William Stevens Perry, 264-265. Lyman Draper, The Life of Daniel Boone, 569.