Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of Silas Harlan from Harlan, Kentucky
High above the Licking River at Blue Licks Battlefield State Park a granite shaft rises over a hillside graveyard of Kentucky militiamen. Far to the southeast, on the courthouse lawn in the city of Harlan, a bronze marker tells visitors that Harlan County was “named 1819 for Major Silas Harlan.” Between those two places lies the story of a frontier officer whose short life helped shape early Kentucky and whose name was later carried into the Cumberland mountains he almost certainly never saw.
This article follows Silas Harlan through the surviving paper trail: letters, land records, military accounts, and monuments. It then traces how a county carved from Knox and Floyd in 1819 took its name from a man buried on a bluff in Robertson County.
From Virginia to Harrod’s party
Most modern reference works place Silas Harlan’s birth in 1752 or 1753 in the Virginia backcountry, near what is now the border of West Virginia. Family genealogist Alpheus Harlan’s 1914 History and Genealogy of the Harlan Family and later writers agree that Silas was part of a large Quaker descended clan that had already pushed south and west from Pennsylvania by the mid eighteenth century.
By 1774 Silas and his brother James appear in the stories of Kentucky’s earliest permanent settlements. Contemporary and near contemporary accounts place them among the young men who came west with James Harrod to establish Harrodstown, later known as Harrodsburg, often described as the first permanent white settlement in what became Kentucky.
Those first years in Kentucky unfolded against the backdrop of Dunmore’s War and the growing conflict that became the American Revolution. Frontier committees debated whether the Kentucky country would fall under a speculative Transylvania Company government or remain part of Virginia. Silas signed on with the faction that pushed for Virginia’s authority and soon turned his attention to the Salt River country southwest of Harrodsburg.
Harlan’s Station on the Salt River
The place that carried the family name in Silas’s lifetime was not a mountain town but a fortified settlement on the Salt River in what is now Boyle County. Later land studies and a National Register of Historic Places nomination for the “Harlan’s Station Site / James Harlan Stone House” pull together the documentary hints. They describe a log stockade raised about 1778 by Silas and his brother James, followed a few years later by a substantial stone house built by their cousin George on or near the same site.
The Harrodsburg based Virginia Land Commission sat in 1779 and 1780 to confirm settlement and pre emption claims in the Salt River region. The commission’s “certificate book,” transcribed in a 1923 volume of the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, preserves the wording of those decisions even though the original record book later disappeared. It shows how families like the Harlans secured legal title by proving when they had planted crops, built cabins, or otherwise “improved” their claims.
Modern researchers can follow the Salt River entries both in that printed certificate book and in the Kentucky Secretary of State’s land office databases, which index early settlement certificates, pre emption warrants, and later grants. Those tools place Harlan’s Station in a wider landscape of cabins, cornfields, and defensive forts that guarded the approaches to Harrodsburg.
Scouting for George Rogers Clark
Silas Harlan stepped from local station life into the broader war when he joined the circle of George Rogers Clark. In the late 1770s he served in Harrod’s company during hazardous trips to retrieve gunpowder, and by 1779 he was commanding men in campaigns against British allied Native towns in the Ohio Valley.
Clark’s Illinois Regiment and Western Department left behind a heavy paper trail: vouchers, pay rolls, contracts, and letters now housed in the Library of Virginia’s APA 204 series and in published volumes of the George Rogers Clark Papers, 1781 to 1784. Those documents name scouts, officers, and suppliers who kept the western campaigns moving. Harlan appears among them as an officer entrusted with frontier reconnaissance and command responsibilities.
A January 1780 will shows that Silas understood the dangers of that service. On 7 January 1780, in what was then Kentucky County, Virginia, he dictated a testament leaving his estate to his brothers Jehu or John, Elijah, and James. The will was later proved in Lincoln County Court on 22 January 1783, after news of his death reached the Salt River country. Photographs and transcriptions of the will and probate entry survive today through Lincoln County Will Book A and modern genealogical presentations.
A November 1779 letter from Harrodsburgh
One of the clearest primary glimpses of Silas Harlan comes in the form of a single letter. On 1 November 1779, writing from Harrodsburgh, he addressed George Rogers Clark about a proposed post at the “Iron Banks” on the Mississippi. The Missouri Historical Society’s finding aid describes the item succinctly: “Letter signed Silas Harland, Harrodsburgh, to George Rogers Clark. Regarding design of setting at Iron Banks, approval by commissioners and assembly.”
The Iron Banks were the high bluffs just below the mouth of the Ohio River, a natural strong point on the Mississippi. Within a few months of Harlan’s letter, Clark established Fort Jefferson there in 1780, a short lived but ambitious western post. Kentucky Historical Society markers at the Fort Jefferson site and related scholarship confirm that the post rose on those bluffs and was abandoned in 1781 after serious conflict with Chickasaw forces.
Harlan’s role in that episode is easy to overlook. The Harrodsburgh letter shows him not only as a field officer but as someone engaged with planning how Virginia and the western command would protect the farthest edge of its claimed territory.
Land warrant, survey, and a 560 acre legacy
The war also tied Harlan to Kentucky land in another way. On 29 January 1780, George Rogers Clark received a treasury land warrant from the Virginia Land Office The following year, in March 1781, Clark endorsed that warrant over to Silas Harlan. The Bullitt County History Museum reproduces images of the original warrant, Clark’s endorsement, and the later survey and grant that grew from it.
Because Harlan died in 1782, he never saw the final result. A survey dated 15 May 1789 laid off 560 acres on Cedar Creek in what was then Nelson County in his name. A grant recorded in Virginia Grant Book 11 on 21 May 1790 conveyed the tract to his brother James as “devisee of Silas Harlin,” confirming that the major’s earlier will controlled who received his estate.
This cluster of documents reveals a frontier officer whose service under Clark earned him substantial land, whose estate planning anticipated an early death, and whose family was embedded in the Salt River landscape long after he fell.
“One of the bravest soldiers”: Blue Licks, August 1782
Silas Harlan’s life ended at one of the most painful defeats in Kentucky Revolutionary history. On 19 August 1782 a force of British rangers and Native warriors ambushed about 182 Kentucky militiamen at a ford on the Licking River now known as Blue Licks. The Kentucky National Guard’s history pages describe the engagement as the last Revolutionary War battle fought in Kentucky and note that roughly sixty four Kentuckians died.
Daniel Boone’s contemporary report from Boone’s Station to the governor of Virginia outlined how the militia pursued raiders from the siege of Bryan Station, crossed the Licking in haste, and ran into the ambush. In that account Boone lists the field arrangement, with Colonel John Todd and Colonel Stephen Trigg commanding the main body, Major Hugh McGary at the center, and Major Silas Harlan leading the advance party in front.
A casualty roll reprinted by the Kentucky National Guard and allied genealogical sites places “Harlan, Silas, Major” among the officers killed while “leading the advance party.” Early narrative histories, followed by modern studies such as John M. Trowbridge’s article “We Are All Slaughtered Men” in Kentucky Ancestors, reconstruct the attack and its aftermath from pension statements, letters, and memorial speeches.
Blue Licks Battlefield State Park preserves the ground today with a granite obelisk over a mass grave of the fallen and interpretive exhibits about the battle. The Harlan Family in America association summarizes the site and notes that Silas Harlan is buried there on the south side of the Licking River. On the Harlan County courthouse lawn, many miles away, a state historical marker quotes Clark’s famous tribute that he was “one of the bravest soldiers that ever fought by my side.”
From Blue Licks to Harlan County
Nearly four decades after Harlan’s death, the Kentucky General Assembly created a new county in the southeastern mountains. Legislative acts show that on 28 January 1819 the state carved Harlan County from parts of Knox and Floyd. Place name authority Robert Rennick’s detailed pamphlet on “Harlan County – Post Offices” and his book Kentucky Place Names both note that this was Kentucky’s sixtieth county and that it was named for Major Silas Harlan.
Official state publications repeat the same attribution. The Commonwealth of Kentucky’s own county profile explains that in 1819 Harlan County was formed from Floyd and Knox and was “named for Major Silas Harlan who came from Virginia to Kentucky in 1774.” Local histories and modern interpretive pieces, including bicentennial material from the Harlan Enterprise and tourism features on Harlan County Trail websites, likewise describe the county as honoring the Revolutionary era major who fell at Blue Licks.
The Kentucky Historical Society’s “County Named, 1819” marker in front of the courthouse ties that later honor back to the Salt River frontier. It notes that Silas came to Kentucky in 1774, helped build Harlan’s Station on the Salt River, commanded spies in Clark’s Illinois campaign, and died at Blue Licks. The Harlan Family in America site reproduces the full marker wording and adds an important caveat: there is no documentary evidence that Silas ever set foot in the mountain county that bears his name.
In other words, Harlan County’s name does not come from a local settler whose cabin stood on the Cumberland or Clover Fork. It commemorates a Salt River officer remembered for his role under George Rogers Clark and his death on a central Kentucky battlefield. The tie between the name and the mountains is symbolic rather than biographical.
Family memory, a Supreme Court justice, and later biography
The story of Silas Harlan did not end with the Blue Licks monument or the 1819 county act. His name continued to circulate in family tradition and nineteenth century narratives. In 1914 Alpheus Harlan devoted a section of his large genealogy to “Silas Harlan No. 215,” including the familiar episode in which his fiancée Sarah Caldwell later married his brother James, making Silas the great uncle of future Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan.
Biographer Tinsley E. Yarbrough, in John Marshall Harlan: Great Dissenter of the Warren Court, sketched those family origins in early chapters. Harlan’s boyhood at Harlan’s Station, his father James’s political career, and the memory of great uncle Silas’s death at Blue Licks all become part of the justice’s backstory.
Closer to home, Harlan County’s own commemorations have grown thicker over time. Bicentennial proclamations, local blogs, and popular histories of “Bloody Harlan” often open with reminders that the county took its name from an eighteenth century frontier major. A short 1964 biography by James S. Green III, Major Silas Harlan: His Life and Times, remains the only stand alone book length treatment devoted solely to him, although it relies heavily on the same documents outlined here.
A name that links rivers and ridges
Standing at Blue Licks, it is easy to see why nineteenth century Kentuckians chose to honor the dead of 1782 with monuments, speeches, and eventually county names. Standing in downtown Harlan, it takes more effort to imagine how a man who helped build a Salt River station and planned a fort on the Mississippi came to lend his name to a coalfield county three days’ ride to the southeast.
The surviving records do not show Silas Harlan hunting on Martin’s Fork or scouting along the Clover. They do show him building and defending frontier communities, advising George Rogers Clark, securing land for his family, and riding into a disastrous battle that scarred Kentucky memory for generations. In 1819, when legislators and local petitioners looked for a Revolutionary era name for a new mountain county, that was enough.
Harlan County’s name, like so many Appalachian place names, is a bridge between the mountains and older stories from other valleys. In this case it links the Cumberland and Clover Forks to a young officer buried on a hill above the Licking River, remembered as “one of the bravest soldiers” in George Rogers Clark’s command and carried into the highlands by statute, marker, and tradition rather than by his own footprints.
Sources & further reading
Harland, Silas. “Letter to George Rogers Clark, 1 November 1779.” Clark Family Collection, A0289, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://mohistory.org.
Library of Virginia. George Rogers Clark Papers, 1771–1784 (Auditor of Public Accounts, Series APA 204). Collection guide, Library of Virginia, Richmond. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://www.lva.virginia.gov.
James, James Alton, ed. George Rogers Clark Papers, 1781–1784. Collections of the Illinois State Historical Library, vol. 8. Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 1926. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://archive.org/details/georgerogersclar01clar.
Kentucky Historical Society. “Certificate Book of the Virginia Land Commission, 1779–1780.” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 21 (1923). Reprint, Southern Historical Press, 1992. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://history.ky.gov/static_assets/061c8fc1-5aa2-44a5-8f8c-98552b3c0704/RegisterContents%2C1903-2025.pdf.
Bullitt County History Museum. “James Harlan’s 560 Acre Tract.” Bullitt County History Museum, Shepherdsville, KY. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://bullittcountyhistory.org/bchistory/james-harlan560.html.
Lincoln County (Ky.). Will Book A (1780–1783). Probate of the Last Will and Testament of Silas Harlan, proved January 22, 1783. Transcribed and imaged in “Will of Major Silas Harlan – Killed at Battle of Blue Licks August 19, 1782.” Kentucky Kindred Genealogy (blog). Accessed December 27, 2025. https://kentuckykindredgenealogy.com/2025/11/26/will-of-major-silas-harlan-killed-at-battle-of-blue-licks-august-19-1782/.
Wisconsin Historical Society. Draper Manuscript Collection. Series “George Rogers Clark Papers” and “Kentucky Papers.” Finding aid and digital guides. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://www.wisconsinhistory.org.
Kentucky Army National Guard. “The Battle of Blue Licks” and “In the Line of Duty – Battle of Blue Licks” (includes Daniel Boone’s August 30, 1782 report and casualty roll). Kentucky Army National Guard History. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://kynghistory.ky.gov/Our-History/History-of-the-Guard/Documents/ancestorsbluelicks.pdf.
Commonwealth of Kentucky. Acts of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, Passed at the Session Which Was Begun and Held in the City of Frankfort on Monday the Fourth Day of January, 1819. Frankfort: William Gerard, 1819. (Act creating Harlan County.) Accessed December 27, 2025. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=iau.31858018298905.
Rennick, Robert M. “Harlan County – Post Offices.” Typescript in Kentucky County Histories series. Morehead State University, 2004. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1384&context=kentucky_county_histories.
National Park Service. “Harlan’s Station Site (James Harlan Stone House).” National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form, 1976. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/bf64daf4-3fa2-4b66-b258-1cd320259e15.
National Park Service. “Historic and Architectural Resources of Boyle County, Kentucky, Multiple Property Submission.” National Register of Historic Places, 1990s. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://npgallery.nps.gov/pdfhost/docs/NRHP/Text/64500226.pdf.
Harlan Family in America Association. “Harlan Family in America.” Family association website with entries on Blue Licks Battlefield State Park and Harlan County courthouse marker. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://www.harlanfamily.org/.
Green, James S., III. Major Silas Harlan: His Life and Times. Cleveland: The Gates Legal Publishing Company, 1964. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0007FDTYC.
Harlan, Alpheus. History and Genealogy of the Harlan Family, and Particularly of the Descendants of George and Michael Harlan, Who Settled in Chester County, Pa., 1687. Baltimore: Lord Baltimore Press, 1914. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://archive.org/details/historygenealogy00harl.
Denis, Michael J., and Kelli Weaver-Miner. “Dragging Fact from Fiction: Harlan’s Station, ‘The Old Stone House’ and the Elijah Harlan House.” Kentucky Ancestors (Kentucky Historical Society), May 23, 2014. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://kentuckyancestors.org/dragging-fact-from-fiction-harlans-station-the-old-stone-house-and-the-elijah-harlan-house/.
Trowbridge, John M. “‘We Are All Slaughtered Men’: The Battle of Blue Licks.” Kentucky Ancestors 42, no. 2 (2006). PDF hosted by Kentucky Army National Guard History. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://kynghistory.ky.gov/Our-History/History-of-the-Guard/Documents/ancestorsbluelicks.pdf.
Kentucky Army National Guard. “In the Line of Duty – Battle of Blue Licks.” The Kentucky National Guard History(web feature). Accessed December 27, 2025. https://kynghistory.ky.gov.
Rennick, Robert M. Kentucky Place Names. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13x1s3p.
Yarbrough, Tinsley E. John Marshall Harlan: Great Dissenter of the Warren Court. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://archive.org/details/johnmarshallharl0000yarb.
Collins, Lewis, and Richard H. Collins. Historical Sketches of Kentucky. Revised edition. Louisville: John P. Morton, 1874–78. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://archive.org/details/historicalsketch02coll.
English, William Hayden. Conquest of the Country Northwest of the River Ohio, 1778–1783. Indianapolis: Bowen-Merrill Company, 1896. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://archive.org/details/conquestcountryn01englrich.
Ryan, Daniel J. History of Ohio: The Rise and Progress of an American State. New York: Century History Company, 1912. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://archive.org/details/historyofohio01ryan.
Rennick, Robert M. Kentucky Place Names. Updated ed. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://books.google.com/books/about/Kentucky_Place_Names.html?id=azPttlmsv24C.
“Silas Harlan.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Last modified 2025. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silas_Harlan.
“Harlan County, Kentucky.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Last modified 2025. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_County,_Kentucky.
Harlan County (official profile). Commonwealth of Kentucky. “Harlan County.” Kentucky.gov. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://kentucky.gov.
Harlan County Enterprise. “Harlan County Turns 200.” Harlan Daily Enterprise, April 1, 2019. Accessed December 27, 2025. https://harlanenterprise.net/2019/04/01/harlan-county-turns-200.
Author Note: Writing this piece on Silas Harlan let me chase the name I grew up seeing on signs and letterheads back to the actual man behind it. I hope it helps you see that our county’s name is not just a label on a map, but the last trace of a young officer whose life ended a long way from the Cumberland mountains.