The story of early Kentucky reads like a romance. By 1820 it counted a population of over 510,000, and still it had scarcely wagon-road communication with the East. Here was a singular phenomenon, a prosperous community, as one might say a garden in the wilderness, separated by natural barriers from the great life of the East, which pushed out north of it a connected, continuous development; a community almost self-sustaining, having for his centre the loveliest agricultural region in the Union, and evolving a unique social state so gracious and attractive that it was thought necessary to call in the effect of the blue-grass to explain it, unaided human nature being inadequate, it was thought, to such a result. Almost from the beginning fine houses attested the taste and prosperity of the settlers; by 1792 the blue-grass region was dotted with neat and commodious dwellings, fruit orchards and gardens, sugar groves, and clusters of villages; while, a little later, rose, in the midst of broad plantations and park-like forests, lands luxuriant with wheat and clover and corn and hemp and tobacco, the manorial dwellings of the colonial period, like the stately homes planted by the Holland Land Company along the Hudson and the Mohawk and in the fair Genesee, like the pillared structures on the James and the Staunton, and like the solid square mansions of old New England. A type of some of them stands in Frankfort now, a house which was planned by Thomas Jefferson and built in 1796, spacious, permanent, elegant in the low relief of its chaste ornamentation. For comfort, for the purposes of hospitality, for the quiet and rest of the mind, there is still nothing so good as the colonial house, with the slight modifications required by our changed conditions. From 1820 onward the State grew by a natural increment of population, but without much aid from native or foreign emigration. In 1860 its population was only about 919,000 whites, with some 225,000 slaves and over 10,000 free colored persons. It had no city of the first class, nor any villages specially thriving. Louisville numbered only about 68,000, Lexington less than 15,000, and Frankfort, the capital, a little over 5000. It retained the lead in hemp and a leading position in tobacco; but it had fallen away behind its much younger rivals in manufactures and the building of railways, and only feeble efforts had been made in the development of its extraordinary mineral resources.