Orange County, Virginia, was formed by Colonial act in 1734; and its boundary was: “to the uttermost limits of Virginia.” The limits of Virginia were; “westward to the Mississippi and so much further as the Colony had a mind to claim.” From Orange County, Augusta County was formed in 1738, extending beyond the Alleghanies to the “uttermost limits of Virginia.” Botetourt was carved from Augusta in 1769 and Fincastle from Botetourt in 1772. Kentucky County was carved by a partition of Fincastle in 1776, under one of the earliest acts of the new Commonwealth of Virginia; and Kentucky County, known as the District of Kentucky, was, in 1780, subdivided into Lincoln, Fayette and Jefferson Counties. These three counties were resubdivided in the making of the additional counties of Nelson, Bourbon, Mercer, Madison, Mason and Woodford; and these nine counties of Virginia, on June 1, 1792, became the State of Kentucky. The days following the Revolution found the people of Virginia restless, poor and out of touch with the ordinary occupations of pre-war days. Their market for tobacco, the product which had sustained the aristocrat in lavish prodigality and supported the colony, was lost and the plantations were mazes of briars and underbrush. As was the intention of the statute, the abolition of entails by the legislature of the new Commonwealth of Virginia, first diluted, then dissipated the power of the aristocracy. The family estate, the plantation of thousands of acres, which had been kept intact in the family for generations, was subdivided and resubdivided between the proprietor’s heirs and creditors and their vendors, until the old-style, feudal-lord-like life was impossible. These still land-hungry “First Families,” looked to the District of Kentucky, where land, more fertile than Tidewater Virginia, was almost free for the taking—to re-establish themselves as proprietors of vast landed estates, as their fathers had been; thus to revive the prestige and influence of the old family name; and many such emigrated to Kentucky. A great many plain farmers, impoverished by the war and seeing no hope for improved fortune at the old home, hazarded a try for better fortune in the new country. A yet more numerous and important element was the discharged veterans of the Continental Army; they had desired a more adventurous life than was to be found in clearing their old fields to start afresh the life of a poor farmer; and they came to Kentucky. These three classes of emigrants, and a conservative estimate places their number at exceeding ten thousand a year for the decade succeeding the Revolution, were of pure English stock, democratic, courteous, hardy, self-willed and trained to defend their rights—created the Kentucky Spirit.