The cemetery of Frankfort, Kentucky is a lovely creepy old place to visit on a rainy afternoon.  It’s lush and green, full of both old and new gravestones, and set high on a hill overlooking the Kentucky River and the Capitol Building.  (Did you know that Frankfort is the capitol of Kentucky?)

My main reason for coming here while I was in the area was to visit the grave of Daniel Boone.  He was an iconic American pioneer and woodsman, most famous for his exploration of what is now Kentucky.  Boone blazed the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachian Mountains from North Carolina and Tennessee into Kentucky in 1775.  He was a militia officer during the Revolutionary War, and was captured by Shawnee warriors in 1778, but later escaped.  He was also elected to the Kentucky general assembly several times, and worked as a surveyor and merchant.

This is the monument on the grave in Frankfort, Kentucky.

Interestingly, it was only by reading Wikipedia after the fact that I discovered that I might not have visited Daniel Boone’s actual resting place!  This is the story given by Wiki:

“Daniel Boone died of natural causes, other sources, from acute indigestion on September 26, 1820, at Nathan Boone’s home on Femme Osage Creek, 2-1/2 months short of his 86th birthday. His last words were, “I’m going now. My time has come.” He was buried next to Rebecca, who had died on March 18, 1813. The graves, which were unmarked until the mid-1830s, were near Jemima (Boone) Callaway’s home on Tuque Creek, about two miles (3 km) from the present-day Marthasville, Missouri. In 1845, the Boones’ remains were supposedly disinterred and reburied in a new cemetery Frankfort Cemetery in Frankfort, Kentucky. Resentment in Missouri about the disinterment grew over the years, and a legend arose that Boone’s remains never left Missouri. According to this story, Boone’s tombstone in Missouri had been inadvertently placed over the wrong grave, but no one had ever corrected the error. Boone’s relatives in Missouri, displeased with the Kentuckians who came to exhume Boone, kept quiet about the mistake, and they allowed the Kentuckians to dig up the wrong remains. No contemporary evidence indicates this actually happened, but in 1983, a forensic anthropologist examined a crude plaster cast of Boone’s skull made before the Kentucky reburial and announced it might be the skull of an African American. Black slaves had also been buried at Tuque Creek, so it is possible the wrong remains were mistakenly removed from the crowded graveyard. Both the Frankfort Cemetery in Kentucky and the Old Bryan Farm graveyard in Missouri claim to have Boone’s remains.^“

So this sign by the grave may, or may not, be correct.  Certainly there was no indication at the cemetery that there was any doubt in the matter!  But without a doubt he’s still a revered figure in the area.

I took the two pictures below because I thought at the time that it was nice that he and his wife Rebecca had a friend and also descendants buried nearby.  His friend Elison Williamson in particular was buried just five years after Boone was supposedly reinterred there, so undoubtedly believed that it was really him.

I suppose we may never know the truth, as probably neither state is in a hurry to have the question resolved, and risk losing their claim of being Daniel Boone’s resting place.  But no matter who is actually in buried in Frankfort Cemetery, whether Boone, an unknown African slave, or someone else entirely, they certainly have a beautiful view…