The following excerpt is from an article published in the September 12, 2011 edition of TheGleaner.com of Henderson, Kentucky.
Gen. Samuel Hopkins would be doubly pleased this week.
Friday morning the community plans to dedicate the cemetery where he is buried, which had grown up in trees and weeds, but is now practically sparkling new. But recently local surveyor Dennis Branson donated to the state archives a map that is the product of Hopkins’ hands. It’s more than two centuries old and shows how the lands of the Transylvania Co. were divided by lottery among the firm’s individual members and their heirs.
The plat covers 200,000 acres, all of the [Henderson] county that lies north of a line drawn between Rangers Landing and the county’s far western tip. All land titles in that area have their source in that map.
That makes the plat’s value “very significant” for researching title sources, Branson said. “There’s no way to know what tract numbers are where without that map.”
But the map’s historical value is probably greater. When Trace Kirkwood, regional administrator for the local records branch of the state Department of Libraries and Archives, first learned of Branson’s wish to donate it, “I knew he had something special” that “got my juices flowing” because the state archives doesn’t often get donations that date from the late 1790s. “I knew right away he had something that was going to be interesting.
“We’re very pleased to get something like this that Mr. Branson donated to us” despite the fact that “it’s in pretty bad shape. It’s suffered some water damage and it’s pretty difficult to pick anything out on the map.”
Branson had owned the map for decades. His father “salvaged that out of a bunch of maps the city was throwing away.” That probably took place when the city was moving out of the old city hall in 1971, prior to construction of the Henderson Municipal Center.
Click here for a brief history of Henderson City, and County, Kentucky.
