The Transylvania Co., also known as
Richard Henderson & Co., in 1775 purchased from the Cherokees a large swath of wilderness between the
Kentucky River and
Cumberland River, encompassing approximately half of what would become
Kentucky as well as a portion of northern
Tennessee. Their intention was to establish a 14th colony to be called
Transylvania Colony. To help attract people to purchase land and populate the region, Henderson & Co. hired pioneer, explorer, woodsman, and frontiersman
Daniel Boone to lead settlers through
Cumberland Gap and direct woodsmen to cut the
Wilderness Road through the Kentucky forest. However, the
Continental Congress declined to act on Transylvania Co.'s petition without the consent of
Virginia and
North Carolina, which laid claim to the disputed lands. In December 1778, Virginia's Assembly declared the Transylvania claim void. In compensation, Henderson and his partners received a grant of 200,000 acres on the Ohio River below the mouth of
Green River. In 1797, the surviving Transylvania Company investors and heirs sent
Samuel Hopkins and
Thomas Allin to the Henderson Grant land to lay out a town and mark off land for the respective investors. The location they selected for the town was the site of an existing settlement that sat high above the Ohio River called Red Banks. The new town was subsequently named
Henderson. Henderson County was created out of
Christian County in December 1798, and was officially established in May 1799. Henderson was designed as its county seat. The county initially encompassed a larger area than it does today. It was reduced in size when
Hopkins County was formed in 1806, when
Union County was established in 1811, and when
Webster County was established in 1860. In August 1799,
serial killers
Micajah and Wiley Harpe came to the house of Moses Stegall, near what is now
Dixon in Webster County, and murdered his wife, child, and a visitor. Moses Stegall later tracked down the brothers, and killed Micajah Harpe, cutting off his head and hanging it in a tree as a warning to other outlaws. Wiley Harpe was captured and hanged four years later in Mississippi. During the 19th century, a cultivar of dark tobacco raised in Henderson County became very popular in Great Britain and continental Europe. Henderson became the largest dark-tobacco market in the world, generating considerable wealth in Henderson County. Around 1880, Henderson had 17 stemmeries in the city and 18 in the county. Stemmeries were where tobacco was stripped from its stem and made ready for use. However, tobacco production in Henderson County declined through the 20th century and early 21st century, with few farmers still raising the labor-intensive crop. A bend on the Ohio upstream from Henderson, is entirely within a strip of Henderson County that shares land borders with
Knight and
Pigeon Townships of
Vanderburgh County, Indiana. This strip, known as "Green River Island", was the subject of ''
Handly's Lessee v. Anthony'', a
U.S. Supreme Court case in 1820. This roughly of area is part of Kentucky, even though it is on the Indiana side of the Ohio River. The
Ellis Park Race Course is located there. This was caused by the Ohio River shifting south due to the effects of the
1812 New Madrid Earthquake. The boundary had been established when Kentucky became a state in 1790.
A workplace shooting occurred at an
Atlantis Plastics factory in
Henderson,
Kentucky, United States on June 25, 2008. The gunman, 25-year-old Wesley Neal Higdon, shot and killed five people and critically injured a sixth, before taking his own life. The mass murder is the worst in the history of Henderson County, surpassing the triple homicides that took place in 1799 and 1955. ==Geography==