Editor’s note: This column, which first ran in The Sunday Brew newsletter, comes from remarks Hoptown Chronicle editor Jennifer P. Brown prepared for a talk about famous people from Hopkinsville and Christian County. The talk was given Thursday at the Alhambra Theatre for the Leadership West Kentucky class, which had 28 of its members in town for a day of presentations organized by Christian County Chamber of Commerce President Taylor Hayes.
If we are going to talk about notable people from Hopkinsville and Christian County, I want to start with a woman named Elizabeth, daughter of this town’s first settler, Bartholomew Wood, who staked a claim for a Revolutionary War land grant of 1,200 acres in the 1790s.
Bartholomew Wood intended to have this town named for Elizabeth — one of 11 children born to Bartholomew and Martha Wood. And so for a brief time around the turn of the 19th century, this place was known unofficially, at least in the Wood family, as the town of Elizabeth.
But there was a problem, as you might have guessed. Another fledging town in Kentucky — at Hardin County east of us — had already been named Elizabethtown.