Simon Kenton

Simon Kenton was born at the headwaters of Mill Run in the Bull Run Mountains on April 3, 1755, in Prince William County, Virginia to Mark Kenton, Sr. (an immigrant from Ireland) and Mary Miller Kenton (whose family was Scots-Welsh in ancestry). In 1771, at the age of 16, thinking he had killed William Leachman in a jealous rage (the fight began over the love of a girl named Ellen Cummins), Kenton fled into the wilderness of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio, where for years he went by the name "Simon Butler." After learning that his victim had lived, Kenton took back his original surname.

Previous to his first marriage, Simon's first son (Simon Ruth Kenton) was born to Christina Ruth in 1773.

In 1774, in a conflict later labeled Dunmore's War, Kenton served as a scout for the European settlers against the Shawnee Indians in what is now West Virginia and Kentucky. In 1777, he saved the life of his friend and fellow frontiersman, Daniel Boone, at Boonesborough, Kentucky.

Kenton served as scout on the 1778 George Rogers Clark expedition to capture Fort Sackville during the American Revolution. Independence did not mean an end to warfare; in 1793-94 Kenton fought in the Northwest Indian War with "Mad" Anthony Wayne.

Kenton started exploring the area of the Mad River Valley of Ohio and making claims as early as 1788. Kenton first saw the area a decade before while he was held as a prisoner with the Shawnee and vowed that if he survived he would return. In April 1799, Kenton and his associate, Colonel William Ward, led a group of families from Mason County, Kentucky to an area between present-day Springfield and Urbana, Ohio.

In 1810 Kenton moved to Urbana, Ohio, where he achieved the rank of brigadier general of the state militia. He served in the War of 1812 as both a scout and as leader of a militia group in the Battle of the Thames in 1813. This was the battle in which the Indian chief Tecumseh was killed. Kenton was chosen to identify Tecumseh's body but, recognizing both Tecumseh and another fallen warrior named Roundhead, and seeing soldiers gleefully eager to carve up Tecumseh's body into souvenirs, he identified Roundhead as the chief.

The Simon Kenton Memorial Bridge is a suspension bridge built in 1931 that crosses the Ohio River and connects Maysville, Kentucky and Aberdeen, Ohio.

A large boulder located on the west side of the Ritter Public Library in Vermilion, Ohio, discovered in 1937 on a farm a few miles to the south, is inscribed "1784 S. KENTON," and tradition has it that it was carved by Kenton himself while in Indian custody. Documentary evidence, however, shows that Kenton was not in Indian custody in 1784, was not near Vermilion in 1784 and did not learn to write until 1785.