Team to seek signs of Blue Licks battle Byron Crawford
The place where Daniel Boone's son, Israel, and 77 other Kentucky frontiersmen were killed by British and Indians during the Battle of Blue Licks is about to be visited by historians and archaeologists with highly sensitive metal-detection devices.
"We have a good shot at finding something if anything is still there," said Morehead State University history professor Adrian Mandzy, an expert in European battlefield archaeology. "More than likely we'll be able to find a number of musket balls … generally there may be metal buttons; gun parts periodically will appear in these kinds of surveys, and with Native Americans, possibly any kind of metal bead fragments."
Blue Licks State Park naturalist Paul Tierney said, "You were losing Kentucky's political and military leaders at that time, people who were responsible for occupying and populating Kentucky.
"The majority of those people were gone in 15 to 20 minutes in this battle," he added.
The bodies of some of the Kentuckians who died in fighting after an ambush are buried in a common grave under a simple stone marker on the park grounds.
No archaeological site preparation was done on the battlefield area before development of the area as a health spa during the 19th century, or later when it became a park, so few -- if any -- artifacts from the battle are known to exist.
The park has one musket ball which is said to have been found on the grounds many yeas ago, but no one knows where.
During the 1990s, the National Park Service American Battlefield Protection Program determined that all the bulldozing and building that had occurred at Blue Licks over the years had destroyed so much of the site's integrity that it no longer qualified for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.
Discovery of tangible evidence of the battle could restore eligibility to the National Register for part of the battlefield and would aid in the protection of territories where artifacts from the battle may remain.
History students from Morehead State will join Mandzy, Tierney and members of BRAVO (Battlefield Recovery and Archeology Volunteer Organization) of New Jersey in searching areas where much of the fighting is believed to have occurred.
"Most of what we're going on are people's remembrances long after the event," said John Patrick Downs, program coordinator for the Kentucky Department of Parks. "It was a long time before Americans considered spots like that sacred ground … and back in 1782, they were spending a lot of time fighting for their lives, because that was still literally frontier."
The archaeological survey of the battlefield could begin by late March or early April.
Byron Crawford's column appears on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at (502) 582-4791 or
bcrawford@courier-journal.com. Comment on this column, and read previous columns, at
www.courier-journal.com/byronhttp://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080217/COLUMNISTS04/802170456/1008/NEWS01#storychat