The morning was fine, the road good, and the country well settled and improved, but the want of the company of my worthy friend A, to which I had now been so long accustomed, was felt by me so sensibly as to make the miles appear uncommonly long.
At four miles I passed a celebrated old military post, called Bryan's station, where the first settlers of the state, repelled a desperate attack of the Indians, who soon after in their turn, ambushed and cut off Col. Todd's little army at the Blue licks, as before mentioned. This post is now the pleasant seat and fine farm of a Mr. Rogers.[133]
I soon after overtook an Irishman named Gray, who was one of the first settlers. He rode two miles with me, and was intelligent and communicative. He informed me that the usual produce of an acre of this wonderfully luxuriant soil, is from forty to fifty bushels of shelled corn, or from twenty to thirty-seven of wheat clean from the threshing floor. And here I must observe, that I have not seen, nor heard of any of the threshing machines now so common in the British European Isles, in any part of America. As they save so much labour, I am astonished that {176} they have not yet made their way across the Atlantick.—They would be of incalculable utility to the very wealthy farmers of Kentucky.
Crossing the North fork of Elkhorn, and Hewetson's branch of Licking, both good mill streams, I entered Paris, eighteen miles from Lexington. It is situated on Stoner's fork of Licking, and contains eighty-seven dwelling houses mostly good ones, several of them of brick, and six or seven building.
It is compact, in three small parallel streets, with a square in the centre, on which is a stone meeting house, a neat
