Background
Christopher Greenup was born about 1750 probably in Loudoun County, Virginia. His parents were John and Elizabeth (Witten) Greenup. Little is known about his early life.
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Christopher Greenup was born about 1750 probably in Loudoun County, Virginia. His parents were John and Elizabeth (Witten) Greenup. Little is known about his early life.
His early education was attained at the local schools of the area. He learned surveying and studied law under Colonel Charles Binns at Charles City County, Virginia.
He took part in the Revolution and rose in rank to a cap- taincy. Near the end of the conflict he emigrated to the Kentucky district of Virginia and settled at Frankfort, though he identified himself with Lexington to the extent of buying a town lot there in 1783.
He secured a license to practise law in the same year, but he is best known for his political activities, for throughout the next quarter of a century he was almost continuously serving in some political capacity. In 1785 he was appointed clerk of the Virginia court for the district of Kentucky and continued in that position until Kentucky became a state. In this same year he was also elected to represent Fayette County in the Virginia legislature. The problem uppermost for the next seven years in the political life of Kentucky was the effort to secure statehood. Greenup took part in the initial step in that direction, the militia convention held in Danville in November 1784, and served as clerk of the body.
He was also a member of the convention held in 1785 and of the one in November 1788 when the Spanish conspiracy was brewing. In the last he was able to steer a course so circumspect that the promoters of the Western World years later (1806) were unable to implicate him as a possible conspirator. With the coming of statehood in 1792 Greenup was first rewarded by being chosen an elector to select the state senators, and then he became one of Kentucky’s first two members of the United States House of Representatives.
He took his seat at the second session of the Second Congress on November 9, four days late. He was reelected to the Third and Fourth Congresses, serving until March 4, 1797, when he returned to Frankfort and served for a time as clerk of the Kentucky Senate.
In 1804 he was elected governor for the regular term of four years and during his tenure of office assumed an intelligent and progressive attitude on the questions of the day. He rounded out his political career by serving as a Madison elector in 1809 and becoming a justice of the peace in 1812.
When the Bank of Kentucky was chartered in 1807, he became one of its directors.
He died at Blue Lick Springs in his sixty-ninth year.
He was a member of the Danville Political Club; in 1787 he joined the Kentucky Society for Promoting Useful Knowledge; in 1789 he helped to organize the Kentucky Manufacturing Society; in 1801 he was appointed a member of the Kentucky River Company, a body organized to improve the Kentucky River; and in 1811 he helped to conduct a lottery to build a church in Frankfort.
He had married, in 1787, Mary Catherine Pope, the daughter of Nathaniel Pope of Virginia.