Background
James Harrod was born in 1742 at Big Cove in what is now Bedford County, Pennsylvania, United States. His father came from England about 1734 and first settled in the Shenandoah Valley but soon moved on to Pennsylvania.
James Harrod was born in 1742 at Big Cove in what is now Bedford County, Pennsylvania, United States. His father came from England about 1734 and first settled in the Shenandoah Valley but soon moved on to Pennsylvania.
James Harrod was a typical product of the unsettled frontier, skilful as a marksman, reveling in the great solitudes of the forest, and almost uncanny in his knowledge of woodcraft. He first saw military service in the French and Indian War as a private in General Forbes’s forces. In 1773 he accompanied a party down the Ohio River in large canoes as far as the Falls, where Louisville now stands, and the next year he returned to the Kentucky region with thirty men. He went up the Kentucky River and began making surveys and building cabins at a place which came to be called Harrodsburg. In the midst of this work he and his men were warned out by Boone on account of an Indian uprising which developed into Lord Dunmore’s War. Harrod hurried away, going through the Holston River country, and arrived at Point Pleasant in time to take part in the battle there. Harrod soon afterward returned to Harrodsburg, completed the cabins - all before Richard Henderson and his Transylvania Company had arrived.
Though Harrod represented his stockaded settlement in Henderson’s assembly, soon he and his followers were arrayed in opposition to the grandiloquent Transylvania scheme and he was among the signers of the petition sent late in 1775 to the Virginia legislature praying for the suppression of Henderson.
Harrod took an active part in the war in the West against the Indians. In 1777 he led a party to the Ohio River to carry back a consignment of powder sent out by Virginia; in 1779 he commanded a company in Bowman’s expedition against Chillicothe; and in 1782 he took part in George Rogers Clark’s invasion of the Shawnee country up the Miami River. A few years later he disappeared from his home under mysterious circumstances and never returned. The most probable explanation is that he was lured away by an enemy in search of the fabled Swift’s silver mine and was murdered.
Harrod had no political ambitions, yet he was elected to the Virginia legislature in 1779 and in 1784 was sent as a militia representative to the Danville convention.
Harrod was married to Ann Coburn McDonald. They had one daughter.