Background

Very little is known of him before he appeared in Kentucky in 1783. The date of his birth is unknown, although the year 1747 seems the most probable conjecture (R. T. Durrett, post). He was born on a farm in the township of East Fallowfield in southeastern Pennsylvania. His father was Davison Filson, and his grandfather John Filson, an emigrant from England (Jillson, post, p. 139).

Education

Nothing is known of his early life in Pennsylvania beyond the fact that he was taught by the Rev. Samuel Finley, later president of the College of New Jersey.

Career

No record of Revolutionary service has been found, but his coming to Kentucky was apparently for the purpose of taking up land on certain Virginia military warrants which had come into his possession. He seems to have spent his first year in Kentucky teaching a private school in Lexington (G. W. Ranck, History of Lexington, Kentucky, 1872, p. 96).

It is evident from his writings that he was much better educated than most Kentuckians of the time. He secured several thousand acres of land in Kentucky, and as a sequel to this achievement wrote his Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucke (1784, 16t ed. ), with the purpose, as it appears from internal evidence, of attracting immigrants and thereby increasing the value of land.

The descriptive portions of this famous book are vivid and attractive; the historical setting is inadequate, misleading, and often quite inaccurate. An appendix to the book contains "The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon. " The "Boon" is written in the first person but it certainly was not written by Boone himself. There has been much dispute over the authorship but its stilted, pedantic style clearly indicates that it was written by Filson himself.

It contains many mistakes of fact as well as continual sins of diction, but it established the reputation of Boone and, more than anything else, was responsible for his place in Western history. The book also contained a map of Kentucky--the first and a remarkably accurate one.

The map was published separately, also, and among his contemporaries Filson seems to have been better known for this map than for anything else. There being no printing press in Kentucky at the time, Filson journeyed to Wilmington, Del. , and had his book published there in 1784. The map was published at Philadelphia in the same year.

The Discovery was very popular, running through several editions in London and Paris the next few years (Lewis Collins, History of Kentucky, 1874, II, 183). Filson returned to Kentucky in 1785 and took up his residence at Louisville where he engaged in business as a fur trader. Restlessness and land hunger led him into several trips to the Illinois country in 1785 and 1786.

In the latter year he once more visited his home in Pennsylvania, returning to Kentucky in 1787. After this he appears twice in Kentucky affairs: on January 19, 1788, when he published in the new-born Kentucky Gazette, at Lexington, a prospectus of a school which he proposed to establish there, and in August of the same year when he published in the same paper a prospectus of a town he and some associates proposed to lay out in Ohio on a tract of land bought from Judge Symmes.

This town, first named Losantiville, is the present Cincinnati. While surveying with Symmes up the Little Miami, Filson was killed by an Indian in October 1788 (The Correspondence of John Cleves Symmes, 1926, ed. by B. W. Bond, p. 46).

Achievements

• He has a unique and permanent place in Kentucky history, because he wrote the first history of Kentucky, made the first map of it, and published (and in all probability wrote) the first account of Daniel Boone.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucke: And an Essay Towards the Topography and Natural History of That Important Country (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State...)

  • The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boone: Containing a Narrative of the Wars of Kentucky From the Discovery and Settlement of Kentucky

    (This collection of literature attempts to compile many of...)

  • The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucky: And an Introduction to the Topography and Natural History of That Rich and Important Boon's Narrative of the Wars of Kentucky

    (Leopold is delighted to publish this classic book as part...)

  • Life and Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boon

    (Life and Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boon is presented h...)

  • The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucky, and an Introduction to the Topography and Natural History of That ... Country. Also Colonel D

    ( This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923....)

  • The discovery, settlement, and present State of Kentucke (The American experience series)

Connections

He never married and left no direct descendants.

Father:

Davison Filson

grandfather John Filson

References

• John Filson, the First Historian of Kentucky: An Account of His Life and Writings (Classic Reprint)