Discovery of tangible http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2319 of the battle could restore eligibility to the National Register for part of the battlefield
by 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 http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1195 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 http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=651 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, 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 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.