Bryan Station was founded in the spring of 1776 by brothers Morgan, James, William, and Joseph Bryan along with their brother-in-law William Grant, settlers who had come from Rowan County, North Carolina. Built on high ground near Elkhorn Creek a few miles northeast of present-day Lexington, the station was laid out as an elongated stockaded compound of roughly forty cabins joined wall to wall for mutual defense, with an adjacent spring supplying water to residents and livestock. In its earliest seasons the settlers cleared forest, planted about sixty acres of corn and other crops, and used the fort as a base for hunting and land surveying, functioning as a working agricultural community as much as a military post. The station's population swelled dramatically in the fall of 1779 when William Bryan led one of the largest single migrations into Kentucky up to that time, bringing several hundred settlers along the wilderness trace. The settlement suffered heavy losses when William Bryan and his teenage son were killed in separate ambushes in 1780, prompting many discouraged survivors to abandon the station and return to North Carolina that August, though occupation continued under later leadership including Elijah Craig. For years afterward the station served primarily as a refuge and rallying point for area settler families facing the threat of raids, a role that culminated in its best-known defense in 1782.