Fort Boonesborough was established in April 1775 when Daniel Boone, working under contract to Richard Henderson's Transylvania Land Company, led a party of axmen across the Kentucky River to build a fortified outpost anchoring the company's Transylvania Purchase claim. By that summer the site held roughly twenty-six one-story log cabins and four corner blockhouses enclosed by a palisade, functioning as a self-contained frontier community where settler families lived, farmed small garden plots, kept livestock, and sheltered from the dangers of the surrounding wilderness. In May 1775 the fort also served a civic purpose, hosting the meeting of delegates that formed Kentucky's first representative government under the short-lived Transylvania colony. Beyond its defensive role, Boonesborough functioned as a supply depot and gathering point for incoming settlers traveling the Wilderness Road, and after the Revolutionary War it developed into a river landing and modest tobacco-trading center along the Kentucky River. Its commercial importance faded by around 1820 as newer towns absorbed regional trade, and the original fort site was eventually abandoned and largely lost to agricultural use and river erosion. In the twentieth century the site was rebuilt as a historically furnished replica fort, and it now operates as a state park and living-history museum where costumed interpreters demonstrate pioneer-era blacksmithing, weaving, and other frontier trades; it was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1996.