James Lane Allen

The Reign of Law; A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields James Lane Allen

The Anglo-Saxon farmers had scarce conquered foot-hold, stronghold, freehold in the Western wilderness before they became sowers of hemp with remem-brance of Virginia, with remembrance of dear ancestral Britain. Away back in the days when they lived with wife, child, flock in frontier wooden fortresses and hardly ventured forth for water, salt, game, tillage in the very summer of that wild daylight ride of Tomlin-son and Bell, by comparison with which, my children, the midnight ride of Paul Revere, was as tame as the pitching of a rocking horse in a boy's nursery on that history making twelfth of August, of the year 1782, when these two backwoods riflemen, during that same Revolution the Kentuckians then fighting a branch of that same British army, rushed out of Bryan's Station for the rousing of the settlements and the saving of the West hemp was growing tall and thick near the walls of the fort.