Bryan Station (also Bryan's Station, and often misspelled Bryant's Station) was an early fortified settlement in Lexington, Kentucky. It was located on present-day Bryan Station Road, about three miles (5 km) northeast of New Circle Road, on the southern bank of Elkhorn Creek near Briar Hill Road. The settlement was established in the spring of 1776 by brothers Morgan, James, William (married to Mary Boone, sister of Daniel Boone), and Joseph Bryan, and brother-in-law William Grant (married to Elizabeth Boone, also a sister of Daniel Boone), all from Yadkin River Valley, Rowan County, North Carolina. After a disastrous winter and attacks by Native Americans, all the Bryan family survivors abandoned the station and returned to the Yadkin River Valley in August 1780. Falling under the command of Elijah Craig, the remaining occupants withstood several American Indian attacks.
History
Captain William Bryan (b. 1733) along with his brothers and a settler party from Rowan County, North Carolina, entered this frontier land in the spring of 1776 and began pitching the station. The site was located on high ground near the southern bank of Elkhorn creek. On this initial expedition, the party built a few cabins, planted sixty acres of farmland, and cleared many acres of the surrounding forest, which boasted a variety of blue ash, black walnut, honey locust, and sycamore trees. A spring flowed and meandered nearby, which served as the water supply for the station and would be center-place for much of the literature and history involving this fort. The parallelogram was distinctively elongated, with its width considerably shorter than its length; A design choice tailored to its inhabitants desire to have a handsome amount of space in between the roughly forty or so cabins that would eventually be constructed.
The fort's establishment and command was originally led by Captain William Bryan until his death. William, who came from an influential Virginia land-owning family, declined an offer from the Royalist North Carolina government to build and lead a Tory militia as a commissioned Lieutenant Colonel. Aside from William's brother, Samuel, who did accept a comparable offer and would lead a battle against Rebels at Moore's Creek, most of the Bryans' loyalist convictions were not as strong; Rather, they found their primary intrigue being in the frontier expeditions of their brother-in-law, Daniel Boone. However, the Bryans' were far from self-avowed Patriots. As propriety citizens, they stood to benefit from certain privileges conferred by the Royal government, such as military protection. In this way, the Bryans' thought an outright revolt could present precarious, if not unnecessary difficulties. As a result, their lack of proclaimed allegiance to the American cause led to their official designation as Tories by the courts of the rebel-controlled Rowan county in 1778, further pressuring a full move out of the North Carolina county to Kentucky.