Managing Editor:
James Perry

By Vernon Summerlin

About 20 miles northeast of Williamsburg, Kentucky just before you get to Barbourville, is the Dr. Thomas Walker State Historic Site. Daniel Boone's shadow dims the fact that Walker and his expedition were maybe the first white men to pass through Cumberland Gap. Thomas built a cabin near the Cumberland River and a replica stands there today.

Before 1750, settlers seeking a way westward from Virginia were blocked by the stone wall of the Cumberland Plateau. A gap was discovered by Dr. Thomas Walker and his party close to where eastern escarpment angles from Tennessee into Virginia. 

The family of Dr. Thomas Walker came from England to America and settled near Jamestown, Virginia, about 1650. Thomas Walker was born in King and Queen County, Virginia, January 25, 1715. In 1741, he married Mrs. Mildred Thornton Merriwether, a relative of George Washington, and moved to Albemarle County, Virginia, where he acquired a large track of land and built his home, Castle Hill. The home was not far from two presidents' homes: Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, and James Monroe's Ash Lawn.

Thomas was physician to Peter Jefferson, father of Thomas Jefferson. He cared for Jefferson until his death, and accepted guardianship of Thomas Jefferson until Thomas became 21 years old.

Dr. Thomas Walker

Dr. Walker, the most famous and successful among physicians and surgeons of Colonial America, fought in the Indian Wars as well as the Revolutionary War under General Washington. He was elected to public office and was a delegate to the National Congress. He was a contemporary and associate to Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Patrick Henry and many other of our country's founding fathers. He had an assiduous nature for learning and exploration.

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When it was learned the French were inciting the Indians to drive out English settlers, Walker was selected to lead a small expedition into Kentucky and the Western wilderness. The expedition was comprised of Ambrose Powell, William Tomlinson, Colby Chew, Henry Lawless, and John Hughes.

Walker was employed to go into the wilderness and find lands suitable for settlement. In the process he found the Warrior Path, the western half of the Great Warpath that connected the Iroquois in the north to the Cherokee in the south. Originally a game trail, the path had been used for hundreds of years by various Indian tribes to reach hunting lands and to raid other tribes. 

Walker's expedition followed the path until they came to the pass through the rock barrier that he called "Cave Gap," after a cave he found near a spring on the north side of the gap. They were the first white men to pass through this opening from the east to the west. But were they?

There is contention that Walker's group was not the first whites to see Cumberland Gap. In 1674, a raiding party of Shawnees captured Gabriel Arthur, an itinerant explorer interested in setting up trade with the Cherokees. Finally, after claiming he could arrange for barter between the white settlers and the Shawnees, his captors placed him on a trail they said would lead him back into Cherokee territory. The trail was the Warrior Path that connected the Shawnee and Cherokee, and Arthur passed through the Cumberland Gap on his way back to join the Cherokees.

Knowledge of this discovery could have hastened the flow of settlers into Kentucky and Tennessee by 76 years, but Arthur was illiterate and left no information about what he had found.

Walker's exploration led him beyond the gap and into the Kentucky interior, where he renamed the Shawnee River the "Cumberland River" after the Duke of Cumberland. It is believed that on a later expedition he also attached "Cumberland" to the entire plateau region he explored.

Walker's discovery did not lead to an immediate rush by settlers to head westward through the gap, because the French and Indian wars kept the frontier closed. When peace returned, the longhunters began crossing into Tennessee and Kentucky. 

During this period Daniel Boone spent two years exploring alone, then returned to Virginia. Shortly after the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals ended the Indian troubles, Boone and 30 ax men were commissioned to mark out the Wilderness Trail from Cumberland Gap into Kentucky. It was because of this, as well as his earlier explorations that Daniel Boone's name is more associated with Cumberland Gap than any other individual.