Sandusky Station, 1776

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Historical Marker #670 commemorates Sandusky Station in Marion County, Kentucky.

James Sodowsky (Sandusky) and his brother, Jacob, were members of Captain Isaac Hite's company of eleven adventurers who came to Kentucky in 1774. That May, they reached the present-day location of Harrodsburg. There, they were joined by a company of about thirty men who had come to Kentucky with James Harrod. They laid off a town at the Big Spring, giving each man a half-acre lot and a ten-acre out lot. The town was named Harrodstown. After an Indian attack, James Sandusky fled to Virginia and Jacob to New Orleans and then back to Virginia.

By March 1775, James returned to Harrodstown with Captain Harrod and others. He spent time exploring the country south of there and found an ideal place for a settlement. There, on the west side of a stream that he named Pleasant Run and on the east side of a ridge that divides the waters of Pleasant Run and Cartwright's Creek, in 1776 James Sandusky and several men from Harrodstown built his fort. Sometime later, his brother, Jacob, joined him there.

The Sandusky brothers were at Sandusky's Station until 1785, when they moved to what is now Jessamine County. Jacob lived there for the remainder of his life, but James, in 1786 or 1787, moved to Bourbon County, where he settled and built another fort, known as Cane Ridge. Anthony Sandusky, son of James, remained at the fort on Pleasant Run, and he and his descendants were long identified with the history of Washington and Marion Counties.