The United States turns 250. The commemoration, America 250, honors the contributions that founded this country. This project recognizes two documented patriots of the Kentucky frontier: Rebecca Bryan Boone and Jemima Boone Callaway.
The work was invited by both the NSDAR and The Boone Society, and builds on earlier research published in The Boone Society's Compass Magazine in 2023. For America 250, it was expanded into a broader treatment of Rebecca and Jemima, delivered as a presentation in March 2026.
The Siege of Boonesborough began on September 7, 1778, and continued for eleven days. A Shawnee force under Chief Blackfish, operating in coordination with British interests on the frontier during the broader Revolutionary War, laid siege to the stockade at Boonesborough. It remains among the longest frontier engagements of the war.
Both women are documented defenders. Rebecca served as markswoman and ammunition supplier. Jemima's nightly ammunition-gathering is preserved in the Draper Manuscript Collection, through correspondence from her granddaughter Eviza Lydia Coshow to the historian Dr. Lyman Copeland Draper.
The original Fort Boonesborough did not survive the nineteenth century. The site, however, is preserved. It carries a National Historic Landmark designation from the National Park Service and is administered as Fort Boonesborough State Park by the Kentucky Department of Parks. The park sits on the west bank of the Kentucky River in Madison County, between Richmond and Winchester. A working replica of the fort (built from roughly ten thousand southern yellow pine logs and dedicated in 1974) stands near the original location and operates seasonally from April through October, with resident artisans, cabins, blockhouses, and period demonstrations.
For descendants of the Boonesborough defenders, and for anyone working seriously on the Revolutionary-era frontier, the site is worth visiting.
The frontier historian Dr. Lyman Copeland Draper (1815–1891) corresponded with Eviza Lydia Coshow, née Howell, a granddaughter of Jemima Boone Callaway, in an effort to preserve family accounts of the siege before they could be lost. Eviza was the eighth of fourteen children born to Susannah Callaway and Thomas James Howell of Howell's Prairie, St. Charles County, Missouri, and one of approximately eighty grandchildren of Daniel and Rebecca Boone. Despite having sight in only one eye and no formal education, she wrote to Draper at length across 1884 and 1885, relaying her grandmother's accounts as she learned them from first-hand oral history. Her letters are catalogued in the Draper Manuscript Collection, Series C (Kentucky Papers), Volume 21.
The nightly ammunition collection is known almost entirely through this correspondence. Jemima dictated her own memoir later in life, intending to correct inaccuracies in the published record; the manuscript was lost when the riverboat transporting it sank. Draper, for his part, had intended to incorporate Eviza's accounts into a biography of Daniel Boone that he did not live to complete.
As told by Jemima Boone Callaway and transmitted through her granddaughter Eviza Lydia Coshow to Mr. Draper.
Britta is a direct descendant of Eviza Lydia Coshow, and part of a chain of granddaughters who have carried this record forward. Jemima's nightly collection of spent musket balls, preserved through Eviza's letters to Dr. Draper, had not previously been held by The Boone Society.