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.

Hemp in Kentucky in 1782--early landmark in the history of the
soil, of the people. Cultivated first for the needs of cabin and
clearing solely; for twine and rope, towel and table, sheet and
shirt. By and by not for cabin and clearing only; not for tow-
homespun, fur-clad Kentucky alone. To the north had begun the
building of ships, American ships for American commerce, for
American arms, for a nation which Nature had herself created and
had distinguished as a sea-faring race. To the south had begun the
raising of cotton. As the great period of shipbuilding went on--
greatest during the twenty years or more ending in 1860; as the
great period of cotton-raising and cotton-baling went on--never so
great before as that in that same year--the two parts of the nation
looked equally to the one border plateau lying between them, to
several counties of Kentucky, for most of the nation's hemp. It was
in those days of the North that the CONSTITUTION was rigged with
Russian hemp on one side, with American hemp on the other, for a
patriotic test of the superiority of home-grown, home-prepared
fibre; and thanks to the latter, before those days ended with the
outbreak of the Civil War, the country had become second to Great
Britain alone in her ocean craft, and but little behind that
mistress of the seas. So that in response to this double demand for
hemp on the American ship and hemp on the southern plantation, at
the close of that period of national history on land and sea, from
those few counties of Kentucky, in the year 1859, were taken well-