CAPT. Thomas Bullitt, a distinguished soldier in the French and Indian wars, headed a surveying party which journeyed from Virginia to the falls of the Ohio in July, 1773, and in August of that year laid out a town. Twelve years later, his nephew, Alexander Scott Bullitt, after a brief residence in Shelby county, on Bull Skin creek, moved down to the settlement at Falls of Ohio. On a farm of a thousand acres on Beargrass creek, nine miles from Louisville, he built his first home, a log cabin. He named the farm Oxmoor, from the celebrated Oxmoor, of Tristam Shandy, and on this farm lives his lineal descendant, William Marshall Bullitt, and his family, the property having been in possession of the Bullitts from that day when Alexander Scott Bullitt and his bride, Priscilla Christian, came to make the Kentucky home of this branch of the Bullitt family that has figured prominently in the social and professional life of Louisville ever since.
Alexander Scott Bullitt, the son of Judge Cuthbert Bullitt, of the General Court of Virginia, preferred coming to Kentucky to fight Indians to staying at home and studying law. His fifteen-year-old bride, Priscilla, was the daughter of Col. William Christian and his wife, Annie Henry, a sister of Patrick Henry. Col. Christian, by a patent of 1780, was granted 2,000 acres of the Beargrass land which had been surveyed in 1774, and on it, in 1780, there was a considerable fort, Sturgis Station, occupied by from twenty to forty families. Thither Col. Christian, of Virginia, sent his slaves ahead to prepare a dwelling, and he with his family arrived to settle in August, 1785 Col. Christian was killed by Indians in 1786. Two years after building the log cabin above the spring of Oxmoor, the Bullitts erected a frame house where their children, Cuthbert, Helen Scott, Anne and William C. Bullitt, were born.
Alexander Scott Bullitt, after the death of his wife, Priscilla, married a widow, Mrs. Mary Churchill Prather, a sister of Col. Samuel Churchill, Armistead and Henry Churchill, prominent Louisville men of affairs. The Bullitts and the Churchills were intimate friends. Alexander Scott Bullitt was one of the eleven State Senators in the first Kentucky Legislature, June 4, 1792. He was elected Speaker of the Senate and re-elected for twelve years. He was the first Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky in May, 1800. Bullitt county was named for him. ...
