Henderson County, Kentucky Communities

The first land grant recorded in Henderson County in 1799 was to Harrodsburg Seminary for 6,000 acres of unoccupied land. This was in compliance with an act of the General Assembly to encourage higher education (i.e. high school). Half of this acreage was located on Tradewater River, which soon became another county, but 3,000 acres was described as "on the headwaters of Highland Creek." Later this tributary became known as Beaver Dam Creek, and the tract, covering what is today the Dixie community, reached east to Cairo and almost to Corydon.

A pioneer trail, known as Mt. Vernon Road, passed through the tract from the Ohio River, opposite Mt. Vernon, IN to Poole's Mill on the Madisonville Road, but no one lived on the Harrodsburg grant until the land was sold after 1836. By 1841 two men, William Q. Dixon and William S. Sutton, owned all of what is now known as Dixie. Although the Suttons left Dixie for about thirty years, today the descendants of both men (to the sixth and seventh generations) still live in the village.

Predictably a Sutton daughter, Eliza, married a Dixon son, George, and they built the first store in the curve where the Mt. Vernon road met the White Lick road and established a post office, named Dixie because Webster County already had a town called Dixon. The post office operated from 1879 to 1907.

During the last decade of the 19th century and the first of the 20th, Dixie had five store buildings, two churches, two schools, three doctors, a mill, a hotel, two or three blacksmith shops, a photo shop, commercial scales, an icehouse and a lodge hall.

Three nationally-known men had their start in Dixie: Ewing Galloway, one-time news editor of Colliers' Magazine and later owner of an internationally-known photo agency; Jesse Tapp, an associate in the U.S. Department of Agriculture and later president of the Bank of America; Dr. A.J. Lynn, well-known educator in Indiana and Kentucky and later auditor for the Methodist Church.

from The Annals and Scandals of Henderson County, Ky.
By Maralea Arnett