This Is Boone Country

By Kevin Osbourn

Living eight miles from Fort Boonesborough, artist and writer Kevin Osbourn dreamed for years about painting a mural of Daniel Boone in Winchester, Kentucky, where two of Boone's children are buried near town and many of the famous pioneer's descendants live to this day. In 2023, Osbourn began working with Daniel Boone living historian Steven Y. Caudill, a Boone descendant from Winchester, to make Osbourn's dream happen. Caudill posed for a photo at the original fort site that spring. Read the true story of how the mural — called "This Is Boone Country"— became a community project, how the 24-foot-tall painting unexpectedly came together and how it nearly ended in disaster.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kevin Osbourn
• Release date: Dec 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9798224687558

Kevin Osbourn

Kevin Osbourn worked as a reporter and editor at newspapers in Somerset, KY, Poughkeepsie, NY and Lexington, KY, then worked in private industry as an editor and writer. He and wife Diane have four children. Now retired, he stays active writing for Kentucky Living and other magazines, painting, volunteering with the Wolfe County Search and Rescue Team, and producing a podcast called "Grace, Grit & Hope." Guests on the podcast tell inspiring personal stories of how they found the grace and grit to overcome difficult setbacks of all kinds. To listen to Grace, Grit & Hope, go Apple Podcasts, Spotify or IHeart Radio, or go to: https://sites.libsyn.com/492851

Book preview

Foreword: A Great Honor

By Steven Y. Caudill

Boone descendant and national Boone re-enactor

Over the last two decades, I have had many honors portraying Daniel Boone, including a speech dressed in authentic pioneer clothing before the Kentucky House of Representatives in 2016, where I received a standing ovation. During my career as Daniel Boone, I’ve also been on countless magazine covers and been in several movie documentaries. But having a mural painted on a wall of my hometown portraying Boone has to top them all. It’s a legacy that will live on forever. Can you imagine how deeply honoring it is seeing the mural This Is Boone Country in the town where my family and I, and many Boone descendants, were born and raised?

It is not just fitting that Daniel Boone be honored by this mural in Winchester. It is timely for people everywhere.

Timely because in my travels across this great land, one thing I say during shows always surprises audiences. I tell them that Daniel Boone’s hopes did not end long ago. In fact, he had the same dreams that people everywhere share to this day. He wanted to claim a piece of land. He wanted freedom to worship. He wanted a place to call home.

His name is synonymous with horses, bluegrass and bourbon. There is not a person in Kentucky who doesn’t know who Daniel Boone is. But as the Bible says about a prophet being misunderstood in their own land, it is surprising how little we know him.

Boone was not an outspoken man. He never wore clothing with long leather fringes or a coonskin hat. He did not discover Kentucky or the Cumberland Gap. He did not spend his life fighting Indians. In fact, he was so beloved by them, they adopted him as a Shawnee son and called him Sheltowee, which means Big Turtle, and it is fitting that the Sheltowee symbol is in the lower right corner of the mural to honor this part of Boone’s story.

The true part of the Boone legend is that he did have a tremendous impact on Kentucky and