The land that would become Daniel Boone National Forest carries a human history stretching back thousands of years. Indigenous peoples — including the Cherokee and Shawnee — moved through and inhabited the ridges and river valleys of eastern Kentucky long before European contact, leaving behind rock shelter encampments, stone points, and traces of campfires in the sandstone bluffs that still define the landscape. The region served as a hunting ground contested between multiple nations, its rich hardwood forests and abundant wildlife making it one of the most productive wild territories in the interior of the continent.

The European chapter of this land’s story is inseparable from the figure after whom the forest is named. Daniel Boone — frontiersman, explorer, and American folk hero — came to know eastern Kentucky more intimately than perhaps any other European of his era. In 1769, Boone crossed the Cumberland Gap with a small party and spent two years exploring the Kentucky wilderness. He later blazed the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap, opening the primary route by which hundreds of thousands of settlers poured into Kentucky and beyond. The Shawnee, who captured Boone in 1778, adopted him into the tribe and gave him the name Sheltowee — meaning “Big Turtle” — the same name now carried by the forest’s great through-trail.

The 18th and 19th centuries brought waves of settlement, then logging and coal extraction that stripped much of eastern Kentucky’s forest cover by the early 20th century. By the 1930s, the land was badly depleted — eroded, overhunted, and economically exhausted. The federal government began acquiring land under the Weeks Act, assembling the holdings that would become the Cumberland National Forest, established on February 23, 1937.

Decades of careful stewardship by the Forest Service allowed the eastern Kentucky hardwoods to regenerate. By 1966, the forest had grown into a beloved regional institution, and Congress renamed it the Daniel Boone National Forest in honor of the frontiersman most associated with Kentucky’s early history. Today the forest supports the full range of hardwood species — oak, hickory, tulip poplar, maple, beech — that once blanketed the plateau, along with the wildlife, watersheds, and plant communities that depend on them.

Historical sites within the forest speak to the full arc of this human story. The Gladie Visitor Center in the Red River Gorge features a pioneer log cabin and interpretive exhibits on geology, natural history, and cultural heritage. Camp Wildcat Battlefield preserves the site of an 1861 Civil War skirmish — one of the first Union victories of the war — in the rugged terrain of Laurel County. The Clear Creek Iron Furnace, an 1800s-era iron production stack, stands as a reminder of the region’s early industrial era.