What is amazing is the fact that in the midst of this revolutionary upheaval and, indeed, at the very moment British troops were threatening to invade Virginia, the Virginia legislature voted to charter a school in this trans-mountain region which was still controlled by Virginia.  The purpose as stated in the 1780 statute was ‘to promote and encourage every design which may tend to the improvement of the mind and the diffusion of knowledge even among the remote citizens, whose situation a barbarous neighborhood and a savage intercourse might otherwise render unfriendly to science.”

Three years later this charter was amended to enlarge the number of trustees, increase the amount of escheated land as endowment, and give it the name of Transylvania Seminary.  Needless to say, conditions were not conducive to developing a school of higher learning in Kentucky at the time.  Dr. David Rice, an outstanding Presbyterian minister living in Danville, did provide part of his cabin for the first classes in 1785 under the tutelage of his son-in-law, but this effort was short-lived. 

Soon the fortunes of Lexington and Transylvania would be joined.  For what was happening in Lexington in the decade of the 1790s was nothing short of an amazing transformation.  It was part of a movement that Richard Wade has described in his book The Urban Frontier: The Rise of the Western Cities, 1790-1930 in which he studies the emergence of Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Louisville, and St.  Louis along with Lexington.  Wade shows that as Americans pushed westward, two types of frontier towns were established.  One was the familiar and traditional rural frontier town.  The other was the urban frontier town: a distinct area to which was transferred wholesale the eastern economic and social institutions and values. 

By 1800 Lexington had grown so fast its population exceeded Pittsburgh and it was twice as large as Louisville.  In the next few decades, however, the steamboat river traffic would change that economic and population ratio dramatically, but in this early period Lexington was preeminent.  Town leaders were ambitious to make Lexington a social and cultural leader in the West as well as a prosperous mercantile center.  Visitors who had first seen Lexington in 1790 and returned ten years later were amazed at the transformation.  One visitor wrote:

On entering the town we were struck with the fine roomy scale on which everything appeared to be planned.  Spacious streets and large houses chiefly of brick, .  .  .  have rapidly taken the place of the original ones....  a rivulet which turns some mills below the town runs through middle or water street, but is covered with an arch and leveled out, over the length of the street. 

Another visitor recorded in his diary:
Lexington is the largest and most wealthy town in Kentucky or indeed west of the Allegheny Mountains; the main Street of Lexington has all the appearance of Market Street in Philadelphia on a busy day....