Knox County is a county located in Appalachia near the southeastern corner of the U.S. state of Kentucky. As of the 2020 census, the population was 30,193. Its county seat is Barbourville. The county is named for General Henry Knox. It is one of the few coal-producing counties in Kentucky that has not suffered massive population loss. Knox County is included in the London, KY Micropolitan Statistical Area.
Knox County courthouse in Barbourville
Henry Knox, a Founding Father of the United States, was a Boston bookseller who became a senior general of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, serving as chief of artillery in most of Washington's campaigns. Following the American Revolution, he oversaw the War Department under the Articles of Confederation from 1785 to 1789. Washington, at the start of his first administration, appointed Knox the nation's first Secretary of War, a position he held from 1789 to 1794. He is well known today as the namesake of Fort Knox in Kentucky, the repository of a large portion of the nation's gold reserves.
An 1806 portrait of Knox by Gilbert Stuart now housed in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston
An ox team hauls cannon toward Boston as part of the 1775-76 "Noble train of artillery"
Men are visible behind Washington working to unload cannon in Thomas Sully's 1819 The Passage of the Delaware (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
Steel engraving of Henry Knox by Alonzo Chappel