[3] It was a prohibition or dry county until November 7, 2023, when voters approved to allow alcohol sales countywide.

Lancaster was founded as a collection of log cabins in 1776 near a spring that later provided a constant source of water to early pioneers.

[6][7] Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the powerful antebellum novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, visited the Thomas Kennedy home located in the Paint Lick section of Garrard County in her only visit to the South while gathering material for the book.

[8] In 2008, Garrard County officials announced their intention to recreate the slave cabin on the grounds of the Governor William Owsley House.

It was strongly pro-Union during the Civil War and has remained a Republican stronghold in the Bluegrass Region which was, until recently, largely Democratic.

Garrard County is the home of Camp Dick Robinson, the first Federal base south of the Ohio River during the Civil War.

[11] Located in east-central Kentucky, most of the county lies in the rolling hills of the Bluegrass region.

Each member of the Fiscal Court is elected to a four-year term, pursuant to the Kentucky Constitution.

Garrard County lies at the northeastern end of the historically Unionist belt of Kentucky, covering the eastern Pennyroyal Plateau, the southern tip of the Bluegrass Plateau, and the southwestern part of the Eastern Coalfield.

Although it only provided a modest level of volunteers for the Union Army during the Civil War and had a very high proportion of slave owners amongst its 1860 electorate,[18] Garrard County nonetheless came to form the northernmost border of the rock-ribbed Republican bloc of south-central Kentucky that includes such counties as Clinton, Cumberland, Russell, Casey, Pulaski, Laurel, Rockcastle, Monroe, McCreary, Clay, Jackson, Owsley and Leslie.

The only Democratic presidential candidates to carry Garrard County since the end of Reconstruction have been Woodrow Wilson in 1912, Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, 1936 and 1940, and Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and Roosevelt only won by 24 votes over Alf Landon and 14 votes over Wendell Willkie.