The park encompasses 896 acres (363 ha) and includes a section of the Wilderness Road that early settlers used to reach Kentucky.

[4] In 1775, Daniel Boone blazed a trail for the Transylvania Company from Fort Chiswell in Virginia through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky.

[4] Many of their descendants still live in Kentucky[5] including members of the McNitt Company, a group of pioneers who were attacked by Native Americans on October 3, 1786.

Some of the cabins are arranged with tools and household items to demonstrate what a pioneer settlement looked like during the Wilderness Road era.

The blacksmith has barred windows and was used as a jail in location filming of The Kentuckian, a 1955 movie starring Burt Lancaster.

[7] The McNitt Company was one of many large groups of early settlers who used the Wilderness Road to cross the Appalachian Mountains and move into the Ohio Valley.

On that night they failed to post a guard against attacks by Native Americans on whose land the settlers were encroaching.

The dead were buried near the site of the massacre at what is known as the Defeated Camp Burial Ground, within the boundaries of Levi Jackson Wilderness Road State Park.