It exported bourbon whiskey, hemp and tobacco, the latter two produced mainly by African American slaves before the Civil War.

[citation needed] It was once a center of wrought iron manufacture, sending ironwork downriver to decorate the buildings of Cincinnati, Ohio, and New Orleans, Louisiana.

[8] Under the leadership of Henry Means Walker, Maysville was home to one of the largest tobacco auction warehouses in the world for most of the 20th century.

[10] Abolitionist author Harriet Beecher Stowe visited the area in 1833 and watched a slave auction in front of the court house in Washington, the original seat of the county and now a historic district of Maysville.

Buffalo once forded the Ohio here, beating a broad path into the interior of Kentucky in search of salt licks.

For thousands of years, various cultures of indigenous peoples inhabited the area, hunting the buffalo and other game.

In the 17th century, the powerful Iroquois Confederacy, based in present-day New York state, drove out other tribes to hold the Ohio Valley as a hunting ground.

The buffalo trace, also a well-used trail traveled for centuries by Native Americans, was a natural path into the bluegrass region, extending all the way to Lexington, Kentucky.

[10][12] Frontiersman Simon Kenton made the first settlement in the area in 1775, but temporarily abandoned that to fight in the western battles of the American Revolution.

In 1786 the village which grew up near Kenton's Station was established by act of the Virginia General Assembly as the town of Washington.

[15] By this time, John May had acquired the land at Limestone and Daniel Boone established a trading post and tavern there.

[17] By 1807, Maysville was one of two principal ports in Kentucky; it was still mostly a place through which goods and people passed, having only about sixty dwellings.

President Andrew Jackson, a bitter rival of Clay, vetoed the bill, arguing that the project was of purely local benefit.

[22] The Maysville Road veto was one of Jackson's first acts in aligning the federal government with his principles of Jacksonian democracy.

[25] Washington, the county seat, had dwindled in importance after a fire in 1825 and a series of deadly cholera epidemics.

[15][26] A proposal to move the county government from Washington to Maysville was bitterly fought but passed by a slender margin in 1848.

Those tolls were removed in 1945 to much fanfare - including celebrations from the local Rotary and Lions club, and a parade in downtown Maysville.

[30] The Russell Theatre, located on Third Street in Maysville, was the site of the world premiere of Rosemary Clooney's first film, The Stars Are Singing, in 1953.

[40][41] Maysville lies on the border of the Humid subtropical and the Hot Summer Continental climate zones.

The annual Rosemary Clooney Music Festival was founded by the singer in 1999 to benefit the restoration of the Russell Theatre.

[50] Amtrak, the national passenger rail system, provides service to Maysville with the thrice-weekly Cardinal.

The AA Highway links the Kentucky suburbs of Cincinnati approximately 50 miles west of Maysville with Vanceburg, Ashland and Interstate 64 near Grayson to the southeast.