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Irene Jaggers, longtime advocate for Logan’s Fort, was so happy last Thursday evening when the Stanford City Council approved plans for the project, she bruised your reporter with a well-placed elbow to the ribs when the vote was tallied. “I don’t care who you tell, I’m just so happy it was approved,” she said.

The council voted unanimously to approve the plans after a presentation by fort architect Garlan Vanhook whose design had been approved by the Logan’s Fort Foundation board the previous evening.

With the plans approved, bids for the project will be accepted until Sept. 15 and Jaggers hopes for a groundbreaking shortly thereafter.

Efforts to rebuild the fort, constructed in 1777 as European settlers expanded into the west, have been ongoing since the late 1990’s when an excavation sponsored by the Kentucky Archaeological Society confirmed the sites’ location at the end of what is now Martin Luther King Street. The fort’s general location was well documented in frontiersmens’ journals by its proximity to St. Asaph’s spring, and researchers were confident when they began digging. In their excavations researchers found many eighteenth century artifacts, cellars and trash pits, and according to their report, “the remains of a young Caucasian male who had been scalped.”

Over the last 10-years support for the project has waxed and waned, but since Jaggers has headed the board steady progress was made and increasing donations made the fort a reality. The project idled slightly over the last year as relations between the city and the board strained over the scope and responsibility for the project, but the council’s approval Thursday moves the project into high gear.

Jaggers said that more fund-raising will begin soon and she hopes that grants will supplement the money raised locally. Currently the construction fund stands at $150,000 and Jaggers hopes to add to that from a variety of sources. “We’ve had 12 elementary school classes buy logs for the project, some bought two. That’s a lot of pennies,” she said. One young boy told Jaggers, “Now we don’t have to go to Fort Harrod, we are going to have our own fort!”

When students and tourists visit the fort, they will see a very accurate representation of what settlers on the Wilderness Road saw when they stopped at the site for respite.

Vanhook told the city council that plans for the fort called for a structure that appeared historically accurate but met all of today’s code standards. Underneath the log walls will be a sturdy foundation and drainage system that the early settlers couldn’t have imagined. Vanhook had solicited comment from historians on the plans and told the council that he had only received minor corrections, and those cosmetic.

While construction hasn’t begun on the fort proper, quite a bit of work has been done on the old ice house adjacent to the spring that will serve as the fort’s visitor center.

The site has been cleared, the roof repaired and new windows and doors installed. The ice house, like the fort site itself, sits quietly now at the end of MLK, waiting for the first shovel of earth to be turned and life brought back into this historic corner of the county.

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