midnight
The Anglo-Saxon farmers had scarce conquered foothold , stronghold , freehold in the Western wilderness before they became sowers of hemp -- with remembrance of Virginia , with remembrance of dear ancestral Britain . Away back in the days when they lived with wife , child , flock in frontier wooden fortresses and hardly ventured forth for water , salt , game , tillage -- in the very summer of that wild daylight ride of Tomlinson and Bell , by comparison with which , my children , the midnight ride of Paul Revere , was as tame as the pitching of a rocking-horse in a boy 's nursery -- on that history-making twelfth of August , of the year 1782 , when these two backwoods riflemen , during that same Revolution the Kentuckians then fighting a branch of that same British army , rushed out of Bryan 's Station for the rousing of the settlements and the saving of the West -- hemp was growing tall and thick near the walls of the fort . Hemp in Kentucky in 1782 -- early landmark in the history of the soil , of the people . Cultivated first for the needs of cabin and clearing solely ; for twine and rope , towel and table , sheet and shirt . By and by not for cabin and clearing only ; not for tow-homespun , fur-clad Kentucky alone .