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AT LEFT: From left to right SFC (R) John M. Trowbridge, Board Chair; Jason M. Lemay, Board Secretary and Chaplain Bill Draper pause for a blessing and a moment of prayer before spreading the soil of all 120 Kentucky counties under the foundations of the Kentucky National Guard Memorial providing a touch of home for all those who will be honored on the Memorial.
 
The Kentucky National Guard Memorial was created to be a sacred space for the families and comrades to remember and a classroom for generations to come for the most important lessons of Kentucky and American history. Tsiyu Gansini, "He is dragging his canoe", known to whites as Dragging Canoe lived from c. 1738 until 29 February 1792 and was a Cherokee war chief who led a band of Cherokee against colonists and United States settlers in the Upper South. Dragging Canoe, opposed to selling ancestral hunting grounds, did warn the whites that they were purchasing a "dark and bloody ground.”
From the time Daniel Boone first came through the Cumberland Gap the predecessors of today's Kentucky National Guard have served to protect the lives and property of the citizens of what became Kentucky. Men and women from every county of Kentucky have served in the Kentucky National Guard and serve today. In order to honor that service and the sacrifice of those who have fallen in the line of duty – all 120 counties provided soil the Kentucky National Guard Memorial rests upon. Soil from across Kentucky supports this Memorial as these men and women have supported citizens across this Commonwealth.
 
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