Abraham Buford was a Virginia-born Continental Army officer who served throughout the Revolutionary War and later became a prominent Kentucky landowner. Born in Culpeper County to John and Judith Early Buford, he began his military career in 1775 as a captain of the Culpeper Minutemen and rose steadily through the ranks, becoming a colonel in 1778. Buford served with several Virginia regiments, wintered at Valley Forge, and fought at Monmouth Court House before being sent south in 1780. That year he commanded Virginia troops ordered to reinforce Charleston, South Carolina, but after the city’s surrender, he was intercepted at Waxhaw by British forces under Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton. The resulting defeat, marked by heavy American casualties and allegations of a massacre after Buford attempted to surrender, hardened the conduct of warfare in the southern theater. Buford remained in service until the war’s end, afterward settling in Kentucky, where he accumulated extensive landholdings, worked as a surveyor and speculator, and became involved in horse breeding. He died during a cholera epidemic at Georgetown, Kentucky, on June 26, 1833.
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