Have you heard the one about a Lexington teacher tangling with a wildcat?

Editor’s Note: As Lexington celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding, the Herald-Leader and kentucky.com each day throughout 2025 will share interesting facts about our hometown. Compiled by Liz Carey, all are notable moments in the city’s history - some funny, some sad, others heartbreaking or celebratory, and some just downright strange.

April 26, 1783 — From the very start of Lexington as a city, education was a key part of the equation.

It attracted a relatively educated set of settlers, and those settlers wanted to see their children educated as well. As early as 1783, Lexington had a school near the fort that would later become the town of Lexington.

Of course, back then, schools weren’t public institutions like they are now and were paid for by the parents who sent their children there. Educated young men came to instruct young children and run the schools.

On the frontier, which Lexington was part of in the 1780s, teaching was a challenging profession. Teachers often relied on community support for their housing and food and were faced with teaching children over diverse age groups in one-room schoolhouses or cabins.

Some even taught in barns.

In Lexington, the first teacher was John “Wildcat” McKinney. McKinney was involved in many things in Kentucky. Over the course of his life, he was a soldier, a farmer and a land surveyor. But it was as a teacher that he earned his nickname.

Looking up from his desk in the schoolhouse in 1783, he noticed that a wildcat had wandered into the schoolroom. At that time, the schoolhouse was located downtown, about where the Lexington History Museum is now.

As the story goes, McKinney noticed the cat was acting weird. Granted, a wild animal walking into a building isn’t exactly normal. Still McKinney allegedly moved to protect his students.

The cat fought back, digging its claws into the school teachers’ torso and its teeth into his shoulder. Although the teacher was fighting for his life, the other settlers decided it was an American Indian attack.

In some stories, McKinney was able to get the upper hand in the battle and choked the cat to death. In others, he was able to hold the cat off. But most stories agree that after the cat was disposed of, McKinney was bandaged up and returned to his class so they could resume their studies.

Now, is it a true story? There was no newspaper to record it in the frontier community, and no court record. It could have happened, after all, that is the stuff that legends are made of.

But it’s possible it is just a story passed down and exaggerated with retellings.

What is known is not long after the attack was supposed to have happened, McKinney left teaching to become a farmer in Bourbon County. He would also help to write the state’s first constitution and would go on to be elected to the first legislature.

Five letters written by John “Wildcat” McKinney are preserved at the Western Kentucky University’s Special Collections Library. One, written to Capt. John Brown in Bath County, asked about the settlement of the “Louisiana Country,” and what Congress intends to do with the property.

Concerned about the legal battles over land claims in Kentucky, McKinney said, “Hoping to hear of a plan for settlement and discouraged by the legal battles surrounding land claims in Kentucky, McKinney observed that “no man is sure of his lands in this country.”

Have a question or story idea related to Lexington’s 250-year history? Let us know at 250LexKy@gmail.com