In the spring of 1810, John James Audubon and his partner, Ferdinand Rozier, moved their trade business from Louisville, Kentucky, to Henderson. The population of Henderson was around 400 people, about half of whom were enslaved people of African descent. The settlement was originally called Red Banks and was re-named Henderson in 1797.
For Audubon, Henderson offered that much more of an opportunity to experience and explore the western frontier of North America. For his wife, Lucy, living in such an unknown and uncultured place could not have been more unappealing. Although, everything changed for Lucy when she and John James Audubon met and established relations with Dr. Adam Rankin and his family. When Dr. Rankin started paying Lucy to teach reading and music to his children, this was the beginning of Lucy working as a teacher and earning what would prove to be vital income for her family during the many years that John James Audubon struggled with the publication of Birds of America.
Lucy and her plight could not have been more evident than on May 29, 1810, when Audubon spotted a hen-like bird close by, dropped everything, and took off chasing the bird. Initially, Audubon identified the “excessively shy bird, runs with great celerity, and when caught, cries like a common fowl” as the Salt Water Marsh Hen (Plate 204). Then upon closer study, there appeared slight differences. As Audubon encountered others over time that were similar, they were always found in freshwater marsh areas, never in the saltmarshes that the Salt Water Marsh Hen favored. Some of the freshwater marsh areas were also where Audubon found alligators lurking, frogs croaking, snakes slithering, turtles basking on fallen logs and branches, and temperatures soaring during what Audubon called “the sickly season.” The illness that settlers feared most during the hot and humid summer months was malaria. Yet, there the bird “remains secure from the search of man, and there, on some hillock or little island of the marsh, it builds its nest. In such places I have found so many as twenty pairs breeding with a space having a diameter of thirty yards.” Audubon named the bird for Birds of America the Great Red-breasted Rail. It is known today as the King Rail.