Aylett Hartswell Buckner

Colonel Aylette Hartswell Buckner, the father of General Buckner, was a son of Philips Buckner. He was born in Albemarle County, Virginia, in 1792, and came to Kentucky in 1803 with his parents, who settled in Hart County. A. H. Buckner was in his twenty-first year when, in 1813, he enlisted in Colonel James Simrall's regiment. He was present during the siege of Fort Meigs and also took part in the battle of the Thames. Like his friend Charles Fox Wing, he was always greatly interested in the soldiers of the War of 1812. In his day he was one of the best-known men in the State. About the year 1832 he built the Henry Clay furnace in Hart County, and about five years later left Hart County for Muhlenberg, where he erected the Buckner Furnace, or The Stack. As early as 1832 he prophesied that within a hundred years every county in the State would be reached by lines of railroad and that people then would travel in iron cars and sleep in beds at night while traveling, and that iron would in many things take the place of wood. During his four years' stay in Muhlenberg he did much toward the advancement of the county's interests. In 1842, when The Stack was abandoned, he moved to his plantation at Beechland, near Camden, Arkansas, where he died in 1852."

A History of Muhlenberg County XVI, The Story of the Stack: "the discovery of the extensive deposits of surface iron ore in southern Muhlenberg County prompted Aylette H. Buckner (the father of General Buckner) and Cadwalader Churchill to organize a company for the purpose of working this ore. In 1837 they erected a furnace near the junction of Pond Greek and Salt Lick Creek, five miles south of Greenville, and before the close of the following year the iron works were put in operation. The Stack was built at the foot of a hill, and a level gangway was placed from the top of the hill to the top of the furnace, where there was a charging platform over the opening through which the ore was fed. The Stack was a double wall of local sandstone, hooped with six iron bands, the whole forming one massive tower about eighty feet-high, forty feet wide at the base, and twenty-five feet across at the top.