. . . probably not

There seems to be some disagreement over whether the town of Morgan was named for the famous Confederate Civil War leader John Hunt Morgan. 

Two articles on this web site, one by by Ewing Cossaboom on the history of Morgan, and one from the Morgan school paper in 1928, say it was, but another article, E. E. and Mary Louise Barton’s Place Names of Pendleton County, says we should take this claim with a grain of salt. 

We note that Patera & Gallagher's A Checklist of Kentucky Post Offices cites the “Morgan” post office as being active from 1856 to 1957.  In a list of Pendleton County post offices in the September, 2002 issue of the Pendleton County Historical and Genealogical Society Newsletter, it’s noted that a post office named “Johnson” existed earlier at what is now Morgan, and maybe, at a still earlier time, the town may have been called “Fork Lick.”  Patera & Gallagher list a Johnson PO from 1830 to 1835. The newsletter article cites January 3, 1856 as the date the first post office opened that was named “Morgan.”  

John Hunt Morgan wasn’t famous until the Civil War (1861-1865 – you knew those dates, right?), so if nobody had likely heard of Gen. John Hunt Morgan until 1861, and Morgan was first named in 1856, we think the safe bet is with the Bartons.   

The Morgan school article also says General Morgan was in the area.  He likely was not.  His men may very well have been, but the General himself?  Highly unlikely.  For Gen John Hunt Morgan to have been every place he's rumored to have been in the war, he would had to have had to magical powers of transportation, and perhaps even needed to have cloned himself.