Abe Buford was named for his great uncle, Col. Abraham Buford, who commanded a regiment of the Virginia Line during the Revolutionary War. That Abraham Buford is sometimes called "Buford of Waxhaws" due to the drubbing he took at the hands of Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton's dragoons, who allegedly perpetrated a massacre of Buford's troops at Waxhaws. After the Revolutionary War, Abraham Buford and his brother Simeon helped to start the thoroughbred horse racing industry in Kentucky, and were early, active participants in it.
Much of Col. Abraham Buford's massive horse farm in Scott County, Kentucky is now the Kentucky Horse Park. His old orange-tiled roofed house--in wretched condition--still stands along I-75 just north of Georgetown. He is buried in the city cemetery in Georgetown, along with his daughter Mary Buford Duke and her husband, James K. Duke. Alongside them rest the bodies of their daughter, Martha McDowell Duke Buford, the wife of Brig. Gen. John Buford, and of Martha's two children, neither of whom reached adulthood, Martha Duke "Little Pattie" Buford, and James Duke Buford, who was known as Duke. Yes, John Buford was married to his second cousin.
Martha McDowell Duke Buford McCown (she remarried after John Buford died) was a first cousin of Irvin McDowell. She was the granddaughter of the youngest sister of the great chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, John Marshall, meaning that she was closely tied into the First Families of Virginia. And she was raised with her orphaned first cousin, Basil W. Duke, who later married the sister of John Hunt Morgan, and who became the brains of Morgan's operation during the Civil War. One of Martha's sisters was married to Union Gen. Green Clay Smith. The schisms in the family ran as deeply as the schisms in Kentucky.
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