Native-peoples have lived, hunted, and fished along the lush and temperate banks of Elkhorn Creek in what is now Scott County for at least 15,000 years. In particular, the Adena culture (800 B.C. - 800 A.D.) thrived in the area, with several significant Adena mounds still marking their presence.

Exploration by people of European ancestry can be traced to a surveying expedition from Fincastle County, Virginia, led by John Floyd in June of 1774. A journal kept by one of the group noted a prominent feature of the rich land that is now Scott County: the "spring is the largest I have seen in the whole country, and forms a creek in itself."

The region was sporadically settled by as early as 1775, and an army outpost, McClelland's Fort, was built overlooking the spring in 1776. After an attack by Indians in 1777, the fort was abandoned. A permanent community was not established until the winter of 1783 when Robert and Jemima Johnson established Johnson Station near the North  Fork of Elkhorn Creek. Johnson Station was later renamed Great Crossing because of the buffalo crossing nearby, and is approximately five miles west of the current location of Georgetown. In 1792, Scott County became one of the first two counties created by the newly formed Kentucky Legislature, and was named  for General Charles Scott, a Revolutionary War hero who later served as the Commonwealth's fourth governor from 1808 throug h 1812.

In 1784, Elijah Craig (1743-1808), an idealistic Baptist preacher from Spotsylvania County, Virginia, incorporated the town of Lebanon near the site of McClelland's Fort in the Virginia legislature. In 1790, the town's name was changed to George Town in honor of President George Washington. And in 1792 it became George Town, Kentucky, when Kentucky became the15th state of the union.

Craig is credited by some with the establishment of "the first classical school in Kentucky, the first saw and grist mill, the first fulling and paper mill, and the first ropewalk. Others affirm that he also produced the first bourbon whiskey. In the December 27, 1787, edition of the Kentucky Gazette Craig advertised for fifty or sixty scholars to study at an academy that would open on January 28, 1788 "in Lebanon town," and would offer courses in Latin, Greek, and "such branches of the sciences as are usually taught in public seminaries." Ten years later the school was absorbed by the Rittenhouse Academy, which was given by the state some 5,900 acres in Christian and Cumberland counties so that they might sell the land to benefit their endowment fund. The academy, in turn, was absorbed by Georgetown College in 1829.

The community went into a decline after the death of Elijah Craig in 1808. When Elder Barton Warren Stone (1772-1844), a founder of the Christian Churches movement during the Great Revival, moved to Georgetown in 1816 to become principal of Rittenhouse Academy, he found the community "notorious for its wickedness and irreligion."

Georgetown College was founded in 1829 by orthodox Baptists to provide education for clergy to combat the reforming threat of the Disciples of Christ, and by those men simply interested in providing a superior classical education. Thereafter the college continued to prosper and in 1898 became one of the first such institutions in the South to become coeducational.