How and why did Albany and Clinton County get their names? We may never know for sure, but it's interesting

Clinton County was created by the 1836 Kentucky Legislature from portions of Cumberland, Russell, and Wayne counties. The original proposal in 1835 was to create a county named Crittenden with similar boundaries as Clinton, but that measure was, for unknown reasons, defeated. The name was designed to honor John J. Crittenden, then the Kentucky secretary of state and later governor and U.S. senator. The legislature created Crittenden County, in Western Kentucky, in 1842.

The bill later resurfaced with the name "Clinton" affixed to the new county, and that measure passed. The county was officially named for DeWitt Clinton, former governor of New York and the driving force behind the Erie Canal. However, the Erie Canal had been completed over 10 years earlier, and Clinton had died in 1828.

The gravestone of Israel Clinton
Winfrey in the Columbia Cemetery

The unpublicized truth was that Francis Winfrey, who represented Cumberland County in the lower house of the General Assembly, had an eight-year-old son named Israel Clinton Winfrey, and the county was quietly named in his honor. The first mention of this was in a March 25, 1951, New Era newspaper column by S.V. Brents, a highly respected local author and historian.

After the establishment of the county, a mass meeting was held to determine where the county seat should be located. There were three proposed locations: Paoli, a village a mile south of Albany that already had a post office, named for a Corsican patriot; an area in the middle of the county in what is now the Wago community; and a place where Robert Cross had offered to donate a portion of his land for public use and where Benjamin McDowell had a tavern.

Benny McDowell was a strong proponent of establishing the town at his tavern's location and supposedly supplied strong drink to several in the crowd, who started chanting, "We're ALL for BENNY," which evolved into "ALL-BENNY." Benny McDowell and Robert Cross carried the day, and their location prevailed, and that further explains the locally preferred pronunciation of "All-Benny."

The official version is that "Albany" is named after Albany, the capital of New York. They both make good stories. You decide for yourself which one to believe.