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Georgetown is a home rule-class city and the county seat of Scott County, Kentucky, in the Bluegrass region north of Lexington, and it is part of the Lexington-Fayette metropolitan statistical area.

The city was founded by Baptist preacher Elijah Craig, who led his congregation from Orange County, Virginia, in 1782 and established a settlement called Lebanon, which the Virginia legislature incorporated in 1784.

Settlers were drawn to the site by the Royal Spring, and Craig built some of the first mills west of the Appalachian Mountains along Royal Spring Branch, where he also manufactured cloth and paper.

Craig founded a distillery at the spring in 1789 and opened a school called the Rittenhouse Academy, which eventually developed into Georgetown College.

The town was renamed George Town in 1790 in honor of President George Washington, became the Scott County seat when the county was formed in 1792, and took its modern one-word name, Georgetown, in 1846.

During the Civil War, Confederate general John Hunt Morgan raided Georgetown twice, on July 15, 1862, and again on July 10, 1864.

Georgetown College, a private liberal arts college founded in 1829, stands in the downtown area, and the city is also home to the Baptist Seminary of Kentucky.

Growth accelerated after Interstate 75 was built through the area in the 1960s, putting the city on one of the nation's busiest highways about 16 miles north of downtown Lexington.

In 1985, Toyota chose Georgetown as the site of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky, its first wholly owned plant in the United States; the plant opened in 1988 and builds the Toyota Camry, Lexus ES, and RAV4.

The Toyota plant is Georgetown's largest employer by far, with about 10,000 employees, and its arrival launched the greatest period of growth in the city's history.