Cadiz: Gateway to the Land Between the Lakes

Travelers along Interstate Twenty-Four pass close to a small Kentucky town that most outsiders mispronounce on first encounter. The name looks like the Spanish port city, but locals say KAY-deez, and they say it firmly enough that you understand the correction is non-negotiable.

Cadiz was incorporated in eighteen twenty-two as the seat of Trigg County, one of the counties carved out of the western Kentucky frontier two years earlier. It grew as an agricultural and trading center in the decades before the Civil War, a market town where tobacco and livestock moved through on their way to river ports. The war disrupted it, as it disrupted every county seat in this borderland region. Cadiz served as a base for both Union and Confederate operations at different points in the conflict, and the courthouse was burned, a common fate for public buildings that sat at the intersection of two armies' supply lines.

For most of the twentieth century Cadiz was a quiet county seat, famous locally for its country hams, which were cured and shipped from here in significant quantities by the nineteen thirties. Then the Army Corps of Engineers reshaped the region. The construction of Barkley Dam on the Cumberland River, completed in nineteen sixty-six, created Lake Barkley, placing Cadiz on the eastern edge of one of the most remarkable recreational landscapes in the eastern United States.

Between Lake Barkley and Kentucky Lake lies a narrow land bridge of about one hundred seventy thousand acres now managed as the Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area. Cadiz is the eastern gateway to that corridor. Visitors who come to kayak, hunt, camp, or watch the Elk and Bison Prairie pass through here. The town that once shipped hams now ships experiences.