Eddyville, Kentucky

Eddyville, Kentucky sits on the Cumberland River and is best known as the home of the Kentucky State Penitentiary, a maximum-security prison that was built beginning in eighteen eighty-four and opened in eighteen ninety and is nicknamed 'the Castle on the Cumberland' for its Gothic stone towers that loom over the river. The town itself was platted in the seventeen nineties and served as an early river trading post. Like nearby Kuttawa, part of old Eddyville was submerged when Barkley Dam created Lake Barkley in the nineteen sixties.

The penitentiary has housed some of Kentucky's most notorious criminals and carried out executions for well over a century. Despite the prison's grim presence, the castle-like architecture makes it one of the more visually striking correctional facilities in the American South.