Eddyville, The Castle on the Cumberland

Eddyville sits at the confluence of Eddy Creek and the Cumberland River in western Kentucky, and it has been a county seat three different times. Revolutionary War veteran David Walker laid out the town in seventeen ninety-eight, naming it for the eddies that swirled in the river at this bend. The town served successively as the seat of Livingston County, Caldwell County, and finally Lyon County when that was formed in eighteen fifty-four.

Today Eddyville is best known throughout Kentucky as shorthand for the state penitentiary. The Kentucky State Penitentiary, a turreted stone fortress sometimes called the Castle on the Cumberland, was built between eighteen eighty-four and eighteen ninety on a bluff above the river. Much of the old town was flooded when Lake Barkley was created in the nineteen sixties, and the community relocated to higher ground.