Shepherdsville: Salt, River, and the Wilderness Trail
Near Louisville, Kentucky
In seventeen ninety-three, a businessman named Adam Shepherd, who had bought land near the Falls of Salt River, laid out streets and lots on the north bank of the river. Kentucky itself was barely a year old. The spot was strategic, in the Salt River country tied to the salt furnaces at Bullitt's Lick, one of the frontier's most essential resources.
On December eleventh, seventeen ninety-three, the state officially recognized the new town of Shepherdsville. Three years later, when Bullitt County was carved from Jefferson and Nelson counties, Shepherdsville became its seat, situated almost dead-center of the new county. What began as a river town is today Bullitt County's county seat, just south of Louisville on Interstate Sixty-Five.
