Appalachian History Series – Buckhorn Lake Dam: Flood Control, a Lost Town, and a Park on the Middle Fork
On a quiet summer morning Buckhorn Lake looks like a long, crooked mirror laid in the bottom of the Middle Fork valley. Ridges rise tight on both sides. Fog clings to the coves where small creeks slide into the main channel. Boats idle out from the ramp, and families set up in the campground below the dam where children play in the shadow of the concrete intake tower. It feels like a simple mountain lake, but the water that fills this narrow basin is part of a much larger story of federal flood control, a submerged town, and the changing climate of the Kentucky River basin.
Buckhorn Lake Dam is a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers project on the Middle Fork of the Kentucky River in Leslie and Perry counties. The embankment stretches a little more than one thousand feet across the valley and rises roughly 160 feet above the old stream bed, creating a reservoir of about 1,230 surface acres at normal summer pool. The lake feeds water downstream for flood control, water quality and water supply, while the state resort park and federal recreation areas have turned the valley into a destination for anglers, campers, and families who have never seen the town that once stood where the lodge and the long drowned channel meet.
The Middle Fork Valley Before the Dam
Long before engineers surveyed the Middle Fork, the river supported a ribbon of small communities that stitched together the upper Kentucky River basin. The headwaters rose in the high country near Hyden and flowed northwest through steep hollows toward Buckhorn and beyond. Farmsteads and crossroads communities clung to the narrow bottoms on either side of the water. Roads in the 1930s and 1950s highway maps followed the river closely, twisting along the foot of the slope with only a narrow buffer between the roadway and the creek.
Bowlingtown was the best known of the settlements in the future pool. It grew on both banks of the Middle Fork, tied together by a swinging bridge. Families farmed small plots, fished, cut timber, and walked or rode along the river road toward Saul or Buckhorn to reach post offices, stores, and churches. According to later family histories, Bowlingtown’s roots reached back to the early nineteenth century, and by the twentieth century it had its own schools, churches, and a sense of place strong enough that people would still call it home decades after its last buildings were gone.
This stretch of the Middle Fork was beautiful, but it was also vulnerable. The valley is narrow, with steep watersheds that respond quickly to heavy rainfall. When storms stalled over the basin, runoff could turn the quiet river into a fast, debris filled flood that tore up bottomland, washed out roads, and threatened towns downstream toward Hazard and Beattyville.
Flood Control on Paper: The 1938 Flood Control Act
The decision to dam the Middle Fork did not begin in Bowlingtown. It began in Washington in the late 1930s, when Congress adopted the Flood Control Act of June 28, 1938. That law authorized an ambitious program of reservoirs and levees across the Ohio River basin, including projects in the Kentucky River watershed. Buckhorn Lake was one of several structures later developed under that authority to manage floods on the headwater forks that feed the Kentucky River.
By the mid twentieth century flood control had become a central part of federal water policy. New Deal era projects on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers were followed by a wave of postwar dams that reached into Eastern Kentucky. Engineers and planners looked for valleys where they could capture runoff during storms and then release that stored water later, trading the sharp, destructive peaks of flood crests for slower, more manageable flows.
The Middle Fork fit the pattern. It drains a sizable basin, funnels water toward downstream communities, and cuts through a narrow gorge near Buckhorn that offered a good dam site. When federal studies ranked possible projects in the Kentucky River basin, Buckhorn rose to the top as a structure that could help protect both local residents and towns further down the system. Later hydrologic assessments for the Beattyville flood risk management study would list Buckhorn alongside Carr Creek Dam as key flood risk management projects already operating in the basin.
From Plans to Earth and Concrete
Although the authorization came in 1938, the dam itself was a product of the 1950s and early 1960s. In that period Eastern Kentucky residents were living through a string of damaging floods, including the famous 1957 event that inundated communities along the North, Middle, and South forks of the Kentucky River. Family accounts from the Middle Fork remember the tension vividly, including stories of armed men from Hazard confronting dam personnel during a high water crisis to argue over how much water would be released.
Ground was broken for Buckhorn Dam on September 29, 1956. Work crews set out to build an earthen and rockfill embankment with a concrete intake and outlet structure at its center, backed by a gated spillway and a narrow but deep pool stretching upstream along the crooked river gorge. Fisheries biologists later wrote that construction of a flood control dam across the Middle Fork began in September 1956 and was substantially completed by September 1960, when the last major elements were in place. Federal hydrologic documents describe the project as being placed into operation in the early 1960s, when the reservoir and control works were fully integrated into Kentucky River flood management plans.
The City of Buckhorn’s own history notes that the embankment is about 1,020 feet long and rises around 162 feet above the original river bed. From the roadway on top of the dam, visitors look down on the Middle Fork squeezed into a steep gorge below and out across the long, narrow lake that backs far into the hills. The same local account emphasizes how the project altered travel, since the new reservoir and dam forced relocations of Kentucky Route 28 and other roads and made it impossible to drive directly from Buckhorn to Hazard without leaving the county.
Inside the dam’s galleries, concrete and steel carry the real work. Gates and valves allow operators to control the rate at which stored water is released, and instruments register how the structure responds as the reservoir rises and falls. Buckhorn is regulated by a formal Water Control Manual that sets out how the project will be operated to meet its authorized purposes, which include flood risk mitigation for the Kentucky and Ohio rivers, water quality, recreation, and water supply.
Filling the Basin and Submerging Bowlingtown
Once the dam was completed and the gates closed, the valley began to change. The reservoir filled behind the embankment and the town that had grown squarely in the Middle Fork bottom gave way to the new lake.
Families from Bowlingtown and the surrounding hollows were bought out under federal land acquisition programs. Houses were moved or torn down. Churches, schools, and businesses closed. Cemeteries were relocated to higher ground, often to consolidated graveyards that still bear the names of the former community. The City of Buckhorn’s history notes that Buckhorn Lake covered portions of Highway 28 and displaced Bowlingtown alongside many other homes and burial grounds.
Some of that story is now preserved in stone. At Buckhorn Lake State Resort Park a plaque at the lodge honors Bowlingtown and records its dates as 1800 to 1960, marking the moment when a town with deep roots in the Middle Fork valley disappeared beneath a new reservoir. Oral history projects have filled in the human side of the story. The KET documentary “As the Water Rises: Finding the Lost Community of Bowlingtown” follows former residents and descendants as they describe pre impoundment life, the arrival of surveyors and federal officials, the decision to accept or resist buyouts, and the memories that remain even when the physical landscape is gone.
Other films and family history projects, such as the “Forever Home” short documentary and the “Remembering Bowlingtown” blog, preserve photographs, transcribed plaques, and genealogy tied to families whose front porches, gardens, and schoolyards now lie under seasonal pool. Together, these sources make clear that Buckhorn Lake did not simply appear in an empty valley. It replaced a lived in community whose stories still belong to the region’s history.
A Lake for Recreation and Wildlife
From the beginning Buckhorn was planned as more than a flood control structure. Federal and state planners set aside lands around the pool for recreation, wildlife stewardship, and public access. The Corps of Engineers operates several campgrounds and day use areas around the lake, including the popular Buckhorn Dam Campground below the embankment where families camp beside the tailwater, fish near the spillway, and watch elk and deer on the surrounding hillsides.
On the high bluff above a long arm of the lake, the Commonwealth of Kentucky created Buckhorn Lake State Resort Park in the early 1960s. Park histories describe an 856 acre park that pairs a modernist lakeside lodge and cottages with trails, a swim beach, boat ramps, and a view that looks straight down the drowned valley toward the old townsite.
Buckhorn also supports a sizeable wildlife management area. Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources surveys of the Middle Fork documented the transformation of the river as the reservoir filled, noting changes in fish communities as deep, still water replaced a swift gravel bottom channel in the main stem while upstream tributaries continued to support species such as muskellunge. Later environmental reports from the Louisville District highlight how project lands now harbor rare species like the federally threatened Kentucky arrow darter in feeder streams near the lake.
Recreation, conservation, and flood control come together in the project’s master planning. In 1972 the Corps adopted a master plan for Buckhorn and revisited it in the early 2020s. The updated master plan and environmental assessment guide where future trails, campgrounds, and habitat projects will go, and they frame how the agency balances shoreline development, protection of cultural sites, and the project’s primary role as a flood risk management structure.
How Buckhorn Works in a Storm
On most days the lake sits at or near its normal operating pool, held around elevation 757 feet above sea level. During fall and winter, when heavy storms are more likely, operators hold the lake lower to reserve storage capacity. When a major storm moves into the Kentucky River basin the reservoir begins to rise as runoff pours down the Middle Fork. Under the Water Control Manual, Buckhorn stores that water until downstream rivers fall back within safe ranges, then releases it in controlled flows.
The flood storage space is not just a theoretical number. It has been tested repeatedly. In February 2025 a sequence of heavy storms drove the lake to approximately elevation 837.2 feet, the second highest pool of record since 1963. Corps of Engineers news releases and a detailed question and answer sheet issued in March 2025 explained how the project performed and how high water affects nearby roads and properties.
According to that Q and A, Kentucky Highway 257 and several county roads begin to flood when the lake reaches about elevation 805 feet. If storms continue and the reservoir keeps rising, more segments of road are submerged in stages. The Corps purchased property rights up to around elevation 845 feet through fee ownership and flowage easements so that it can store floodwater even when that storage temporarily inundates roadways and private land within the project boundary. The same document describes a new Buckhorn Lake Viewer map that allows residents to see how different water levels overlap with their property.
The 2025 flood carried another message. Corps hydrologists noted that runoff from high intensity rainfall has become more frequent in the Buckhorn watershed in recent years. From the early 1980s to 2012 there was only one event in which more than three inches of rain fell in 24 hours, while from 2013 to 2020 there were three such events and from 2021 to 2025 there were five, three of which exceeded four inches of rain in 24 hours. This pattern matches broader findings in NOAA’s precipitation frequency work for the Ohio River basin and in climate vulnerability assessments for the Appalachian region, which warn that intense short duration rainfall is becoming more common.
In that sense Buckhorn Lake is both a mid century structure and a twenty first century tool. Its designers could not have foreseen the exact storms that now hammer Eastern Kentucky, but their embankment and outlet works are still being used to blunt the worst impacts while agencies reevaluate how to manage risk in a changing climate.
Memory, Commemoration, and the Story Under the Water
While hydrologists and engineers look at Buckhorn through the lens of storage volumes and stage elevations, many local residents see it through the lens of memory. For them the lake is a place where family stories surface whenever the water is low enough to reveal old foundations or when they walk through the relocated cemeteries that hold Bowlingtown’s dead.
Documentaries and social media posts have helped keep those memories alive. The “Ghost Lakes” blog offers a narrative of Bowlingtown’s history and links to pre impoundment highway maps that show how roads and homes once clustered in the valley now under water. Kentucky Historic Travels and other public history projects have visited Buckhorn to talk about “lost towns” across Kentucky, using Bowlingtown as an example of how flood control projects erased some communities while protecting others.
Each year descendants and former residents continue to gather, in person or online, to share photographs, swap stories of the swinging bridge and the stores along the Middle Fork, and watch films like “As the Water Rises” that stitch together family testimony with historical documents. The plaque at the lodge, the markers in the cemeteries, and the documentaries all serve as reminders that Buckhorn Lake is both a place of recreation and a reservoir of memory.
Buckhorn in the Larger Appalachian Story
Buckhorn is only one of many reservoirs that reshaped Appalachian river valleys in the mid twentieth century. In Kentucky alone federal and state agencies built structures on the North Fork, South Fork, and main stem of the Kentucky River, as well as on tributaries across the Ohio River basin. In the 1970s government accountability reports compared projects like Buckhorn to other regional lakes, noting how flood control and recreation benefits were used to justify the costs of dam construction and land acquisition.
Today those projects are being reexamined as communities reckon with both their benefits and their costs. For downstream towns, Buckhorn Dam remains a crucial tool for reducing flood risk. For families from Bowlingtown and the surrounding hollows, it also stands as a monument to what was taken. For biologists and park visitors, the lake and its public lands have become habitat and parkland that would not exist without the dam.
The Corps’ current master planning and the Kentucky River basin climate studies reflect this complicated legacy. They ask how to keep dams like Buckhorn operating safely and effectively, how to adapt to more intense rainfall, and how to manage recreation and conservation on lands that were once privately owned farms and homeplaces.
A Valley That Holds Two Stories
Standing on the dam today you can look upstream toward the drowned valley and downstream toward the narrow gorge where the Middle Fork continues its run toward the confluence at Beattyville. On one side is a lake used by anglers, campers, and families who come for the quiet water and the state resort park. On the other is a river whose floods are now shaped by a mid century embankment that rises far above the old channel.
Under the surface lie the foundations of a community that now lives on in plaques, photographs, oral histories, and the stories descendants still tell. Buckhorn Lake Dam is a piece of federal infrastructure that continues to do the work it was built for, storing floodwater and stabilizing flows in the Kentucky River system. It is also part of the Appalachian story of lost towns, hard choices, and the complicated tradeoffs that come when a narrow valley becomes a reservoir in the name of safety downstream.
Sources & Further Reading
United States. “Flood Control Act of 1938.” Public Law 75–761, 52 Stat. 1215 (June 28, 1938). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_Control_Act_of_1938 Wikipedia
United States. “Water Resources Development Act of 2007.” Public Law 110–114, 121 Stat. 1041 (November 8, 2007). https://www.congress.gov/110/plaws/publ114/PLAW-110publ114.pdf Congress.gov
United States. Energy and Water Development Appropriations Act, 2002. Public Law 107–66, 115 Stat. 486 (November 12, 2001). https://science.osti.gov/-/media/budget/pdf/sc-congressional-appropriations/fy-2002/enacted-bill-public-law/FY02_PL_107_66_v2.pdf U.S. DOE Office of Science
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Great Lakes and Ohio River Division. “Buckhorn Lake.” Project information page, January 10, 2024. https://www.lrd.usace.army.mil/Mission/Projects/Article/3641099/buckhorn-lake/ USACE LRD
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Louisville District. “Buckhorn Lake Master Plan Update.” News release, January 9, 2024. https://www.lrd.usace.army.mil/Mission/Projects/Article/3638846/buckhorn-lake-master-plan-update/ USACE LRD
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Louisville District. Buckhorn Lake Draft Master Plan with Integrated Environmental Assessment. 2023. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Buckhorn_Lake_draft_master_plan_with_integrated_environmental_assessment_-_USACE-p16021coll7-23339.pdf Wikimedia Commons
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Operation and Maintenance: Buckhorn Lake, KY, Fiscal Year 2020. In Operation and Maintenance justification volume, USACE-p16021coll6-2119. 2019. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/Operation_and_maintenance_-_USACE-p16021coll6-2119.pdf Wikimedia Commons
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. FY 2023 Work Plan – Operation and Maintenance. Entry for “Buckhorn Lake, KY.” 2023. https://usace.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/api/collection/p16021coll6/id/2316/download CONTENTdm
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Louisville District. “Buckhorn Lake (Eastern Kentucky) Flooding Event – Frequently Asked Questions.” March 7, 2025. https://www.lrd.usace.army.mil/missions/projects/article/4112484/buckhorn-lake-eastern-kentucky-flooding-event/ USACE LRD
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Great Lakes and Ohio River Division. “Buckhorn Lake – Recreation.” January 10, 2024. https://www.lrd.usace.army.mil/Missions/Recreation/Display/Article/3641620/buckhorn-lake/ USACE LRD
Turner, William R. “The Buckhorn Reservoir Fishery During the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Years of Impoundment.” Fisheries Bulletin 46. Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources, 1966. https://fw.ky.gov/
Hoffnagle, Timothy L., and William R. Turner. “Muskellunge Streams Investigation in the Middle Fork and South Fork of the Kentucky River.” Fisheries Bulletin 78. Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources, 1977. https://fw.ky.gov/
Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources. “Buckhorn Lake Wildlife Management Area – Index Map.” Map, 2013. https://fw.ky.gov/
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. Perry County, Kentucky Highway Map. 1937. https://transportation.ky.gov/Maps/
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. Perry County, Kentucky Highway Map. 1955. https://transportation.ky.gov/Maps/
U.S. Geological Survey. Buckhorn Dam, KY 7.5-Minute Topographic Quadrangle. Various editions. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
City of Buckhorn. “Buckhorn Dam, Buckhorn Lake, and Tailwater Campground.” City of Buckhorn, Kentucky. https://cityofbuckhorn.org/buckhorn-lake/ cityofbuckhorn.org
“Reflections.” Perry County newspaper column, April 9, 2025. KYPublicNotice.com. https://www.kypublicnotice.com/
WSGS (Hazard, Kentucky). “History Note on Buckhorn Dam Dedication, September 10, 1960.” Facebook post, September 10, 2020. https://www.facebook.com/
Kentucky Educational Television (KET). As the Water Rises: Finding the Lost Community of Bowlingtown. Documentary film, c. 2014. https://ket.org/program/as-the-water-rises-finding-the-lost-community-of-bowlingtown-14459/ KET
Pollard, Traci Bowling. “Bowlingtown, Kentucky – A Lost Community, but Not Forgotten.” Kentucky Kinfolk (blog), March 11, 2013. https://joannedi.wordpress.com/2013/03/11/bowlingtown-kentucky-a-lost-communiy-but-not-forgtten/ joannedi.wordpress.com
Pollard, Traci Bowling. “FOREVER HOME: The History of Bowlingtown Kentucky (Buckhorn State Park).” Kentucky Kinfolk (blog), 2022. https://bowlingbollingsandmoresurnamesfamily.wordpress.com/tag/buckhorn-lake/ bowlingbollingsandmoresurnamesfamily.wordpress.com
“YouTube. ‘Flood Control Dam (Formerly Bowlingtown, KY).’” Oral-history video with former residents, c. 2010s. https://www.youtube.com/
Kentucky Department of Parks. “Buckhorn Lake State Resort Park – History and Overview.” Kentucky State Parks. https://parks.ky.gov/buckhorn/parks/resort/buckhorn-lake-state-resort-park Kentucky State Parks
“Buckhorn Lake (Kentucky).” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Last modified 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckhorn_Lake_(Kentucky) Wikipedia
“Buckhorn Lake State Resort Park.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Last modified 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckhorn_Lake_State_Resort_Park Wikipedia
U.S. Government Accountability Office. Report RED-76-10: Red River Lake – An Evaluation of the Project’s Benefits and Costs. Washington, D.C., 1975. https://www.gao.gov/
U.S. Geological Survey. “USGS 03280800 Buckhorn Lake at Buckhorn, KY.” Daily data series, 2014–present. https://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/dv?site_no=03280800 USGS Water Data
Art Lander Jr. “Art Lander’s Outdoors: Buckhorn Lake Offers Beautiful Mountain Scenery and Muskie Hideaway.” Northern Kentucky Tribune, October 23, 2020. https://nkytribune.com/2020/10/art-landers-outdoors-buckhorn-lake-offers-beautiful-mountain-scenery-and-muskie-hideaway/ nkytribune.com
Author Note: As I wrote this piece I kept thinking about how a quiet lake can hide both engineering and the memory of a lost town beneath its surface. If you or your family have stories of Bowlingtown or Buckhorn, I hope you will share them so we can help keep those voices alive in the historical record.