Burkesville

History

Burkesville began as a small riverside settlement even before the Iroquois Indians officially sold the land in 1768. The settlement was originally called Cumberland Crossing. In 1846, it was incorporated as a city and named Burkesville after Isham Burk, a prominent citizen leader at that time. Just as Kentucky was a border state in the Civil War, so was Burkesville a border town. Burkesville stood on the Cumberland River, a major natural barrier between opposing forces, so Union and Confederate troops as well as guerillas led by Champ Ferguson sparred across the countryside. Confederate General John Hunt Morgan tore through the area while conducting Morgan's Raid, and Confederate General Hylan B. Lyon's raids in December 1864 burned seven courthouses, ending with the one in Burkesville on January 3. Burkesville was a fairly busy river port whose heyday came during the latter part of the nineteenth century, when water transportation was the most feasible way to move large quantities of goods. The rise of larger craft, such as the riverboat, required diligent dredging of the riverbed to keep it navigable so far upstream. The last steamboat docked in Burkesville in 1929, the year after the first major road was opened to the larger city of Glasgow, to the west. The river's head of commercial navigation moved from Burnside (which has a railroad) to Burkesville (which does not) when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began building Wolf Creek Dam without a lock about 25 miles upstream before World War II. The dam controlled flooding that had plagued the town from its beginning, but was the last nail in the coffin of commercial navigation. The corps' impoundment of Dale Hollow Reservoir in 1944 gave the town a tourist and fishing trade, and development of a trout fishery on…

Geography

Burkesville is located at (36.792787, -85.369578). According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of , of which is land and , or 2.90%, is water.

Race & ethnicity

Most-observed species

• Northern Cardinal

  Cardinalis cardinalis (Linnaeus, 1758) · Aves
  424
• American Crow

  Corvus brachyrhynchos C.L.Brehm, 1822 · Aves
  391
• Carolina Wren

  Thryothorus ludovicianus (Latham, 1790) · Aves
  326
• Red-bellied Woodpecker

  Melanerpes carolinus (Linnaeus, 1758) · Aves
  314
• Turkey Vulture

  Cathartes aura (Linnaeus, 1758) · Aves
  313
• Tufted Titmouse

  Baeolophus bicolor (Linnaeus, 1766) · Aves
  309
• Carolina Chickadee

  Poecile carolinensis (Audubon, 1834) · Aves
  297
• Blue Jay

  Cyanocitta cristata (Linnaeus, 1758) · Aves
  269

Most recent

• M 2.67 — 2019-10-12
  21 km ENE of Somerset, Kentucky
• M 2.5 — 2014-11-08
  9 km N of Grimsley, Tennessee