Kenlake State Resort Park

The park exists because of the water. When the TVA dammed the Tennessee River, it flooded the valley to create Kentucky Lake, one of the largest man-made lakes in the country, and in 1948 the agency handed more than eleven hundred acres of the new shoreline to Kentucky. The state named it Kentucky Lake State Park, and over time people shortened that to Kenlake.

Development came quickly. Fifteen vacation cottages opened in 1950, and a lakeside hotel followed in the spring of 1952, turning the park into a proper resort where families could boat, fish, and swim on the new lake. Today the park still centers on the water, with a marina, a campground, and long open views across Kentucky Lake.

For a road tripper, Kenlake is an easy, restful stop. Short walking trails wind through the woods and down to the shore, and the lake draws anglers, paddlers, and boaters, while the wooded edges make fine birdwatching, from bluebirds in the trees to herons and egrets stalking the shallows.

In 1951, on a neighboring arm of the same lake, Kentucky opened Cherokee State Park, the first state park in Kentucky and the South created for Black families during segregation. It was, in the language of its day, advertised as the finest vacation site of its kind in the South, and it gave Black Kentuckians a lakeside retreat of their own when nearly every other public recreation area was closed to them.

Cherokee had about 300 acres with a beach, cottages, boat and fishing docks, a picnic area, a bathhouse, and a dining hall that seated two hundred. Just a short distance away, on a different part of the same lake, stood the whites-only Kenlake, and the two parks side by side made the hard geometry of segregation impossible to miss.

In 1963 Governor Bert Combs signed an executive order ending segregation in Kentucky's public facilities. With integration, Cherokee closed, and some of its cottages were literally floated or trucked over to Kenlake. Only a few original buildings remain, but a restoration project completed in 2010 has preserved and interpreted the site, and a connecting trail now links historic Cherokee to Kenlake so visitors can walk the ground and learn the story.

Kenlake sits at the western edge of the Land Between the Lakes, the broad wooded peninsula caught between Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley, one of the largest inland peninsulas in the country and a magnet for outdoor recreation.

From the park you are within easy reach of that whole region, with its bison and elk range, its planetarium and homeplace living-history farm, and hundreds of miles of trail and shoreline. Kenlake's own quiet trails and marina make a comfortable home base for exploring it.

It is that mix that gives the park its character: a relaxed resort on a beautiful lake, a doorway to a huge recreation area, and, held within its bounds, one of the more important and moving chapters in the story of public parks in the American South.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.