Shippingport, Kentucky

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Shippingport as it looks today

Shippingport, Kentucky is an abandoned settlement near Louisville, Kentucky on a peninsula near the Falls of the Ohio. It was incorporated without a name on October 10, 1785, then became Campbell Town after Revolutionary War solder John Campbell, and was sold to a Philadelphia-based partnership in 1803 and renamed Shippingport. They established a warehouse, rope walk and mill at the site, and the area began to be settled, primarily by French families.

The locations of the six early Falls settlements, as shown on a modern map

Though the town frequently flooded, it reached its peak in the 1820s with a population of 600, but the digging of the Louisville and Portland Canal in 1825 made the peninsula an island, allowing ships to bypass the Falls and, by extension, Shippingport. The town dwindled until the federal government acquired the remaining private property there in 1958 to widen the canal, evicting the remaining families, some of whom had lived there for over a century.

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