Taylorsville Lake State Park is a park encompassing 1,625 acres (7 km2) in Spencer County, Kentucky, roughly between Louisville and Lexington. Taylorsville Lake, its major feature, extends into parts of Anderson County and Nelson County.
Taylorsville Lake gains its name from the nearby town, named for President Zachary Taylor's father, Richard Taylor, who donated 60 acres (240,000 m2) of his own land for creation of the town. The lake was created when the United States Army Corps of Engineers chose to dam the Salt River, thereby creating the lake, with its public opening in January 1983. The dam, which measures a height of 163 feet (50 m) and a length of 1,280 feet (390 m), cost $28.8 million to build. The resulting lake is 3,050 acres (12 km2) in total area, has 75 miles (121 km) of shoreline, and is 18 miles (29 km) long.
There is both a park office, maintained by the state of Kentucky, and a visitors' center maintained by the United States Army Corps of Engineers. The Visitors' Center is pyramid-shaped with a brown metal roof, and contains displays of the local trees, boating, and dam management. Fishing is the main attraction, as it is the most heavily stocked lake in the Commonwealth of Kentucky; it is known for its bluegill, and features bass and crappie. This is facilitated by a rule that bass must be 15 inches (38 cm) long, at minimum, to be legally caught and kept; crappie must be 9 inches (23 cm); bluegill are not sport fish and there is no minimum size. There are also 17.3 miles (27.8 km) of hiking trails in the park, but these are seen as poor quality by hiking enthusiasts as their use by equestrian traffic has made the hiking trails like "a plow had chattered down them". Camping was not available at the park until 1998.
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The mountainous region of the State of Maine stretches from near the White Mountains, northeasterly one hundred and sixty miles, to the head of the Aroostook River, and is about sixty miles wide. The wild or unsettled portion is far more extensive. So that some hours only of travel in this direction will carry the curious to the verge of a primitive forest, more interesting, perhaps, on all accounts, than they would reach by going a thousand miles westward.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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