History
The river received its name from the Bullitt's Lick facility that was founded in 1779 by Henry Crist. The river has been used for navigation and sustenance since humans occupied the area. Old Indian artifacts are found along the length of the river valley by farmers and new construction work in the area. Log cabins and settlements grew on the banks, using it as a source of water, power and transportation. The river bank flats and water made travel over through the ridged terrain easier.
During the American Civil War, an earth-walled fort was established on a tall hill overlooking the Ohio, near the Salt River. It guarded passage through Louisville and south on the road along the Ohio River, which much later became known as the Dixie Highway. It also protected against Southern forces attacking from the Ohio River and up the Salt River. Fort Duffield may be the best-preserved earthen Civil War fort in America and illustrates how important river access via the Salt River and the Ohio was to early travelers.
In 1983 a dam was built just east of Taylorsville, forming Taylorsville Lake.
Read more about this topic: Salt River (Kentucky)
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“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more, it is the history of earth and of heaven.”
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)