In 1962, Congress authorized the Army Corps of Engineers to construct a dam in the Red River of Kentucky to make the Red River Lake. During the next two decades, citizens banded together to resist the implementation of this project.

As one source put it, “to have lived in the State of Kentucky and been unaware of the fact of a dam was in prospect in the North Fork of the Red River, one would have to have his head in the sands like an ostrich.”

The lake, according to the vault, “would flood 2,100 acres, covering two-thirds of the gorge and destroying more than half of the plant and animal life.” One of the reasons for the dam was purportedly water storage for Lexington. The State of Kentucky agreed to pay extra money to have the dam built higher to impound water for Lexington, Frankfurt, and other downstream towns.

A year later, the privately owned Lexington Water company sold two of its reservoirs for a profit of then $2,415,846, undoubtedly banking on this new RRG water supply. Kentucky politician Gene Snyder referred to this event as “a peculiar coincidence. If Lexington needs water, why did they sell their reservoirs? Maybe that’s why they need more water.”

Another justification for the dam was recreation as a tourism generator. According to Floyd Ledford, who lived on the bank of the North Fork and would have had his house flooded underwater, “The motive of the people who want this dam is money. A lot of people are going to be disappointed. They ain’t going to get rich…there’s going to be sad people when they understand this lake isn’t going to make them wealthy.”

The turning point happened on November 18th 1967, when Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas led a protest hike of 600 hikers in the Clifty Wilderness of the Red

This gained national attention for the movement. Then Senator of Kentucky, John Sherman Cooper, responded to this resistance that such dam foes should have spoken up sooner. Public hearings for the dam were held 14 years before by request of citizens. But few people knew of the hearings in the first place.

In 1971 The University of Kentucky commissioned poet and essayist Wendell Berry to write a book in defense of the preservation of the Gorge in its unaltered state. Sierra club along with other environmental groups, became closely involved with the resistance efforts.

Organizations such as The Kentucky Audubon Society, Nature Conservancy, Inc., Kentucky Ornithological Union, and Kentucky Academy of Science all asked for a new study on the dam, but the answers for politicians remained the same “The funds have been granted, it's too late to stop now.” "Senator Cooper knows this is not necessarily so," said The Courier-Journal in another editorial. "Should a major oil field be discovered in the flats along Red River tomorrow, plans for the dam would be doornail dead by tomorrow night. And something far more precious to Kentucky's future than an oil field is at stake here.”

It wasn’t until December 3rd, 1993, that the citizens' efforts were finally rewarded with the 19.4 section of the Red River being entered into the Wild and Scenic river system by President Bill Clinton. This prevented all future considerations of damming along this section of the river. It is to the efforts of these citizens who fought an uphill and often felt losing battle that we owe what the Red is today.

Now it is our turn to take up the torch to ensure that the Red remains brilliant and beautiful.

Red River Gorge United
Email: info@rrgunited.org