Paris Landing State Park

Paris Landing was a steamboat stop on the Tennessee River long before Kentucky Lake existed, and the state park sits on the shore of the lake that replaced the river. The Tennessee Valley Authority closed Kentucky Dam on August 30, 1944, and the rising water became one of the largest man-made lakes in the world. The park followed in 1945, and Paris took the name Capital City of Kentucky Lake. Today it has a lodge, cabins, a marina on the Tennessee River, an eighteen-hole golf course and trails, and the Birds of Paris Landing Aviary, which cares for raptors that cannot return to the wild.

The lake also covered something. In 1821 a well drilled in search of a salt bed on a former Chickasaw (Chikasha) reservation struck sulphur water, and Sulphur Well grew into the area's first tourist stop, a summer resort where people came to drink the water for their health. Many sought refuge there during the 1837 yellow fever epidemic. Kentucky Lake submerged the site in 1944.

A TVA reservoir creates a lake and removes a landscape. The aviary, the lakeshore trails and the marina make an easy afternoon above what the water covered.