Golden Pond

The moonshine capital that became a visitor centre car park

Golden Pond was a town in western Trigg County, Kentucky, strung for almost a mile along what is now U.S. Route 68 on the peninsula between the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers. It is gone. Its site is the headquarters of the Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area, 11 miles west-southwest of Cadiz, and the name survives mostly in the recreation area's mailing address.

Its name has three stories. The most accepted says that residents named a pond 2.25 miles west of town because sunlight on its surface looked like melted gold. Another, likely a legend, credits a man who scattered gold dust near the pond to start a gold rush and push up land prices. A third claims the place was once called Fungo, after the entertainment at the local saloon, though that name may belong to a community further west, or may never have been used at all.

A post office called Golden Pond opened on 28 December 1848, its site unknown, and the town at its known location was founded in 1882. It lived on timber, iron ore and farmland. Fire destroyed it in 1898 and badly again in 1936, and both times it was rebuilt. During Prohibition it became known nationally for moonshine whiskey, sold in speakeasies as far away as Chicago, Detroit and St. Louis.

The end came from the Tennessee Valley Authority. Its dams, built from the 1930s on to control floods and generate electricity, made Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley and cut the peninsula off from the rest of the state. In 1964 the TVA opened the first office of Land Between the Lakes at Golden Pond, and the government bought up every property inside the recreation area, by eminent domain where owners would not sell; some holdouts' homes were burned before condemnation was complete. Retta Jones-Balentine, born in Golden Pond in 1940, had to leave in 1966, and the last residents were gone by 1969. There is still controversy over the prices paid. Many former residents settled in eastern Calloway County, at a place named Little Golden Pond in 1989.

The Trigg County Historical Museum has mounted an exhibit on the lost town, with old photographs, a church pew, a soda fountain and a moonshine still from Prohibition days.