Bowlingtown history reveals Perry County’s changing landscape

Bowlingtown does not survive as a town on today’s map, but it still explains how Perry County was built, moved, and remade. The former settlement sat on the Middle Fork of the Kentucky River near Eversole Branch and Bowling Branch, and its story now lies under Buckhorn Lake and Buckhorn Lake State Resort Park.

Bowlingtown’s place in the county

Perry County was founded in 1821 from parts of Floyd and Clay counties, and both the county and Hazard carry the name of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry. That naming history matters because Perry County’s place names are not decorative, they are records of who held land, who settled near the river, and how communities took shape along narrow bottoms and ridges.

The county government describes Perry County’s history as deeply tied to coal and timber, two industries that helped shape roads, jobs, and settlement patterns across the hills. Buckhorn Lake State Resort Park now stands as one of the county’s best-known destinations, but the ground beneath it once held homes, graves, and a small river community called Bowlingtown.

What Bowlingtown was called, and why

Kentucky Atlas ties Bowlingtown directly to the Bowling and Bolling families, an example of how local surnames became geography. The community’s post office opened in 1903, was renamed Lillian in 1907, became Bowlingtown again in 1918, and closed in 1959.

That sequence captures more than a change in labels. It shows how a post office could be the anchor for a place even when the settlement itself remained small, and how a family name could return to official use after a brief detour. For Perry County readers, the name Bowlingtown is one of the clearest reminders that the county’s communities often grew from kinship networks as much as from formal town planning.

The lake that erased the town

Buckhorn Lake is a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers project on the Middle Fork of the Kentucky River in Leslie and Perry counties. The dam embankment stretches a little more than 1,000 feet and rises about 160 feet above the old stream bed, and the reservoir holds about 1,230 surface acres at normal summer pool.

That water changed everything around the old town site. The lake flooded over portions of Highway 28 and displaced Bowlingtown along with many other homes and cemeteries, turning a river-bottom settlement into submerged ground. A Bowlingtown history source says families were forced to relocate in 1960 when the lake was constructed, and another account says 873 graves were reinterred at Buckhorn Cemetery.

Those details make the lake more than a scenic feature. It is also a boundary line between the county that existed before impoundment and the county that came after it, with one road, one cemetery, and one family settlement after another pushed onto higher ground.

What remains at Buckhorn

Buckhorn Lake State Resort Park now covers 856 acres, and Kentucky State Parks says the lodge overlooks the roughly 1,200-acre lake. The park did not officially open until 1965, several years after the relocation that cleared the old Bowlingtown site, and the lodge later rose on land once occupied by the Bowlingtown School.

That physical layering gives the park a sharper local meaning than a simple recreation area. Visitors looking out from the lodge are standing above a place where children once went to school, families lived near the river, and graves had to be moved to make room for the reservoir.

A history piece says a plaque at the lodge honors Bowlingtown and gives its dates as 1800 to 1960. That marker does important work: it keeps the lost community visible even as the lake and resort park occupy the ground.

Why the names still matter

Bowlingtown is the most dramatic example of how Perry County’s place names preserve a vanished landscape. The names of the Middle Fork, Eversole Branch, Bowling Branch, Buckhorn Cemetery, Highway 28, and Buckhorn Lake State Resort Park all point to the same story: river-bottom communities once clustered where water, kinship, and travel routes met.

The county still carries that older geography in plain sight. Residents who know the region understand that some of the most familiar landmarks now sit on land that was once a settlement, a school site, or a burial ground. The lake, the park, and the road network did not just redraw maps. They also shifted where families could stay, where graves could rest, and which names survived as the county’s living memory.

Bowlingtown’s history shows Perry County as a place where the past is not gone so much as submerged, relocated, and renamed.