Taylorsville Lake State Park is a park encompassing 1200 acre in Spencer County, Kentucky, roughly midway between Louisville and Lexington. Taylorsville Lake, its major feature, extends into parts of Anderson County and Nelson County. Taylorsville Lake gains its name from the nearby town, named for President Zachary Taylor's father, Richard Taylor, who donated 60 acre of his own land for creation of the town. The lake was created when the United States Army Corps of Engineers chose to dam the Salt River, thereby creating the lake, with its public opening in January 1983. The dam, which measures a height of 163 ft and a length of 1280 ft, cost $28.8 million to build. The resulting lake is 3050 acre in total area, has 75 mi of shoreline, and is 18 mi long.

Activities and amenities

There is both a park office, maintained by the state of Kentucky, and a visitors center maintained by the United States Army Corps of Engineers. The visitors center is pyramid-shaped with a brown metal roof, and contains displays of the local trees, boating, and dam management. Fishing is the main attraction, as Taylorsville Lake is the most heavily stocked lake in the Commonwealth of Kentucky; it is known for its bluegill, and features bass and crappie. This is facilitated by a rule that bass must be 15 in long, at minimum, to be legally caught and kept; crappie must be 9 in; bluegill are not sport fish and there is no minimum size. There are also 17.3 mi of hiking trails in the park, but these are seen as poor quality by hiking enthusiasts as their use by equestrian traffic has made the hiking trails like "a plow had chattered down them". Camping was not available at the park until 1998.