Paducah, KY news and local guide

Paducah was first settled as Pekin around 1821 by James and William Pore, and in 1827 the explorer and surveyor William Clark laid out the town and renamed it Paducah. Local lore long tied the name to a Chickasaw chief called Paduke, but scholars of the Chickasaw say no such chief or band existed, and historians believe Clark named the town for the Comanche of the western plains, known to settlers as the Padoucas, from a Kaw or Omaha word. Paducah was established as a town in 1830 and incorporated as a city in 1838. Steamboat trade and railroads made it a river and rail center, with a brickworks and a foundry for rail and locomotive parts, dry docks and barge companies, and it became an important hub of the Illinois Central Railroad, which built its largest locomotive shop there between 1924 and 1927.

More about Paducah

At the start of the Civil War, after Confederates occupied Columbus, Union forces under Ulysses S. Grant occupied Paducah, which served as a major Union supply depot. On December 17, 1862, under Grant's General Order No. 11, Union forces expelled 30 Jewish families from their homes, on the basis of antisemitic assumptions about the cotton black market. The local businessman Cesar Kaskel telegraphed President Lincoln and met with him, and amid wider protests the order was revoked. The Ohio River flood of 1937, driven by 18 inches of rain in 16 days and sheets of moving ice, was the worst natural disaster in Paducah's history, forcing 27,000 residents from their homes for nearly three weeks, and plaques downtown still mark the high water. Sources Wikipedia: Paducah, Kentucky