Burkesville is a home rule-class city in Cumberland County, Kentucky, in the United States. Nestled among the rolling foothills of Appalachia and bordered by the Cumberland River to the south and east, it is the chair of its county. The population was 1,521 at the 2010 census.

Burkesville began as a small riverside concurrence even back the Iroquois Indians officially sold the house in 1768. The deal was originally called Cumberland Crossing. In 1846, it was incorporated as a city and named Burkesville after Isham Burk, a prominent citizen leader at that time.

Just as Kentucky was a be close to state in the Civil War, so was Burkesville a attach town. Burkesville stood on the Cumberland River, a major natural barrier in the middle of opposing forces, so Union and Confederate troops as well as guerillas led by Champ Ferguson sparred across the countryside. Confederate General John Hunt Morgan tore through the Place while conducting Morgan’s Raid, and Confederate General Hylan B. Lyon’s raids in December 1864 burned seven courthouses, ending as soon as the one in Burkesville upon January 3.

Burkesville was a fairly bustling river port whose heyday came during the latter allowance of the nineteenth century, when water transportation was the most practicable way to move large quantities of goods. The rise of larger craft, such as the riverboat, required hardworking dredging of the riverbed to keep it navigable in view of that far upstream. The last steamboat docked in Burkesville in 1929, the year after the first major road was opened to the larger city of Glasgow, 40 miles (64 km) to the west. The river’s head of poster navigation moved from Burnside (which has a railroad) to Burkesville (which does not) when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began building Wolf Creek Dam without a lock nearly 25 miles upstream since World War II. The dam controlled flooding that had plagued the town from its beginning, but was the last nail in the coffin of billboard navigation. The corps’ impoundment of Dale Hollow Reservoir in 1944 gave the town a tourist and fishing trade, and press forward of a trout fishery upon the river from the dam to Burkesville has as a consequence provided a small economic boost, as has proceed of Dale Hollow Lake State Resort Park.