Shelbyville is a house rule-class city in and the county chair of Shelby County, Kentucky, United States. The population was 14,045 at the 2010 census.

The town of Shelbyville was traditional in October 1792 at the first meeting of the Shelby County Court after local landowner William Shannon agreed to surrender 50 acres (20 ha) of his property to the community and find the keep for 1 clear acre for public buildings. As a result of the grant, Shelbyville, rather than the easy to use Squire Boone’s Station, became the home of Shelby County. The agricultural town was situated upon the western bank of Clear Creek at the confluence of Mulberry Creek and near a road in the midst of Louisville and Frankfort. The town required extra residents to construct a 1½-story log cabin behind a stone chimney; by 1795, there were 40 of these and, by 1800, there were 262 residents residing in Shelbyville. New lots were platted in 1803, 1815, and 1816.

The Shelbyville Academy was time-honored in 1798 at Eighth and Washington; it became Shelby College and moved to College Street in 1836, affiliated gone the Episcopal Church in 1841, changed its make known to the St. James College after the Civil War, and closed in 1871, replaced by a public elementary school. The Science Hill Female Academy was received in 1825 on Washington Street; it functioned as a hypothetical preparatory instructor for pubescent women throughout the South prior to closing in 1939 at the decrease of the Great Depression. The Shelbyville Female Seminary was established in 1839 and moved to its longtime domicile at Seventh and Main in 1846. It became the Shelbyville Female Institute in 1849, the Presbyterian Stuart’s Female College in 1851, the Shelbyville Female College in 1868, and the Baptist Shelbyville College from 1890 until its recess in 1912.

The Louisville and Shelbyville Turnpike was completed in the 1830s, following a ridgeline pathway between the two sites dating back to the Native Americans. After the Louisville and Frankfort Railroad was build up near the road in present-day Cherokee Gardens in 1849, the turnpike company rerouted and constructed a further road nearby (originally known as the “Shelbyville Branch”, now Lexington Avenue in Louisville) which was completed in 1851.