It was a major project initiated during the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration, to invest in infrastructure to benefit the country.

After absorbing the Tennessee, the Ohio flows for another 46 miles (74 km) before emptying into the Mississippi River at Cairo, Illinois.

It is within parts of Livingston, Marshall, Lyon, Calloway, and Trigg counties in Kentucky and parts of Humphreys, Benton, Decatur, Stewart, Carroll, Wayne, Henderson, Henry, Perry, Houston, and Hardin counties in Tennessee.

The dam has a generating capacity of 223,100 kilowatts, and its 24-bay spillway has a total discharge of 1,050,000 cubic feet per second (30,000 m3/s).

[4] A large industrial complex of chemical plants has developed below the dam near Calvert City due to the convenient barge transportation and inexpensive TVA electricity.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers conducted an extensive survey of the lower river in the early 1900s, and recommended constructing a dam at Aurora Landing (roughly 20 miles (32 km) above the present site), but the project was never funded.

In the 1930s, the Tennessee Valley Authority sought to create a continuous minimum 9-foot (2.7 m) channel along the entirety of the river from Paducah to Knoxville.

The communities of Johnsonville and Springville in Tennessee, and Birmingham in Kentucky were completely inundated by the project.

[1] Kentucky Dam was completed and its gates closed on August 30, 1944, and its first generator went online September 14, 1944.

Instead, the water level would rise slowly over at least six hours before flooding the Calvert City chemical plants.