Leavenworth is a town in Jennings Township, Crawford County, Indiana, along the Ohio River.

[4] Leavenworth was laid out in 1818 in a horseshoe shaped bend of the Ohio River, directly under a large bluff called Mt.

The bluff forms part of the Indiana Ridge and faces directly across the river toward Kentucky.

"Old Leavenworth" (the original town, now practically abandoned) was almost completely wiped out by the huge 1937 Ohio River flood, as it was built directly on the floodplain.

In 1824, a wood yard was established in the town to provide fuel to steamboats, and David Lyon had a boatbuilding industry here in 1830.

Riverboat men returning from New Orleans were thought to be carriers of the yellow fever and cholera epidemics that often devastated the Ohio Valley frontier.

Together, they piloted the steamboat Nebraska past Memphis at the outbreak of the Civil War, receiving gunshots across their bow as a warning to halt.

Dressed as Federal troops, they crossed the Ohio River on horseback a few miles downstream from Leavenworth, then struck out for Paoli, pretending to be in pursuit of Union deserters.

In French Lick, they met with the local Copperhead leader, Doctor William A. Bowles, who headed the Confederate-leaning Democratic party in southern Indiana and was a supporter of slavery.

Residents of Leavenworth carried ammunition to Union troops, who gunned several of the horsemen down as they tried to get across the river at Little Blue Island.

At the end of the Civil War, Leavenworth was a thriving town, a regular stop for steamboats on the Ohio River.

The fire was discovered by Lyman Davis, a porter at the Hawn Hotel, but all attempts to extinguish the blaze were to no avail.

Record rainfalls by late January resulted in a huge flood, the most destructive in the Ohio Valley's history.

[9] Laborers enlisted by Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Salvation Army salvaged what they could, but when the waters receded, it was decided to move what was left of Leavenworth uphill.

[11] The climate in this area is characterized by hot, humid summers and generally mild to cool winters.