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Caneyville, Kentucky

Everything Caneyville is known for

RoadyGoat plays music like this when you drive through Caneyville. It's free on iPhone, and full songs play through Apple Music.

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Artists From Caneyville

Rivers & Roads in Song near Caneyville

Songs written about the waterways and highways that run near Caneyville.

History of Caneyville

The Tar That Ate the Ice Age RoadyGoat

50000

That same black tar that named this Kentucky town has another, far more sinister claim to fame. In the middle of Los Angeles sit the La Brea Tar Pits, where natural asphalt seeps up from underground and pools at the surface. For tens of thousands of years, between roughly fifty thousand and ten thousand years ago, that sticky black ooze worked as a perfect trap. An animal would wander in, get stuck, and never get out. Predators chasing easy prey got caught too. The tar then preserved their bones in stunning detail. Over a million bones have come out of the pits, including more than four thousand dire wolves, over two thousand saber-toothed cats, and even Columbian mammoths. The same gooey substance that killed them became the museum that saved them, a tar trap turned into one of the richest Ice Age fossil sites on Earth.

17.7 mi away

The Glue of Ancient Babylon RoadyGoat

-5000

Long before asphalt paved a single road, humans were using natural tar for something else entirely: keeping water out. For thousands of years, people gathered bitumen where it seeped up from the ground and used it to waterproof their world. The oldest known reed boat, found in Kuwait, was coated in bitumen around five thousand years before the common era. In ancient Mesopotamia, builders used hot bitumen as mortar between mud bricks. The Greek writer Herodotus described it sealing the walls of Babylon. Baskets were lined with it to carry water, and ships were sealed with tar, the very source of the word pitch in seafaring. The same sticky black substance that named this Kentucky town was, for our ancestors, one of the first great building materials on Earth.

17.7 mi away

The Bottom of the Barrel RoadyGoat

Ever wonder where asphalt actually comes from? Most of the asphalt on modern roads is literally the bottom of the barrel, the heaviest leftover of crude oil. When refiners heat crude, the lighter parts boil off first and rise: the vapors that become gasoline, then jet fuel, then diesel. What stays behind, too heavy to evaporate, sinking to the bottom, is the thick black residue we call asphalt, or refined bitumen. It is the last thing left when everything lighter has been driven off. So the smooth highway under your tires is the dregs of the oil barrel, the part nobody could burn as fuel, given a second life as the road itself. And here in Kentucky, nature did the refining first, soaking it straight into the sandstone.

17.7 mi away

Everything Near Caneyville

7 stories, landmarks & places within ~20 miles — the same local lore RoadyGoat plays as you drive through.

  • Grayson Springs (resort) · 14.7 mi · Scraped Hmdb

    Imagine the glamorous life at this spot! Grayson Springs was once a popular destination for the wealthy and famous, a true escape in rural Kentucky. The resort officially began in 1832, built around naturally occurring…

  • Bill Monroe Farm · 15.2 mi · Scraped Hmdb

    Pull over and listen up, music fans, because you're near the birthplace of bluegrass itself: the Bill Monroe Farm. Bill Monroe, the man who practically invented bluegrass, was born and raised right here near Rosine,…

  • The Tar That Ate the Ice Age · 17.7 mi

    That same black tar that named this Kentucky town has another, far more sinister claim to fame. In the middle of Los Angeles sit the La Brea Tar Pits, where natural asphalt seeps up from underground and pools at the…

  • The Glue of Ancient Babylon · 17.7 mi

    Long before asphalt paved a single road, humans were using natural tar for something else entirely: keeping water out. For thousands of years, people gathered bitumen where it seeped up from the ground and used it to…

  • The Bottom of the Barrel · 17.7 mi

    Ever wonder where asphalt actually comes from? Most of the asphalt on modern roads is literally the bottom of the barrel, the heaviest leftover of crude oil. When refiners heat crude, the lighter parts boil off first…

  • The Town Named Asphalt · 17.8 mi

    Asphalt is a tiny community in Edmonson County, in western Kentucky, about five miles west of Brownsville. The name is not a joke and not an accident. The hills here hold a strange treasure: rock asphalt, sandstone…

  • The Liquid That Looks Like Rock · 18.0 mi

    Here's something that will bend your brain. Pitch, a cousin of asphalt and tar, looks and feels exactly like a solid. Hit it with a hammer and it shatters like glass. But it is not a solid at all. It is a liquid, an…

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