Where is McLean County?

      McLean County is located in Western Kentucky, in the Lower Green River Valley. It's in the very upper reaches of the Mississippi Delta region, in the Western Kentucky Coal Fields. Agriculture is the largest industry, and is very much like agriculture throughout the midwest, with grain crops being the major land use.
     Our nearest city is Owensboro, and we lie approximately 100 miles north of Nashville, TN, 100 miles west of Louisville, KY, and 200 miles east of St. Louis, MO.

Trenton Ayer

Kyle Howard and Avery Brawner

Calhoun, Our County Seat

     Calhoun today is a small town, with only one stoplight and few businesses. We compiled a database of current buildings and compared it to the town 50 years ago. This map represents present day Calhoun.       

Calhoun in the 1950s

      Calhoun has always been a small town, but it has changed a lot since the 1950s. This map is a reconstruction of Calhoun in the 50s. It was made with the help of many long time residents and displayed on top of a modern satellite photo. While prior to the 50s, Calhoun was a thriving downtown, it is much different today.

Kyle Howard and Avery Brawner

Trenton Ayer and Cody Carter

Commerce, Shopping and Entertainment

   McLean County doesn't have much in the way of shopping and recreation, so we must travel to adjoining counties for many of our necessities, entertainment, even jobs.

   Using a Palm GPS database, we searched several categories, put them together in a database with geographic coordinates and constructed this map showing some of those places and the distance we must travel to them. The map also shows most of the comparable businesses in our county.

         McLean County Cemeteries 

  McLean County has 137 recorded cemeteries. 25 of these contain the remains of Civil War veterans from both the Union and Confederate armies. We have located, confirmed and mapped approximately 80 or these cemetery locations, using information from landowners, family members, old maps and footwork.

4H GIS Club

Avery Brawner and Kyle Howard

 Visible Coal Burning Power Plants

These are coal fired power plants visible from almost anywhere in our county:

      These power plants supply a huge number of houses and businesses with electricity made by coal.  These power plants can be seen for miles.

      The coal that comes from our area is very high in sulfur content.  When we burn this coal to make electricity the air is polluted by the sulfurous gases in the air while burning sulfur.

      Throughout this project we learned that some of the coal we burn comes from the western United States.  The coal from the west is rather low in sulfur.  We burn small amounts of this coal to keep our sulfur rates low, as required by law. The sulfur rates in western Kentucky coal is 4%.  This compares to the western United States level as 1.5%.

      As in many rural areas, lack of education is a problem. This map depicts the educational levels by census tract of McLean County residents. As you can see, a high percentage of residents have no high school diploma, even though McLean County Schools are one of the highest performing districts in Kentucky.

     The McLean County Adult education program, a partner in this program, offers General Education Diploma (GED) training for residents, often using our GIS analysis to determine where its potential students live and work.

Cody Carter and Trenton Ayer

  Fire Protection in McLean County

      McLean County has five fire fighting districts, and they're all volunteer. We've tried to help them out by producing this resource map, showing the district boundaries, waterlines, locations of buildings (from our high resolution landcover data), and the hydrant location data they currently have. We're also helping them complete the collection of hydrant location data.

     These firefighters do a great job for our county, saving lives and property nearly every day!              

James VanCleve

James VanCleve

  Where Can a Sex Offender Live?

     This map shows where sex offenders can and cannot live. Changes in the law in 2006 added churches, playgrounds and "places where children gather" to the already restricted school and daycare center zones. using buffering, we added the new areas to our map. McLean County has 12 registered sex offenders, 3 of whom name their residence as Calhoun.

     The homes displayed in red are homes that sex offenders cannot live in.  These homes are within a 1,000 foot radius of a school, daycare facility, playground facility, or churches.  The homes displayed in the blue are homes that sex offenders may live in.  They are outside the 1,000 foot radius around the designated areas.  The circle outlined in red is the 1,000 feet around the schools.  The circles outlined in yellow designate the 1,000 foot radius around the churches.  Daycare facilities are designated by the purple circle.  And the blue circle designates the playground facilities.

Ag Profile: Fairview Farms

     Fairview farms is a typical family farm in McLean County. The map represents the  2829 acres Fairview has in McLean County. They also farm land in 3 other counties for a total of approximately 4174 acres. It represents 119 of 170 total fields, and depicts the percentage of various soil drainage classes typical of our farmland. The data was taken from the McLean County Soil Survey.

Trenton Ayer

Kyle Ayer

Ag Profile: Hilltop Farms

     This map displays the soil types of Hilltop Farms, another of our farms. There are 23 different soil types on this farm. Soil types differ because of the parent material from which they were created. Each soil has different abilities to grow crops. This data was gathered by overlaying the county's soil types onto the farm boundaries and summarizing the results. The McLean County Soil Survey is the source of this data.

Ag Profile: Poultry in McLean County

      In McLean County there are 67 Poultry Farms with a total of 302 poultry houses. Up to 500 feet in length, one poultry house produces 600,000 pounds of chicken a year. In 2006 each person ate 82 pounds of chicken, making one chicken house feed 7317 people. That means McLean County poultry growers produce enough chicken for a city of 2.2 million people every year!

     A poultry house produces 175 tons of fertilizer (manure) per house per year. At $60.00 per ton that is a value of $3,171,000 worth of manure a year. That's enough to provide at least half the fertilizer our farmers need to grow their crops.

     Finally,if you placed all the poultry houses end to end they would stretch 35.88 miles, wider than the whole county! Poultry in McLean County is both big business and good business! 

Levi Pinkston

James VanCleve

The Tornado of 2002

     On January 24, 2002, an F2 tornado roared through Calhoun just before 10:30 PM. With winds up to 120 mph, it damaged a number of homes and businesses, and destroyed a large number of old oak trees in the Calhoun Cemetery. Luckily, there was no loss of life.

     This map records the path and points of major damage caused by the tornado.

  Flooding: Our Largest Natural Hazard

     McLean County lies in the Green River floodplain and is actually the northernmost part of the Mississippi Delta Region. Of our 163,929 acres, 91,682 or 55.9% are vunerable to flooding.

     This map depicts our most recent flood (1997) which was a once in 100 year flood. The record flood of 1937 is also depicted. It exceeded the 1997 flood by over 9 feet in depth, and was recorded as a once in 500 year flood. Damaging floods have occurred at least 23 times since 1913, with 5 since 1980.          

Cody Carter

4H GIS Club

Some Christmas Fun

This past Christmas, we were talking about Santa, and decided to make a little study. We used census data on population, and geographic data on both the county and the world. We then did some routing analysis to come up with the most likely route Santa takes and came up with the analysis presented on the map. Soon after we did this, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), came up with an analysis that was pretty close to ours! So, we thought you might like to see the information we came up with!

Photo By Michelle Pinkston

www.cityoflivermore.net