Winter, after some rain, is a good time to see this wet-weather cascade waterfall. It’s a well-known scene among local residents. With the leaves off the trees, you can get a look at all but the uppermost part of this waterfall as it tumbles down the limestone shelves to the Kentucky River. This photo was taken this past Thursday after a couple of days of rain. It is roadside between the highway 627 bridge and Hall’s Restaurant in Clark County; there is space at the waterfall to pull your car off the road.
The falls takes its name from the spring from which it begins, Coffee Springs. The spring was named after Ambrose Coffee, a Kentucky pioneer and early Fort Boonesborough settler. Fort Boonesborough was only about one and a half miles upriver.
After the Civil War, a former enslaved person who had served in the Union Army, Fielding Lisle, purchased 20 acres near the spring and started a black community there that we know as Lisletown.
Today, Coffee Springs and most of the waterfall are owned by the Allen Company. Part of the lowest section is owned by the Southwest Clark Neighborhood Association. There is evidence of a former structure that was situated several feet above the road and to the right of the falls, in the part now owned by the SWCNA. I seem to recall a small house or cabin still standing there at least 40 years ago.
From a geologic perspective, the waterfall starts at Coffee Springs in the Lexington Layer of limestone and then travels down through the Tyrone Layer and Oregon Formation to the Camp Nelson Layer. The Camp Nelson Layer has the oldest rocks exposed at the surface of the ground in Kentucky (450−470 million years old) and can be seen at the base of the palisades all along the Kentucky River between Boonesboro and Frankfort.
