Fourth Generation, Family-Owned Buchanan Resort Provides Sanctuary on Kentucky Lake
Published on June 24, 2021
Nestled along Eagle Creek, where the Big Sandy and the Tennessee rivers meet to form Kentucky Lake, visitors here at Buchanan Resort have been hoping to the hook the big one since 1946. It’s the oldest family owned and operated marina on Kentucky Lake in Springville, Tennessee. And visitors of long ago might not recognize it today.
In the beginning, when John Buchanan founded the resort, it was more like a fishing camp that drew neighborhood fishermen who rented skiffs from John, who left them under the 100-year-old oak tree on shore. They put their payment — whatever coins they felt was a fair exchange for their recreation — in a cigar box nearby.
Soon, the lure of fishing started drawing visitors from further afield, from big cities like St. Louis and Chicago, to test their fishing prowess.
Growing List of Amenities
Today, Rachel McKee helps operate the resort where she jokingly recalls her grandparents may have broken child labor laws by letting her ring people up and check them out when she was about six years old.
Buchanan Resort has morphed to accommodate visitors’ vacation and recreational desires throughout the decades. They now boast more than 400-slips at the marina, cottage and motel accommodations for more than 200 visitors, three campgrounds with more than 200 campsites, a full-service marina store and the areas’ premier corporate conference center, which can accommodate up to 120 guests. According to the resort web site, “Buchanan Resort is the most complete vacation and recreational destination on Kentucky Lake.“
“A normal day would consist of the visitors renting a pontoon boat or kayak and getting out on Kentucky Lake,” McKee said from her years of experience. She added there’s a beautiful waterfront golf course within a five-minute drive from the resort. There are tourist attractions such as Land Between the Lakes and many historical sites in our area.
“The afternoons, visitors typically grill out at their cabins and relax with their friends and family while watching the sunset. The wildlife comes out in the afternoons as well as in the mornings,” she said.
And those long-ago visitors would find something familiar if they were to return to John Buchanan’s fishing spot, too.
“We have a minnow tank and a cricket box along with a refrigerator full of different kinds of worms for fisherman,” McKee said. “We purchase all of this bait from a family owned and operated business out of Clarksville, TN. The company comes once a week to supply us with bait and tackle.”
Fishing has waxed and waned over the years, but it’s on the upswing again these days. If you’re lucky, you might hook blue gill, small mouth bass, sauger, red ear, striped bass, catfish, large-mouth bass and white bass. The winner, though, with the most caught, are crappies.
Change is Ongoing
The changes to the resort this year are impressive. But McKee noted they do renovations every year. They decide what they’re going to do based on the condition of the facilities as well as visitors’ demands. A tornado took out one of the docks two years ago. And conversely, for instance, in 2020 they had a record-breaking year, with a waiting list for boats, so this year, 28 slips are being added and they upgraded their boat ramp.
“This year it seems like it will be more record-breaking than last year,” McKee predicted. “But then again we were closed 75 days last year during prime season because of COVID.”
This year they’ve also relocated the uncovered docks to a place where they have new wiring for electricity. The new slips were placed where the old ones used to be, adding new wiring and a new ramp in the process. This provides the customers with easier access to their uncovered slips.
Staff at Buchanan Resort usually alternate renovations to the land-based amenities, such as the campgrounds and accommodations, and the lake-based amenities, like the docks, each year.
What brings folks to the resort changes, too.
McKee thinks several things, including last year’s global pandemic, may be at the heart of some of the recent changes.
For instance, people are reevaluating their fast-track careers and the fact that plush vacations for a week could instead net them more time for less resources at a place like Buchanan Resort.
“And COVID was a terrible thing for so many — terrible in my community, as well. But the good thing that did come from COVID was people are realizing, ‘Hey, this could happen again. We might have another outbreak of something … I’d rather have a boat and a camper where I can go and stay in my own space rather than renting a cabin because that’s probably going to be closed if this happens again’,” she said.
The visitors come from further afield, too. They used to get most of their visitors from Illinois and Indiana and they mostly came for the fishing. While most of the visitors still come from surrounding states as well as from within Tennessee, some customers have houses in Florida and also their Kentucky Lake townhouses and dock their boats with Buchanan Resort, splitting their time between the two.
And while they were founded on fishing, recreational boating has picked up in the last decade.
“We can’t keep pontoon boats in stock,” McKee said, adding neither her not her parents, who are in their 60s, have ever seen this before.
Buchanan Resort opens the second week in March and closes the second week of November. Spring and fall are big for fishing while May, June and July are primarily recreational.
The customer demographics have changed, too, Rachel says. The age range has expanded. Rachel, who is 30, says she can speak from the perspectives of herself, her parents, and her grandparents, all of whom have recently witnessed a larger number of 30- to 50-year-olds buying boats, wanting to be at the lake.
“That wasn’t the case 10 years ago. This was everyone’s retirement place,” she recalled. “You’d come to visit your grandparents at the lake. You know, they might have a condo or a lake house and you would come visit them.”
McKee said this is “amazing” because she feels visiting the lake will continue from generation to generation.
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