Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Ravenna, KY

Ravenna is a home rule-class city in Estill County, Kentucky, sitting on about 0.31 square miles in the valley of the Kentucky River.

Ravenna and neighboring Irvine, the county seat, are known as Estill County's twin cities, and Kentucky Route 52 runs through Ravenna as Main Street.

The city was created by the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, which completed a terminal with shops, a yard, an office building, and passenger and freight stations just east of Irvine in 1915.

A thriving railroad village sprang up in 1915 as the shops were built, and Ravenna was incorporated as a sixth-class city in 1920; it was raised to a fifth-class city in 1924.

Accounts of the name differ: the Kentucky Atlas says the town was named for Ravenna, Ohio, while railroad tradition holds that an Italian foreman on the construction crew asked that the station honor his birthplace, Ravenna, Italy.

Ravenna's population peaked at 1,189 in the 1930 census, then declined after the railroad switched from steam to diesel in the 1950s and its shops were no longer needed.

The 2020 census counted 568 residents in Ravenna.

At the 2000 census, the city had 693 people living in 301 households.

Kentucky River Lock and Dam No. 12, completed in 1910 at Ravenna, is maintained by the Kentucky River Authority.

The former CSX rail yard in Ravenna is now owned by the Kentucky Steam Heritage Corporation, which is restoring the Chesapeake and Ohio steam locomotive No. 2716 there as it develops a rail heritage center.