Hospital Hill or Reservoir Hill?

Published 10:32 am Sunday, August 2, 2026

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The sun sets over Reservoir Hill in downtown Bowling Green on Aug. 4, 2025.
(JACK DOBBS / Daily News)

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Wes Swietek

It’s a question with no right or wrong answer: do you call it Hospital Hill or Reservoir Hill?

Overlooking Bowling Green is the hill that was the site of a Civil War fort, Bowling Green’s first comprehensive hospital and the iconic, patriotically painted reservoir.

The latter two features have given the hill its two seemingly interchangeable names.

The first common name for the location was apparently College Knob, as it was the site of the Southern College of Kentucky in the early 1800s.

A few decades later, there were plans to build a more substantial college on the hill. Early construction of the new college was halted by the Civil War, and the Confederate Army used parts of the new construction to build defensive fortifications.

Also in the 1800s, construction began on a stone water reservoir to serve the city (the current reservoir was finished in 1966) and it was then commonly called Reservoir Hill.

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But in 1926, the hill became the site of City Hospital, and at some point a second name for the location emerged.

It seems the names Reservoir Hill and Hospital Hill have been variously used since then.

Per the city’s website, the location is now dubbed “Historic Reservoir Hill.”

Brent Childers, head of the city’s department of Community and Neighborhood Services department, which sits atop the hill, said he calls the location Reservoir Hill.

The same goes for Bowling Green Mayor Todd Alcott.

And while the old hospital building is still there, The Medical Center opened its new location just down the hill in 1980.

So it would seem Reservoir Hill is the more technically correct, and current, designation, but the names are used equally as often.

In a similar situation, many Daily News readers with the benefit of a few years under their belt call the paper the “Park City” because that wording was used on the paper’s front page for many years. (The reference was not to Park City the town, but to the fact that Bowling Green was once dubbed “the beautiful park city.”)

So, what do you call Bowling Green’s iconic hill? Let me know (wes.swietek@bgdailynews.com) and I will report the results of this unofficial tally in a future column.

—Wes Swietek is the Daily News managing editor.