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Naponee is a village along the Republican River in southern Franklin County, first settled in 1869. A Canadian Civil War veteran purchased land here and named the settlement after his hometown of Napanee, Ontario, with the spelling gradually shifting to Naponee. A post office was established in 1871, the first store opened in 1877, and the village was formally surveyed in 1879, the same year the Burlington Railroad reached town; Naponee was formally incorporated in 1909. The Depression years brought hardship, including the 1935 dust storms and Republican River flooding, but construction of the Harlan County Dam a few miles upstream in the 1940s nearly doubled the town's population during the building boom. Naponee is the hometown of actor David Janssen, star of the television series The Fugitive. With a 2020 population of 83, the village today sits just a few miles downstream of Harlan County Lake, a regional recreation destination.
Naponee's name is one of the more distinctive in Franklin County, tracing directly back to a Canadian hometown carried west by an early settler. Its proximity to Harlan County Lake gives the small, declining village a modest ongoing connection to regional recreation.