It is well known that solutions of the Cauchy problem for general dispersive equations $w_t +iP(D)w=0,\quad w(x,0)=q (x), \quad x\in \mathbb{R}^n, \ t\in \mathbb{R}$, enjoy the local smoothing property $q\in H^s (\R ^n) \implies w\in L^2 \Big (-T,T; H^{s+\frac{m-1}{2}}_{\textrm{loc}} \left (\R^n\right )\Big )$, where m is the order of the pseudo-differential operator P(D). This property, called local Kato smoothing, was first discovered by Kato for the KdV equation and implicitly shown later for linear Schrödinger equations. In this paper, we show that the local Kato smoothing property possessed by solutions general dispersive equations in the 1D case is sharp, meaning that there exist initial data $q\in H^s(\R)$ such that the corresponding solution $w$ does not belong to the space $L^2(-T,T; H^{s+\frac{m-1}{2} +\epsilon}_{\textrm{loc}} (\R) )$ for any $\epsilon >0$.