History of Louisville, Kentucky
The earliest such settlements occurred during the latter stages of the American Revolutionary War by Virginian soldiers under George Rogers Clark, first at Corn Island in 1778, then Fort-on-Shore and Fort Nelson on the mainland.
At that time a part of Kentucky County, Virginia, the town was chartered in 1780 and named Louisville in honor of King Louis XVI of France.
[4] Other notable residents of the city have included boxing legend Muhammad Ali, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, newscaster Diane Sawyer, actors Victor Mature, Ned Beatty and Tom Cruise, actresses Sean Young and Jennifer Lawrence, singers Nicole Scherzinger and Bryson Tiller, rapper Jack Harlow, the Speed family (including U.S. Attorney General James Speed and Abraham Lincoln's close friend Joshua Fry Speed), the Bingham family, industrialist/politician James Guthrie, U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and contemporary writers Hunter S. Thompson and Sue Grafton.
There was a continuous indigenous human occupation of the area that became Louisville from at least 1,000 BCE until roughly 1650 CE, when the Beaver Wars resulted in depopulation of much of the Ohio River region.
[6] The account of the first European to visit the area, the French colonizer, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle in 1669, is disputed and not supported by facts.
Subsequently, La Salle explored areas of the Mississippi river valley and lower Great Lakes region from the Gulf of Mexico up to modern-day Canada, claiming much of this land for France.
The first Trustees were selected in April 1779, as part of this transition, with the first board consisting of seven men – William Harrod, Richard Chenoweth, Edward Bulger, James Patton, Henry French, Marsham Brashear, and Simon Moore.
By April, they called it "Louisville", in honor of King Louis XVI of France, whose government and soldiers aided colonists in the Revolutionary War.
[18] Also, during 1780, three hundred families migrated to the area, the town's first fire department was established, and the first street plan of Louisville was laid out by Willian Pope.
Factors were the threat of Indian attacks (ended in 1794 by the Battle of Fallen Timbers), a complicated dispute over land ownership between John Campbell and the town's trustees (resolved in 1785), and Spanish policies restricting American trade and travel down the Mississippi to New Orleans.
In 1803, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson to make an expedition across North America; they organized it at the Falls of the Ohio and Louisville.
[21][22] Since settlement, all people and cargo had arrived by flatboats and later keelboats, both of which were non-motorized vessels, meaning that it was prohibitively costly to send goods upstream (towards Pittsburgh and other developed areas).
City status gave Louisville some judicial authority and the ability to collect more taxes, which allowed for the establishment of the state's first public school in 1829.
When the railroad was completed in 1859, Louisville's strategic location at the Falls of the Ohio became central to the city's development and importance in the rail and water freight transportation business.
On August 6, 1855, a day dubbed Bloody Monday, election riots stemming from the bitter rivalry between the Democrats and supporters of the Know-Nothing Party broke out.
Seeing Louisville's strategic importance in the freight industry, General William Tecumseh Sherman formed an army base in the city in the event that the Confederacy advanced.
In March 1864, Generals Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant met at the Galt House to plan the spring campaign, which included the capture of Atlanta, Georgia.
During the postwar years, the Freedmen's Bureau opened a school, led by W. H. Gibson, and a bank in the city to serve the now free and growing African American population.
[41] Confederate women organized in associations to ensure the dead were buried in cemeteries, to identify missing men, and to build memorials to the war and their losses.
James Callahan and other area businessmen organized the Louisville, Harrods Creek and Westport Railway in 1870 and continued construction through the Long Depression before failing in 1879.
Although the LHC&W never reached beyond Harrods Creek, its service was continued by the L&N and contributed to growth in the city's eastern suburbs, particularly after the LRC purchased and electrified the track between Zorn Avenue and Prospect in 1904.
Its new campus, at Fourth and Broadway downtown, was underwritten by a group of Louisville business leaders, including the Norton family, eager to add the promising graduate-professional school to the city's resources.
On August 1, 1883, U.S. President Chester A. Arthur opened the first annual Southern Exposition, a series of World's Fairs that would run for five consecutive years adjacent to Central Park in what is now Old Louisville.
The "whirling tiger of the air" carved a path from the Parkland neighborhood all the way to Crescent Hill, destroying 766 buildings ($2.5 million worth of property) and killing an estimated 74 to 120 people.
Not wanting to pay city taxes, the whiskey companies persuaded the Kentucky General Assembly to pass the Shively Bill, which made it much more difficult for Louisville to annex additional areas.
In 1946 the General Assembly passed a law allowing the formation of a Metropolitan Sewer District, and Louisville's Board of Aldermen approved its creation a few months later.
The final death-knell for the Haymarket, already in decline due to changing economic trends, was the construction of an Interstate 65 ramp through the main part of the open-air market.
In 1971 and 1972 the Kentucky Civil Liberties Union, Legal Aid Society, and NAACP filed suit in federal court to desegregate the Louisville and Jefferson County school systems.
The Kentucky Commission on Human Rights also filed suit asking that desegregation be achieved through merger of the Louisville, Jefferson County and Anchorage school systems, to overcome residential segregation and the inability of the city to expand by annexation and take in a more diverse area.
Its 420-foot (130 m) high spray (later reduced to 375 feet (114 m) due to energy costs) and fleur-de-lis patterns graced Louisville's waterfront until the fountain was shut down in 1998.
