Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.
Issue link: https://loumag.epubxp.com/i/111400
Growth and prosperity were hallmarks of west Louisville a century ago, but so were racism and mistrust, and after succeeding decades showcased the latter, the former gradually gave way. LOUISVILLE 1873 By Jack Welch Photos by Gail Kamenish The Great A map of west Louisville in 1873, when Parkland was brand-new and most land west of 26th Street held farms or sparsely housed macadam roads. CHANGEOVER I f Kentucky had been part of the band of 11 Southern states that seceded from the Union either before or shortly after the attack on Fort Sumter in 1861, the demographic history of Louisville would most assuredly have played out diferently. Instead, the commonwealth ��� a slaveholding state ��� sided with the North, and by doing so was allowed to keep its slaves under bondage during (and eight months after) the Civil War, while President Lincoln���s Emancipation Proclamation freed all slaves throughout the Confederacy in January 1863. Tus Louisville ��� a border city in a border state, one river���s breadth from free soil ��� added to its already complex racial makeup. From being a clandestine way station for African-Americans feeing slavery, it became a way station for multitudes of newly emancipated blacks, who had discovered that freedom in the Deep South didn���t actually change things much. But that���s just chapter two in the story of Louisville���s ��� and in particular, west Louisville���s ��� African-American history, which began with a few pioneer servants of white settlers and militiamen and now includes a constituency that dominates eight of nine west Louisville neighborhoods 30 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 3.13 (Portland being the exception), all with histories of their own. According to the late historian George Yater in his book Two Hundred Years at the Falls of the Ohio, the land that would become west Louisville north of Broadway (the Russell, Shawnee and Portland neighborhoods) was granted to Pennsylvanian Charles Dewarrensdorf in 1773 as a reward for his British military service. (Kentucky was then a territory of the Colony of Virginia.) He sold the 2,000-acre parcel to land speculators John Campbell and John Connolly, the latter of whom Yater describes as an ���arch-Tory and ardent opponent of (American) independence.��� Te two already owned what was to become downtown Louisville through military-service grants. But there was a problem: Campbell was captured by Indians in 1779 and didn���t reappear until 1783, and Connolly���s holdings were forfeited to the town trustees after the Revolutionary War ended. Any ���community-building��� during the interim occurred east of Louisville at a half-dozen settler stations along Beargrass Creek. Te town plot of 1785 was in the shape of a wide-bottom trapezoid, extending from 12th Street at the river southwest to today���s 18th and