History of the Ohio falls cities and their counties : with illustrations and bibliographical sketches, Vol. I, Part 29

Author: Williams, L.A., & Co., Cleveland
Publication date: 1882
Publisher: Cleveland, Ohio : L. A. Williams & Co.
Number of Pages: 814

USA > Ohio > History of the Ohio falls cities and their counties : with illustrations and bibliographical sketches, Vol. I > Part 29

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in the vicinity averaging a height of two hundred feet more.

The geological character of the Louisville site does not differ greatly from that of the larger plain upon which it is situated. It is a diluvial formation of surface clay, sand, and gravel, rest- ing upon the limestone of the Silurian basin and the Devonian formation above. This easily sug- gests to the scientist that here is the bed of a very ancient and somewhat extensive river-lake or estuary. The beds of clay and gravel here vary from twenty-five to seventy-five feet in depth.

ITS PRIMITIVE STATE.

When the gallant Captain Thomas Hutchins, erstwhile of His Britannic Majesty's Sixtieth regi- ment of Royal Foot, and by and by to be first and only "Geographer of the United States," made the earliest chart of the Falls and vicinity in 1766, and likewise when Clark came with his band of colonists a dozen years later, the view which met their eyes on the Kentucky shore was one which the rise of a great city, and even the change of nature's arrangement of land and water here, make difficult indeed to realize. The map of Hutchins's shows no human habitation or clearing about the Falls; for such there were none. All except the space occupied by greater or smaller sheets of water was dense woods, as his map indicates. Here grew the oak in sev- eral interesting varieties, the walnut and the hickory, the mighty poplar and the sycamore or buttonwood, the maple, wild cherry, hackberry, locust, buckeye, gum, and, in brief, almost if not quite every forest tree known to the deep woods of Kentucky. Colonel Durrett, in the Centen- nial Address already cited, enumerates the fol- lowing veterans of the forest primeval that have survived the destroyer Time and the greater destroyer Man: "An oak in the backyard of Mr. Bottsford, on Chestnut street, another in that of Mr. Lindenberger, on Fourth, and a honey locust in front of the residence of Mr. Brannin, on Broadway, have come down to us from the olden times. In the yard of Mr. Caperton, the old Guthrie residence on Walnut street, there is the branchless trunk of a noble beech which died a few years ago, which stood there when Louis- ville was first settled; and in Central Park are a few hoary sentinels which have watched over us for a century."

BEARGRASS CREEK.

Some of the noblest of the forest monarchs stood upon the long tongue of land or peninsula between the former course of the Beargrass and the Ohio. There is some reason, which the ex- cavations made for the ship-canal have tended to confirm, to believe that a still more ancient bed of this creek carried its waters yet further down, perhaps to disembogue them into the river at some point below the Falls. But it is within the memory of many now living that the stream, after joining its several headwaters near the present city limit, flowed thence in a westerly course, in a channel still to be recognized in places, one to two miles further, gradually ap- proaching the river until it entered the Ohio about half a block below the present foot of Third street .* So lately as 1844 it was necessary to reach the river from any of the streets east of that by bridges across the Beargrass, which were thrown over at Clay, Preston, Brook, Second, and Third streets. The point made by the creek and the river formed one of the best landings on the city front. The Cincinnati mail-boats then, and for many years before, as now indeed, made that their point of arrival and departure; but they had to be reached by the Third-street or other bridge. Finally, the incon- venience and loss caused by this large occupation of valuable territory by the Beargrass became so pronounced that the diversion of its current was virtually compelled. This was easily accom- plished by means of an embankment of less than half a mile, sending its waters by a short and straight channel into the river almost exactly at the northeastern corner of the city.

In the earlier days the mouth of Beargrass, so near the head of the Falls, offered a spacious, · safe, and convenient harbor for the primitive craft that came down the river. It figures fre- quently in the narratives of the olden time, and this locality seems at first to have been known indifferently as " the Falls of the Ohio" and "the mouth of Beargrass." It is not improbable that the situation of the former mouth of this otherwise insignificant stream was an important element in determining the original settlement and the rise of a town at this point.

* See Hobbs's fine Map of Louisville, appended to the City Directory of 1832.

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HISTORY OF THE OHIO FALLS COUNTIES.

CORN ISLAND.

A little below the old mouth of Beargrass, not far from the foot of Fourth street, began an- other of the famous physical features of this lo- cality, which has now disappeared, except at low water, when the stumps of the fine trees that once covered it can still be seen. This was the historic Corn Island, of which something will be said hereafter. It lay in a long and narrow tract, pretty close to the shore, from a little be- low Fourth street to a point about opposite to the foot of Thirteenth. According to the scale of Hutchins's map, which shows the island, it was about four-fifths of a mile long by five hundred yards in its greatest breadth. Besides heavy timber, it had a dense undergrowth of cane, which the Clark colonists were obliged to clear away for their cabins and their first corn- crop. This done, however, they had access to a rich, productive soil, which soon yielded abundant returns for their labor.

Mr. Hugh Hays, in an interesting letter to the Courier-Journal a few months ago concerning Corn Island, gives the following as from the mouth of Sandy Stewart, the well-known "island ferryman" of three-quarters of a century ago:

Without any interruption from Indians we landed on this island June 8, 1775. The scenery at this time was beau- tiful, and such as the eye of civilized man scarcely ever gazed upon. Here was the broad and beautiful Ohio, sweeping on down her peaceful shores in silent grandeur and flowing on for hundreds of miles to mingle her waters with old ocean. The odors of the wild flowers-the hawthorn, the honey- suckle, the jessamine, the rose, and lily; the green forest, where the axe was a stranger, in all its native beauty, filled up the background. The feathered tribe, from the eagle to the linnet, the sea-gull and the crane, sweeping over the Falls, turning up their snowy wings glittering in the sunlight; the buffalo, the bear, the deer lying under the trees in warm weather, perfectly serene, as they were strangers to the sound of the rifle and so unacquainted with man that their tameness astonished me. This spot in the wilderness seemed a very Eden; and as I had no Eve to be tempted by the serpent, I resolved to take up my rest here, and never from this isle de- part. Here will I be buried.

According to Mr. Hays, who visited the island in 1832 to attend a camp-meeting, it then com- prised but about seventy acres, which were still heavily timbered. Of the small stream of water (yet apparently larger than the Beargrass), which Hutchins exhibits as coursing through the middle of the island, he says nothing; nor are we aware that anybody has ever recorded recollections of what appears upon the Captain's map to be a knoll or hill at the extreme southwestern end.

Mr. Hays writes that in 1824 a powder-mill was put up on the island and blown up six years later, killing several employees; that about this time it became celebrated for "its barbecues, picnics, bran-dances, camp-meetings, fish-parties, etc.," in which many of the first people in the town partic- ipated; and that about 1840 the heavy timber was cut, and then the island began to lose its surface soil and gradually disappeared. Corn island is now but a famous name in history. It was owned by the Hon. John Rowan, whose heirs, grimly remarks the venerable Hays, still own its rocky bottom.

The following notice is given to Corn Island in the Louisville Directory for 1844-45:

This small island, at the Falls, is rendered interesting only from the fact of its having served as a dernier resort for the early settlers, when too hotly pursued by the Indians. At the present day it is the general resort of old and young who are fond of angling. The first rudiments of the very intri- cate science of worming a hook or pulling up at a nibble are here learned. The island is covered with trees and sur- rounded by quarries of limestone, which are not now used.

OTHER ISLANDS IN THE OHIO.

Sand, Rock, and Goose islands were in the stream then and for untold ages before, substan- tially no doubt the same as now. But there is at present one remarkable feature on the river front that was not then, and is indeed the growth of quite recent years-the now familiar Willow Bar, sometimes called Towhead Island, at the upper end of the city. It is a long, narrow tract, completely covered at high water, but at other times to· be observed as stretching from just below the mouth of Beargrass to just below Campbell street. It has pretty nearly the dimen- .sions of the older Corn Island, being three- fourths of a mile long by five hundred feet in largest width. Although one of its characteristic growths gives the island its name, it is chiefly covered with cottonwood trees, some of them nearly three feet through. Colonel Durrett gives the following account of its genesis:

The growth on this island clearly indicates how it rose from the water, and which are its oldest and newest parts. On its edges where there is always water nothing but willows appear ; and this was the growth observed by our oldest in- habitants when the island first began to appear above the water. Willows first appeared on a sand-bar, and when once established they caught the sediment suspended in the waters made muddy by floods, and rapidly built up the island. So soon as the soil rose high enough to be part of the year above water the cottonwood began to grow. And now that the soil is almost above overflow other trees are beginning to grow ; such as sycamore, hackberry, and ash. The sedi-

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ment now being caught from the floods hy the dense growth on this island must soon raise it entirely above overflow, and then a still greater variety of trees will no doubt soon spring up.

THE OLD-TIME PONDS.

No fact of the early time, probably, is more familiar than the abundance of small lakes or ponds upon the primitive site of Louisville, and indeed upon the entire Louisville plain, from Beargrass to the Salt river, of which the "Pond Settlement " is still a reminiscence. A few of the old ponds are also still to be seen beyond Broad- way, in the south part of the city. But in the old days they were found, larger and more nu- merously, much nearer the river, and all along the town-site. The upper or " second bank " of the river had a slight slope to the southward ; and the soil being sufficiently tenacious to pre- vent the water from escaping, it made much of the ground swampy, and in some places col- lected more largely in ponds. One of them was very well called the "Long Pond," since it stretched from the point where now are the cor- ners of Sixth and Market streets to the Hope · Distillery site, about Sixteenth street-a distance of nearly a mile. For many years after it was drained, traces of it were still to be seen, as in an alley running from Seventh street, between Market and Jefferson. Mr. Casseday's History has some pleasant reminiscences of it:

In the winter, when it was frozen over, this little lake was the scene of many a merry party. On the moonlight even- ings, numbers of ladies and gentlemen were to be seen skim- ming over its surface, the gentlemen on skates and the ladies in chairs, the backs of which were laid upon the ice and the chairs fastened by ropes to the waists of the skaters. And thus they dashed along at furious speed over the glassy sur- face; beaux and belles, with loud voices and ringing laugh- and the merriment of the occasion was only increased when some dashing fellow, in his endeavors to surpass in agility and daring all his compeers, fell prostrate to the ice, or broke through into the water beneath.

Gwathmey's or Grayson's pond was the one upon which the old Grayson mansion, still stand- ing near St. Paul's church, looked down from its eminence on the bank. It reached in a rather long ellipse from Center street, just back of the First Presbyterian church, along Green and Grayson to a point near Eighth street. The water of this pond was supplied by springs, and, being always clear and pure, it was much used for baptisms by immersion, for whose spectators the turf-covered, sloping banks offered superior facilities. It was also excellently stocked with

fish, which were carefully guarded by its owners. It was surrounded by some of the loftiest, finest trees upon the Louisville site.

The writer of a brief history of Louisville, in the City Directory for 1844-45, has the follow- ing entertaining paragraphs concerning this and another pond :

There are some amusing reminiscenes of Grayson's Pond. We have it from a citizen who well remembers the outlines of this pond. Great numbers of tortoises or small turtles were found about this pond. Thither also came to enjoy its luxuries large flocks of geese and ducks. The battles between. these different tribes are described as being very amusing. The turtle would take to the water and scull along very silently, and settling beneath the surface, await the approach of the duck; at a sudden he would seize the duck by his feet and draw him under water. The struggle generally resulted in favor of the feathered combatant, who, on regaining the surface, would set up such shouts as to collect the whole flock around him in a grand congratulatory quacking con- vention.

This pond, well shaded by the native forest-trees, became a favorite resort of many, to while away the hours of a sultry day on its banks. It was always clear, and had a sufficient depth of water, the dryest season, to swim a horse in.

Another pond at this period (1800), and a very disagree- able one, was to be met with at the intersection of Third and Market streets, extending along Third street to nearly op- posite the site of the present post-office [Green street]. A tannery on Third street, which discharged its waste water into this pond, rendered it at times nearly impassable, except by mounting a rail-fence, which enclosed the lot where the White mansion now stands. The wagons from the country often stalled at this point.

Still another was on Market street, from Third to Fifth; another on Jefferson, near Fourth; and many others were scattered far and near over the watery tract. Indeed, Mr. Casseday, writing in 1852, says: "A map of the city as it was sixty or even thirty years ago, would present somewhat the appearance of an archipelago, a sea full of little islands."

Some of the ponds, as part of those last named, had only water in them after rain, perhaps only after heavy rain; and the consequence was that they were usually in various stages of stagnation or dryness. They abounded in ironweed and other characteristic vegetation. A vast amount of malaria and miasm was engendered by them ; fever and ague, with more deadly ills, and finally a more terrible pestilence in 1822-23, made life a burden in Louisville a large part of the year ; and it early came to bear the name of "the Graveyard of the Ohio." So great was the affliction resulting from them that in 1805 the General Assembly gave formal authority to the trustees of the town to remove "those nuisances

九五F

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in such manner as the majority of them should prescribe." The legal authority was ample and the spirit of the citizens was willing; but the public purse was weak, and it was long before the "nuisances" were abated. After the strange epidemic of later years the Legislature, at the urgency of the local Board of Health, sanctioned the raising of the sum of $40,000 by lotteries for draining the Louisville ponds and those between them and the Salt river. The work was mostly done on the town site, but those below town had to wait for more recent appropriations, which finally shut up most of their holes of death.

In the filling of the ponds certain moderate eminences, here and there about town, came excellently well into play. They were of clean, white sand, than which no better material, prob- ably, could be found for making fills in the basins of stagnant or other ponds. By their use a double purpose was subserved, in the reducing of useless knolls and the filling of harmful hol- lows.

DOCTOR DRAKE'S REMARKS.

The famous Dr. Daniel Drake, for a time a resident of this city, in his great treatise on the Principal Diseases of the Interior Valley of North America, published in 1850, thus deals with the location of Louisville :

The site of the city itself was swampy, with shallow ponds, and although more than seventy years have elapsed since the commencement of settlement, specimens of both may be seen within two miles to the south and west of the city quay, for the draining of which a trench has keen dug. Even the streets of the southern suburbs show a soil retentive of moist- ure and disposed to swampiness, while the surface is so level as to render all draining difficult. To the southeast of the city the creek called Beargrass descends from the highest lands, and being joined by streams which originate on the plain, flows to the north along the base of the low hills, until it reaches the new bottom, when it turns to the west and, like a narrow canal, makes its way for a mile nearly parallel to the river, which it finally joins at the middle of a northern margin of the city. The water in the eastuary of this creek is generally foul and stagnant ; and the slip of bottom be- tween it and the river is sometimes overflowed. A quarter of a mile from the mouth of Beargrass, opposite the lower part of the city, is the head of the Louisville & Portland Canal, which, after running two miles, enters the Ohio be- low the Falls. The bed of the canal is in solid rocks, the removal of which has given it high and strong banks; but on each side, and especially between it and the river, after the first mile from its head, the bottom is so low as to be subject to annual inundation. On this bottom. immediately above the junction of the canal with the river, stands the old, declining village of Shippingport. Below the junction, on a bank so high that even its most depressed portions are in- undated by the greatest floods, is the newer and more grow-

ing town of Portland, in the rear of which, to the south, there are many small ponds and swainps, situated on the upper terrace.

The city has since, under the guidance of in- telligent and efficient Boards of Health, bravely reformed nearly every element of bad sanitation provided by the physical geography of the site ; and it now, as we shall fully show in a subse- quent chapter, enjoys perhaps the lowest death- rate of any city of more than one hundred thou- sand inhabitants in the world.

CHAPTER II.

BEFORE LOUISVILLE WAS.

1773-The Beginnings Genealogy of the Bullitt Family -Captain Thomas Bullitt-The Surveying Party-Han- cock Taylor-Bullitt at Old Chillicothe-The Voyage -- The Survey-Did Captain Bullitt Lay off a Town ?- So- dowsky, or Sandusky-Connolly's Grant-Connolly-The Warrenstaff (Warrendorff) Patent -- Colonel John Camp- bell. 1774-Boone and Stoner at the Falls. 1775-More Surveys and Locations-The Hites and Others in this Re- gion. 1776-77-Gibson and Linn's Voyage to New Or- leans-The First Cargo from New Orleans to Pittsburg. 1778-The Beginnings of Settlement-Sketch of George Rogers Clark-His Campaign in the Illinois-The Fam- ilies with Clark-The Roll of the Pioneers-The Hites and Johnston-Military Preparations- Departure of Clark's Expedition. The Settlers in 1779-The New Immigration -The Old Survey and Map-The Popes-Colonel Bow- man's Expedition- The First Birth in Louisville - The Boones at the Falls-An Amusing Story-The Cold Winter.

The history of Louisville, not as a name, but as a place for the residence of civilized and white man, begins nearly eleven decades ago, or with the year of our Lord 1773. We find no evidence that a village, or a village site, to be known by the royal name of the "City of Louis," was laid off or recognized at the Falls of the Ohio prior to the act of the Virginia Legislature, passed in May, 1780, which, as we shall pres- ently see more fully, expressly and in terms "es- tablished a town by the name of Louisville." But the fact of a previous survey at the Falls, and of a subdivision of some kind into village lots, may be regarded as equally well ascer- tained.

THE BULLITT FAMILY.

The family of Bullitt is associated with the earliest settlement of Louisville and Jefferson

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county, and has been continuously represented there from that time to the present.

This circumstance, taken in connection with the fact that Captain Thomas Bullitt led the first party who made an attempt at exploration around the Falls of the Ohio, will excuse a sketch of the family rather more extended than the scope of this work generally permits.

The facts relating to the origin and ancestry of the family are obtained from a sketch pre- pared by Colonel Alexander Scott Bullitt, which is without date, but was found among his papers at his death in the year 1816.

The first known ancestor of the family of Bul- litt was Benjamin Bullett (so spelled at that time), a French Huguenot, who resided in the province of Languedoc, and who, at the age of twenty-five, left France to escape the persecu- tions which followed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. He landed in Maryland in the latter part of the year 1685, and purchased lands near Port Tobacco, Charles county. He died in the year 1702, leaving one child, a son, Benjamin Bullitt, then but two years of age. He resided in Maryland with his mother until he became of age, when, having sold his patrimony, he pur- chased lands and settled in Fauquier county, Virginia, where, in 1727, he married Elizabeth Harrison, of that county. By her he had five children-Joseph, Elizabeth, Thomas, Benja- min, and Cuthbert. Joseph died a bachelor. Benjamin was killed in an engagement with the Indians shortly after Braddock's defeat. Eliza- beth married a Mr. Combs, and left a numerous family.

Thomas Bullitt, the survivor who visited the Falls of the Ohio in 1773, was born in 1730, and died at his home in Fauquier county, Virginia, in February, 1778, at the age of forty-eight years. He was never married, and left his estate to his brother Cuthbert.

Cuthbert Bullitt (second in descent from the original ancestor) was born in 1740, and was bred to the law. In the year 1760 he married Helen Scott, of a wealthy family, in Prince Wil- liam county, to which he removed, and in which he resided until his death. He pursued the practice of law with considerable success until he was appointed a judge of the supreme court of Virginia, in which office he died in the year 1790. He left six children. The only son, who

settled in Kentucky, was Alexander Scott Bullitt.

He (third in descent from the original ances- tor) was born in the year 1761 or 1762. He came to Kentucky in 1783 and settled first on Bull Skin, in Shelby county, but believ- ing that he was too far removed from the Falls of the Ohio, he purchased the farm "Oxmoor," in Jefferson county, about eight and one-half miles from Louisville, on the Shelbyville turn- pike, where he lived until his death, on April 13, 1816. He married Priscilla Christian in the fall of 1785. She was the daughter of Colonel Wil- liam Christian, who settled in Kentucky in the spring of 1785 and was killed in an engagement with the Indians April 9, 1786, at the age of forty-three years. Her mother was Annie Henry, a sister of Patrick Henry. They left two sons, Cuthbert and William Christian Bullitt, and two daughters, Helen and Annie. These are now all deceased, and with the exception of Helen (who was Mrs. Key at the time of her death) have left descendants, a number of whom still live in Louisville and Jefferson county.

The distinguished merchants, Cuthbert and Thomas Bullitt, who settled at an early day in Louisville, and who owned a large survey of about a thousand acres, running back from Broadway and embracing what is now the most fashionable residence part of the city, were de- scendants of Benjamin Bullitt and nephews by the half-blood of Cuthbert Bullitt.

CAPTAIN BULLITT.

The principal name associated with the first movements in this locality looking to the perma- nent settlement of the whites is that of Captain Thomas Bullitt, of this family, as is recited above. He was a gallant soldier of the French and Indian wars, who had particularly distin- guished himself in the expedition against Fort Du Quesne. He was a company commander in Colonel George Washington's own regiment, and fought with it on the fateful field of Brad- dock's defeat, and in several other engagements. He was, says Collins, a man of great energy and enterprise, as he showed on several import- ant occasions. He was an uncle of Colonel Alexander Scott Bullitt, a delegate to the con- vention which framed the constitution of Ken- tucky, President of the Senate and of the second Constitutional convention, and first Lieutenant-

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History of the Ohio falls cities and their counties : with illustrations and bibliographical sketches, Vol. I, Part 29

Author: Williams, L.A., & Co., Cleveland Publication date: 1882 Publisher: Cleveland, Ohio : L. A. Williams & Co. Number of Pages: 814

Author: Williams, L.A., & Co., Cleveland
Publication date: 1882
Publisher: Cleveland, Ohio : L. A. Williams & Co.
Number of Pages: 814