Locksmith In
Louisville

Louisville is a city that is famous for its long history, which extends back hundreds of years, and which has been molded deeply by the geography of the region and its access to the Falls of the Ohio River. In the area of the Falls, river travel was impossible, and because of this fact settlements were created at this place. In 1778, Col. George Rogers Clark created the first European settlement on Corn Island in what is now Louisville; he is celebrated as the city’s founder today, and several important landmarks bear his name.

The Virginia General Assembly approved the town charter of Louisville in 1780. They named the city after King Louis XVI of France, whose soldiers were then assisting Americans in the Revolutionary War. Early settlers lived in forts to protect themselves from attacks by the local Native Americans, but they moved out by the late 1780s. In 1803, explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark planned their cross-country expedition in the city of Clarksville, Indiana at the Falls of the Ohio opposite Louisville.

The city grew quickly because riverboats had to be unloaded and moved downriver before they could go on above the falls. By 1828 people counted 7,000 and Louisville became a City by act of the Legislature. Early Louisville was a port of shipment and commercial center. Enslaved African Americans worked at many of the jobs that were related to the business. Fugitive slaves often found a way to escape to freedom by coming to Louisville bound for the North. Indiana, which is just across the river, is free. In twenty years, Louisville’s population grew more than ten times larger than it had been in 1828.

At this time in the 1850s the city was booming and lively, but there were downsides to that too. It was the center of planning, supplies, recruiting, and transportation for numerous campaigns, especially in the Western Theater. Ethnic tensions boiled over, and on August 6, 1855, known as “Bloody Monday,” Protestant mobs attacked German and Irish Catholic neighborhoods on election day, resulting in 22 deaths and widespread property destruction. Then by 1861, the civil war broke out. During the Civil War, Louisville was an important stronghold of Union forces, which helped keep Kentucky firmly in the Union.

Louisville came out of the war without an attack on the city itself, although skirmishes and battles, including the battles of Perryville and Corydon, took place nearby. Afterward, returning Confederate veterans largely took political control of the city, leading to the joke that Louisville had joined the Confederacy after the war was over. Since the 1980s, many of the city’s urban neighborhoods have been revitalized into areas popular with young professionals and college students. The most profound changes have occurred along the Bardstown Road/Baxter Avenue and Frankfort Avenue corridors as well as in the Old Louisville neighborhood.

This kind of change has been happening in NuLu, or the East Market District, in recent years as well. After a residential, tourist and retail boom began in the late 1990s, particularly downtown, with the opening of KFC Yum! Center, Lynn Family Stadium and Louisville Slugger Field, the conversion of old industrial sites along the waterfront into the parks named Waterfront Park, the opening of new and interesting museums, and the bustle of Fourth Street Live!, a huge entertainment complex created in 2004 in a refurbished old mall called the Galleria, this century just kept on rollicking, new projects popping up every few years, it seemed like, like the eight-story stage set of Hotel Distil standing up on Main Street since last year or the just-formed initiative to expand Waterfront Park with public space on the scraped clean land over by Shelby Park.