Louisville

Louisville experienced a “rapid change from sleepy village in 1800 to bustling city in the 1830s (total wholesale business in 1835 was estimated at $29 million, including $8 million handled by the twenty-eight commission houses),” thanks above all to the two-way river traffic made possible by viable river steamboats after 1815. “If the river made Louisville a town, the steamboat made Louisville a city.” By 1830, its population of 11,345 made it the largest Kentucky urban area. Despite fears that the completion of a canal around the falls would dry up business on the city’s wharves, the expansion of cotton into the Mississippi River valley “created an expanding market for Ohio Valley production” as “river tonnage leaped upward by bounds.”¹

Travel Narratives

Basil Hall’s travel narrative discussed the changes made by steam boat navigation, which shortened journey from Mississippi to Louisville from nine months to nine days (p. 368). Hall praised the canal around the Falls (p. 374) as well as the “excellent accommodations at a hotel in Louisville, the best ordered, upon the whole, which we met with in America, though the attendants were all slaves” (p. 375).²

Edmund Flagg in 1838 noted the bustle and noise of the docks, including the “fitful port-song of the negro firemen rising ever and anon upon the breeze” (p. 13).

And Caleb Atwater painted a similar picture of the docks and its “motely crowd” and “the stores filled with the commodities and manufacturers of every clime, and every art.” Atwater guessed there were “upwards of 150 in number of steam boats” by 1828 (p. 16), as well as at least sixty stores (p. 22). “During high waters, this place resembles a seaport, vessels continually arriving and departing. All is life, activity and motion.” He added that “the cotton and sugar of the South are as cheap here, almost as where they are produced” (15).³

See also Ben Casseday’s 1852 history of the city, which discusses a financial crisis in 1834 on pp. 188-189 that may explain why Henry Forsyth looked to sell Henrietta Wood not long after. The distress was caused by the withdrawal of “government deposites which had heretofore been placed in the banks here and used by them as banking capital.” Charles Mynn Thruston served as secretary of a meeting of citizens in 1834 to protest about the spirit of “gloom and despondence” this had caused: “Prices here have fallen beyond any former example. … Real property has fallen in many instances 50 per cent. It is believed that there will not be employment during the ensuing season for one-fourth of the mechanics and working men of Louisville…. They therefore pray that the deposites be restored, and such measures taken in relation to a National Bank as shall be most likely to afford relief to the country.” There is also a discussion of Louisville as a market for cotton on pp. 239-240.

Miscellaneous

• An 1832 map of the city