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In 1769, Daniel Boone created a trail from North Carolina to Tennessee, and then spent the next two years exploring what would become the Commonwealth of Kentucky. In 1774, Boone built the Wilderness Road and established Fort Boonesborough at a site near modern-day Boonesborough, Ky. The Kentucky wilderness was considered a county of Virginia at the time.
The first settlement was made in the vicinity of modern-day Louisville in 1778 by Col. George Rogers Clark, who was conducting a campaign against the British in areas north of the Ohio River. In May, Clark led 150 soldiers out of Redstone, today’s Brownsville, Pa., and into a place farther south called the Falls of the Ohio. They took along 80 civilians who hoped to claim fertile farmland and start a new settlement in the Kentucky wilderness.
Clark’s soldiers helped the civilians clear land and build homes on what could become known as Corn Island. The next year, the settlers began crossing the river and established the first permanent settlement in Kentucky, which they eventually named “Louisville,” in honor of King Louis XVI of France, whose soldiers at the time were aiding Americans in the Revolutionary War. Many landmarks in Louisville are named after Clark. On June 1, 1792, Kentucky became the 15th state in the United States.
In 1828, the population reached a size of 7,000, and Louisville became an incorporated city, the first in Kentucky. In 1830, the Louisville-Portland Canal was completed, allowing boats to travel more easily from Pittsburgh to New Orleans - a boon to the fledgling economy.
Louisville’s early economy was based mainly on shipping and the slave trade. The expression “sold down the river” originated as a lament of Kentucky slaves being split apart from their families and sold in Louisville to be shipped down the Ohio River to their new owners.
For more history of Louisville from Kentucky Educational Television, CLICK HERE.
