A Concise History of Louisville
from "Spirited City: Essays in Louisville
History"
by Clyde F. Crews
III. Victorian City, Southern-Style: 1870-1900
 In
the 1870 census, Louisville passed the 100,000 mark for the first
time. As if to celebrate its new southern dominance after the war, it
completed its grandiose new City Hall in 1873. The opening of
Macauley's Theater in 1873 provided yet another landmark of theatrical
significance. (Photo: Louisville City Hall, 1800's)
 It
has often been remarked that Louisville joined the Confederacy after
the war. This was, in fact, a political and commercial fact of life.
Many of Kentucky's post-war governors had been southern in their
sympathy , and most of Louisville's civic leaders, such as Henry
Watterson, Basil Duke and John Castleman, had fought for the Conquered
Banner. The city increasingly defined itself as southern, in part, to
hold the allegiance of the markets of the old confederacy. The immense
Southern Exposition, a kind of World's Fair of its day, was a
massive structure and event of the city's life during much of the
1880's. In those years too, many of the mansions and stately homes of
Old Louisville and the Cherokee Triangle took their rise. (Photo: Bicyclists,
1896.)
 As
the new technologies (telephone, plumbing, electricity) found their
way into civic life, something else was in evidence as well. A city
that had for its first century been the power preserve of white
Anglo-Saxon males very gradually found some of its leaders beginning
to emerge among its women (especially in the founding and staffing of
hospitals), and from such groups as Blacks, Germans, Irish, Italians
and Jews. By the 1880's political power was wielded at the ward level
by the Irish Whallen brothers, James and John. (Photo: Jennie
Cassaday Free Infirmary,1895)
During these years, many of the distinctive institutions of
Louisville began to appear: Churchill
Downs, and its Derby (1875); the Southern
Baptist Theological Seminary (1877); the Filson Club (1884) and
the Olmstead park system (1890). In 1876, Louisville had been among
the first eight teams in baseball's new National League. It remained
essentially in the major leagues until the turn of the century. Along
Main Street, commercial palaces continued to rise, providing the city
in our own time with some of the finest Victorian commercial
architecture left in America.
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