The Naming of Louisa

Contributed by Kym Hitchcock

From the book Kentucky's Last Frontier

by Henry P. Scalf:

"Just when the name Louisa was first used is not known. Historians and others have assumed that the name was derived from the naming of the river by Dr. Thomas Walker in 1750. This assumption may be correct but has been attacked. There exists a tradition in the Rice and Ward families of Big Sandy that one of the early Rices visited and hunted in 1797 around the Forks section and while there stayed in the cabin home of Neri and Elizabeth Ward. They were relatives. Louis Ferguson in a manuscript history of the Skaggs family writes: "This being true, of which I entertain no doubt, Louisa was settled a little earlier than most historians admit and named Louisa for a reason which historians have never mentioned..."

The naming of Louisa "for a reason historians have never mentioned" is that Neri and Elizabeth Ward named their first child, a daughter, Louisa, and since she was the first white child born there, the little settlement was changed from the Forks to Louisa in her honor.