Crestwood, Kentucky

Crestwood's name has a story rooted in railroad mockery. In the eighteen fifties, a farmer named Joseph Beard donated land to the Louisville-to-Frankfort rail line and built a warehouse at the crossing, which became Beard's Station. By eighteen eighty the name had been shortened to simply Beard on the timetables.

The problem was that train engineers found this irresistible. Pulling into a station named Beard, they would call out Whiskers, and the joke apparently never got old. Residents eventually had enough.

In nineteen oh nine they petitioned to rename the town Crestwood, a dignified nod to the wooded ridge crest the community sits on in Oldham County. The old Whiskers nickname faded, and Crestwood today is one of Louisville's more prosperous eastern suburbs, though the founding farmer's warehouse site still anchors the crossroads where highway three twenty-nine meets the old rail corridor.