Old Louisville and Edison's First Big Show
Near Louisville, Kentucky
In the summer of eighteen eighty-three, President Chester Arthur traveled to Louisville to open the Southern Exposition, a world's fair on the southern edge of the city where Central Park now stands. The exposition was designed to demonstrate that the South, eighteen years after the Civil War, was an industrial and commercial power worth doing business with. It ran for five consecutive summers, drawing more than a million visitors each year.
What people remembered most was the light.
Thomas Edison's company had been contracted to provide the electrical illumination for the main exhibition hall. They installed four thousand six hundred incandescent bulbs inside the building and four hundred more in an adjacent art gallery, five thousand bulbs total. At the time, the total number of incandescent bulbs burning in all of New York City was smaller than what Edison put into that one Louisville hall. It was the largest incandescent installation the world had seen.
Electrical pioneers later credited the Louisville Exposition with doing more to accelerate the adoption of interior electric lighting than any other single event. People came, they saw rooms lit without gas or flame or smoke, they went home and wanted it too.
The exposition grounds were dismantled when the fair ended in eighteen eighty-seven. The land was sold in parcels, and within a few years a neighborhood of substantial Victorian houses was rising on the footprint of the fairgrounds. By the eighteen nineties and early nineteen hundreds, Old Louisville had become one of the grandest residential districts in the American South, its streets lined with Richardsonian Romanesque and Queen Anne mansions built by the families who had made money from the bourbon trade, the rail connections, and the commerce that the river had carried here for a century.
Old Louisville is now the third-largest Victorian historic preservation district in the United States, and the largest in which the architecture is almost entirely Victorian.
