Portland and the Canal That Ate Its Reason for Being
Near Louisville, Kentucky
Before the canal, Portland was the city. Or at least it was the part of the Falls area that mattered most to commerce.
General William Lytle of Cincinnati laid out the town of Portland in eighteen eleven on the land immediately downstream from the Falls. He understood the logic precisely: the Falls stopped every large boat going west. The freight had to come off the boats above the Falls, move overland through Portland, and go back onto boats below. Whoever controlled the portage controlled the revenue. Portland became the transfer hub, a city of warehouses, cooperages, boatyards, and taverns serving the army of workers and travelers who were always passing through.
By the eighteen twenties, Portland had become one of the largest settlements at the Falls of the Ohio, rivaling Louisville itself.
Then came the Louisville and Portland Canal, which opened to boat traffic in eighteen thirty and was fully completed a few years later. It cut through the floodplain south of the river, allowing boats to bypass the Falls entirely. There was no more portage. The workers who had moved cargo by hand and wagon for twenty years were no longer needed. The warehouses emptied. The river trade shifted back to Louisville, which had its own commercial district and connections to the expanding rail network. Portland's economic rationale had been removed by the very infrastructure its founder had hoped to build.
The neighborhood absorbed immigrants and industrial workers through the nineteenth century, German and Irish families arriving in the decades after Bloody Monday, many of them working in the meatpacking, tanning, and industrial operations that came to define the West End waterfront. It flooded badly in nineteen thirty-seven, again in nineteen forty-five, and the middle-class families who had settled there largely moved to higher ground. Portland was annexed into Louisville and became a neighborhood that had outlived the reason it had originally existed.
Its old streetscapes, the brick workers' houses and commercial blocks near the wharf, are still there, and they still look like what they were: a working waterfront that expected to last forever.
