The Falls That Made the City

Nine hundred eighty-one miles. That is the distance from Pittsburgh to Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio River meets the Mississippi. For most of that journey, a loaded flatboat in the eighteenth century could travel without stopping. The current did the work. The river was calm, wide, manageable.

Then it hit Louisville.

At this bend, the Ohio drops twenty-six feet over roughly two miles of exposed Devonian limestone shelves, three hundred eighty-six million years old, laid down when this part of North America was covered by a shallow tropical sea. The drop is not dramatic to look at. It is a series of rapids, not a waterfall. But it was enough to stop every large vessel on the western water highway. And stopping meant unloading. And unloading meant commerce. And commerce meant a city.

George Rogers Clark brought a company of Virginia militiamen to Corn Island, just at the lip of the Falls, in May of seventeen seventy-eight, during the Revolutionary War. They were using the river to reach British posts farther west. The island was a staging ground, not yet a settlement. But Clark understood the geography. He wrote to Virginia officials about the site's strategic value. The town of Louisville, named for King Louis the Sixteenth of France, whose troops were then helping the Americans fight the British, was platted on the south bank in seventeen eighty.

For the next fifty years, before the canal that bypassed the Falls opened in eighteen thirty, every westward-bound boat had to stop here. Goods were unloaded, carried by wagon around the rapids, and reloaded onto new vessels below. The people who managed that transaction, the draymen, the warehouse owners, the boatbuilders, the merchants, grew rich from the delay. Louisville was the toll booth at the threshold of the American interior.

The Falls are still here. On the Indiana side, the exposed limestone beds hold the best collection of Devonian coral and invertebrate fossils in the world. You can walk on rock that formed before the first trees existed.