Historical Sketches of



  The site of the town was the head of the Pond Settlement.
This pond region extended from Beargrass Creek, where it en-
ters the Ohio bottom, nearly to the mouth of Salt River, twenty
miles below. A large proportion of the site of Louisville now
covered with houses was then covered with water. Besides in-
numerable smaller bodies of water, there was one large lake, fa-
mous for its water-fowl, and for its boating facilities, occupying
the space between the present site of St. Paul's Church and
Main street.
  Louisville was then dreaded as a very grave-yard. In the sum-
mer and fall of 1822 vast numbers were swept off by a fever of
a very malignant type. The late venerable Robert Wickliffe
informed me that one morning in that season, during his attend-
ance at Court., he was greeted with the intelligence that in every
house in town there was a sick or dead man. This terrible visit-
ation aroused the surviving inhabitants to the necessity of re-
moving the cause of the pestilence, and their efforts were so suc-
cessful that the scourge has never been repeated, and the city
for many years has been one of the healthiest ili the United
States. Mr. Ben. Casseday, in his excellent history of Louisville,
says that this pestilence was " the most terrible blow ever given
to the prosperity of the rising town. Emigrants from abroad, as
well as from this and neighboring States, for years afterward,
dreaded even to pass through the town, and of those who had
already determined to locate here, many were dissuaded from
their purpose by the assertion that it was but rushing upon
death to make the attempt."
  The effort to establish the Episcopal Church in Louisville
seems to have proceeded quite as much from the country gentle-
men in the neighborhood as from the residents of the town.
  Jefferson County, like several other prominent points in Ken-
tucky, was settled at the very earliest period by a class of highly
educated gentlemen from Virginia. Of course they were all tra-
ditionally Episcopalians, for that had been the established reli-
gion of Virginia. But unfortunately, at the period of this emi-
gration, the coarse blasphemies of Tom Paine, and the more re-



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