![]() ![]() Although Louisville escaped the brunt of the destruction that took place in other Georgia communities, Federal troops set fire to several houses, the jail, and the courthouse, in addition to ransacking private homes. The Civil War (1861-65) put Louisville in the path of Union general William T. Broad Street emerged as the main business thoroughfare and continues in that function today. ![]() Residents adopted a linear design for their central business district, following a popular trend in Georgia town development during the 1820s and 1830s. In the fall of 1807 the state government relocated to Milledgeville, and the arrival of the railroad in the nineteenth century turned economic activity away from the old statehouse square. Criticism of the site arose over the vulnerability of its residents to malaria outbreaks, disappointment with the Ogeechee river trade, and the town’s inaccessibility to the growing western population. Louisville served as the state capital for ten years. Lamar, who served as the second president of the Texas Republic and Herschel Johnson, who is buried in the Louisville City Cemetery. Posner operated a thriving mercantile and real-estate business, including a boarding house in which state leaders and residents gathered in the popular “Long Room.” Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, several residents in and around Louisville achieved influential legal and political careers: Roger Lawson Gamble Mirabeau B. Prominent early residents of the Louisville area include Revolutionary patriot Solomon Wood and Joseph Gabriel Posner, a Polish Jewish immigrant who moved to the town in 1795. By 1806 the town had grown to nearly 100 homes with approximately 550 free and enslaved inhabitants. Residents kept in touch with events through the State Gazette and Louisville Journal the Louisville Gazette, which briefly expanded to the Louisville Gazette and Republican Trumpet the Independent Register and later, the Louisville Courier. By the end of the 1790s Louisville had acquired a cosmopolitan atmosphere, offering a coffeehouse, a debating society, and traveling shows, as well as dancing, fencing, and French lessons. It served as one of a series of schools established to train young men for a university education. ![]() The legislature briefly considered making Louisville the home of the University of Georgia but decided to build the Jefferson, or Louisville, Academy there instead. Merchants brought commercial trade to the town, and city leaders sought to expand the navigational potential of the Ogeechee River. Tobacco and, later, cotton served as the major cash crops during Louisville’s first decade. But political violence did not deter growth. Arguments over the issue frequently spilled out to the streets of the new capital. ![]() In 1796 the Georgia legislature gathered in Louisville amid the political uproar caused by the 1795 Yazoo land fraud. Georgia’s Revolutionary War debt and the threat of a large-scale conflict with the Creek Nation delayed the official opening of the Louisville statehouse until May 1795, when delegates convened there for a state constitutional convention. The original city plan, modeled after Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, included a raised statehouse in the central square, with streets and town blocks radiating out from that focal point and forming right angles. Organizers envisioned Louisville as a trade center, and Commissioners Brownson, Few, and Lawson purchased 1,000 acres on the south side of Rocky Comfort Creek near the Ogeechee River to take advantage of the river transportation. Legislators also specified that the new capital would be named Louisville in honor of King Louis XVI of France, America’s Revolutionary War ally. On January 26, 1786, the assembly passed a law appointing Nathan Brownson, William Few Jr., and Hugh Lawson as commissioners charged with finding a site for the seat of government. By the mid-1780s the new upcountry settlers outnumbered those in the older coastal counties, and upcountry legislators demanded a state capital in a more western location than Savannah. The town grew as the result of both large-scale immigration to the Georgia upcountry after the American Revolution (1775-83) and the desire of many Georgians to enhance the state’s commercial prosperity. Louisville, the county seat of Jefferson County, also served as Georgia’s third capital from 1796 until 1807. ![]()
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