Germans in Louisville: A History (American Heritage) by C. Robert Ullrich & Victoria A. Ullrich

Author:C. Robert Ullrich & Victoria A. Ullrich [C. Robert Ullrich and Victoria A. Ullrich]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2015-10-12T04:00:00+00:00

15 .

BUTCHERTOWN

BY EDNA KUBALA-MOTT

Butchertown is a neighborhood located just east of downtown Louisville. It is bordered by the Ohio River on the north, Interstate 65 on the west, Main Street on the south and Mellwood Avenue and Beargrass Creek on the east. As early as 1796, a gristmill was built there, and the first house was erected in 1802. The area was annexed by the City of Louisville in 1827. The history of Butchertown is closely tied to the wave of German immigration to Louisville beginning in the 1830s.

In the nineteenth century, Louisville faced a large and ever-growing urban population to feed. With only twelve butchers in town in 1832, they were in great demand. As Germans with a mastery of the butchering trade immigrated to the United States and settled in the Midwest, they were the natural fit to heed the midcentury call. In Louisville, the only question was where. With the generally messy process of butchering livestock banned in the city center, the just-removed area upriver, east of downtown, also happened to be the intersection of Shelbyville Turnpike, Workhouse (Lexington) Road and Brownsboro Road, all prime routes to transport livestock into town from the surrounding farm country. Also, the nearby Beargrass Creek was a convenient place to dispose of animal remains (a practice long since abandoned).

A large influx of experienced butchers emigrating from Germany following the European revolutions of 1848, combined with the then suburban location and proximity to Beargrass Creek, quickly established Butchertown as a bustling early German neighborhood in Louisville. By 1865, Louisville was home to two hundred master butchers, 80 percent of them in Butchertown. A typical Louisvillian of the time would buy cleaned, butchered meat from one of the many Germans employing the skills and experience brought over from the strong Metzger culture of Germany. Names such as “Kleisendorf, Leibold, William and Gottlieb Kriel, Casper and Henry Schmitt, Bremacher, Weis, Ulmer, E. Kirder, F. Butterweck, Conrad Schoefel, Frank Hammer, Charles Rehn, and Fred Leib” turned animals into dinner during the antebellum and Civil War eras in Louisville.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the Germans who immigrated to the United States were, for the most part, refugees from the political strife that embroiled the German states prior to Bismarck’s unification (in contrast to the Irish famine immigrants). In the United States, the areas settled by Germans became humming towns and villages with the efficient specialization of labor typical of Germany. This was true of Butchertown with its natural geographic features, manmade infrastructure and nearby city requiring products and food. The industriousness of the newcomers and the urban proximity and transportation advantages of the neighborhood brought about a host of complementary commerce, the likes of which also took advantage of German experience and expertise. Becoming a veritable German workshop to the city’s immediate east, cooperages (making barrels to ship meat and other products), Louisville’s largest woolen mill, breweries, inns, tanneries, bottle makers, candle makers and soap-making factories began to emerge to support the rapid growth following the Civil War.

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