Introduction
LOUISVILLE society was as delightful in 1819 as in these 1919 care-free
days of after the war, if one may rely upon the accuracy of Dr. Henrico
McMurtrie, who published his "Sketches of Louisville" just a hundred years
ago. Surely his graceful tribute to society will bear repetition, for while
Louisville, the town of 4,500 at the Falls of the Ohio, has lost its slender
proportions, has changed in many ways, even in climate, the social life
has withstood time to the extent of proving quite as rare and interesting
and has managed to hold within the circle families of the same name as
those that dispensed hospitality in memorable fashion in his day.
Dr. McMurtrie observed that the majority of the inhabitants,
engaged in adding dollar to dollar, devoted no time to literature or "to
the acquirement of those graceful nothings, which, of no value in themselves,
still constitute one great charm of polished society. Such is the character
of the inhabitants of this place, in general, "ma ogni medaglio ha il suo
reverso." There is a circle, small 'tis true, but within whose magic round
abounds every pleasure that wealth, regulated by taste, can produce, or
urbanity bestow.
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There, the "red heal" of Versailles may imagine himself in the emporium
of fashion. and, whilst leading beauty through the mazes of the dance,
forget that he is in the wilds of America.
Since that time many families have come to Louisville
to take up their residence; aristocratic families of Virginia, families
representing the flower of the far South, families of culture and refinement
from across the Mason and Dixon line, those who came over in the Mayflower,
and others on the "W. C. Hite," as one society leader cleverly described
the arrival of her antecedents in our midst. These good people have made
their place in the community, are indispensable to the city's business,
social, and club life, but in connecting what in Dr. McMurtrie's day made
society a rare and beautiful phase of life in a bustling frontier town,
with the Louisville society after a hundred years have past, attention
must be devoted and confined to the first families from an historians viewpoint.
but first families in the other sense, too, for they represent today what
they then stood for in position, culture and refinement.
They formed the nucleus of society in 1819 but they came to
the beautiful country of the Beargrass before 1800.
The population of the town in 1780 was incorrectly rated by an
early historian as thirty
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inhabitants though the figure was nearer one hundred and fifty so it
should not be difficult to separate the sheep from the goats, although
it would appear that there were only sheep among the early settlers, leaving
the other class to be composed of marauding Indians, who bitterly contested
possession of every clearing the original group of cotillon leaders and
future bank presidents made. Kentucky, at that time the Fincastle county
of Virginia, was known as the land of blood, but was desired by Virginia
gentlemen for immigration purposes, no less heartily than by the Indians
of the North and South who had marked it for their own as a hunting ground.
The Indians bit the dust in many of these encounters, but heavy toll was
taken among the pioneers, whose families counted possession of Kentucky
homes all the more dear in their tragic association.
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