Jefferson County, Kentucky
History, Records, Facts and Genealogy

Jefferson County, one of three original counties in what is now the state of Kentucky, is located west of the Outer Bluegrass region along the Ohio River. Bounded by Bullitt, Spencer, Shelby, and Oldham counties, it has an area of 386 square miles. The Virginia General Assembly created Jefferson County in May 1780 by dividing Kentucky County into three parts for better administration. The residents at and near the Falls of the Ohio had petitioned the legislature for a separate county, complaining that they "were near one hundred miles from the Court House" at Harrodsburg. LOUISVILLE was designated the seat of justice of Jefferson County, a territory of more than 7,800 square miles. The county was named for Thomas Jefferson, then governor of Virginia.

The County is bordered by Clark County, IN (north), Oldham County (northeast), Shelby County (east), Spencer County (southeast), Bullitt County (south), Hardin County (southwest), Harrison County, IN (west), Floyd County, IN (northwest). Cities, Towns and Communities include Anchorage, Audubon Park, Bancroft, Barbourmeade, Beechwood Village, Bellemeade, Bellewood, Blue Ridge Manor, Briarwood, Broad Fields, Broeck Pointe, Brownsboro Farm, Brownsboro Village, Cambridge, Cherrywood Village, Coldstream, Creekside, Crossgate, Douglass Hills, Druid Hills, Fairmeade, Fincastle, Fisherville, Forest Hills, Glenview Hills, Glenview Manor, Glenview, Goose Creek, Graymoor-Devondale, Green Spring, Hickory Hill, Hills and Dales, Hollow Creek, Hollyvilla, Houston Acres, Hurstbourne Acres, Hurstbourne, Indian Hills, Jeffersontown, Keeneland, Kingsley, Langdon Place, Lincolnshire, Louisville, Lyndon, Lynnview, Manor Creek, Maryhill Estates, Meadow Vale, Meadowbrook Farm, Meadowview Estates, Middletown, Minor Lane Heights, Mockingbird Valley, Moorland, Murray Hill, Norbourne Estates, Northfield, Norwood, Old Brownsboro Place, Parkway Village, Plantation, Plymouth Village, Poplar Hills, Prospect, Richlawn, Riverwood, Rolling Fields, Rolling Hills, Seneca Gardens, Shively, South Park View, Spring Mill, Spring Valley, Springlee, St. Matthews, St. Regis Park, Strathmoor Manor, Strathmoor Village, Sycamore, Ten Broeck, Thornhill, Watterson Park, Wellington, West Buechel, Wildwood, Windy Hills, Woodland Hills, Woodlawn Park, Worthington Hills, Whipps Millgate

The population was 695,055 in 1970; 685,004 in 1980; and 664,937 in 1990. The Official County Website is located at http://www.louisvilleky.gov/.

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Jefferson County Court, Probate and Tax Records

Jefferson County Birth, Marriage, Divorce and Death Records

Jefferson County Census Records

Jefferson County Maps & Atlases

Jefferson County Military Records

Jefferson County Genealogical Addresses

Jefferson County Church & Cemeteries

Family Trees & Genealogy Tidbits

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Extended History

The county's population in 1780 was concentrated almost exclusively around the Falls of the Ohio and nearby streams that emptied into the Ohio River, notably the Middle and South forks of ,Beargrass Creek and Goose Creek east of Louisville. This area, liberally endowed with springs and at a higher elevation than the site of Louisville, was especially desirable. In 1780 there were six fortified stations along the Middle Fork: Spring, Hogland's, Floyd's, Low Dutch (or New Holland), A'Sturgus, and Linn's. Sullivan's Station was on the South Fork. Jefferson County, from its exposed position on the river, was particularly vulnerable to Indian raids even some years after the interior of the state was relatively safe. As late as 1789, a raid on the isolated farm of Richard Chenoweth in present-day eastern Jefferson County left five settlers dead.

South of Louisville the early discovery of salt springs (notably Mann's Lick and Bullitt's Lick) prompted the establishment of fortified points in the 1780s along Salt River: Mud Garrison, Dowdall's Station, Fort Nonsense, and Brashear's Station. They offered protection to the salt makers, who began plying their trade in 1779, and salt making became Jefferson County's first industry. As settlers pushed into the farther reaches of Jefferson County, new counties were carved from its original territory, beginning with Nelson in 1784. In all, twenty-eight counties and parts of counties were created from Jefferson, which reached its present size in 1823.

The early settlers in the county represented diverse groups, not only Virginians but also many from North Carolina and the northeastern states, especially Pennsylvania. Mostly of Scotch-Irish and English ancestry, the newcomers also included many of German descent, and a close-knit group of Dutch descent founded the New Holland Station. Slaves brought to frontier Kentucky were a significant part of the population from the earliest days.

Well-to-do Virginians owned the best land, the largest acreages, and the most slaves. They established plantations on the Virginia model. Their ranks included Richard Taylor (father of President Zachary Taylor) of Springfields, Alexander Scott Bullitt of Oxmoor, Richard Clough Anderson of Soldier's Retreat, John Speed of Farmington, William Croghan (brother-in-law of George Rogers Clark) of Locust Grove, and Henry Massie of Ridgeway. The yeoman farmers, by contrast, mostly performed their own labor on smaller and often more rugged acreages. Non-Virginians were hampered in acquiring farms by Virginia's land laws and had few or no slaves. Some of the landless demanded that Kentucky be made a separate state, with different land laws.

Jeffersontown was founded in 1797 by Abraham Bruner, one of the Pennsylvania German immigrants, and was known informally for a number of years as Brunerstown. It was also in 1797 that Philip Buckner founded Middletown. Both settlements were in the eastern section of the county; not until the early years of the nineteenth century did the fertile but low-lying and flood-prone river plains in southwestern Jefferson County see any substantial number of farms.

The most important political entity until the early years of the nineteenth century was the county court, made up of all the justices of the peace (twenty-two in 1815), who exercised legislative, executive, and judicial powers, and selected their own successors. The two most powerful political offices were those of the sheriff (normally the senior justice of the peace) and the county clerk, appointed by the court. The rapid growth of Louisville in the nineteenth century shifted the focus of political power from the courthouse to city hall in the same way that the mercantile interests of the city overshadowed the county's agrarian economy.

While relations between city and county were usually amicable, there were exceptions. In 1835 there was a move to make Louisville a separate county, in part because Whig politicians, who dominated the city, had largely been shut out of membership on the county court. Another factor was a disagreement between city and county over financing the construction of a new courthouse, to be occupied also by city offices-a proposal that originated in the city government. The legislative act to make Louisville a county passed the state House of Representatives, but failed in the Senate. After this, city and county reached agreement on construction, sharing costs, and ownership. Although offers to present the courthouse to the state for a capitol building failed, the General Assembly met there for a month during the 1862 Confederate invasion of Kentucky.

By 1850 there were 5,000 voters in Louisville, more than double the number in the rest of Jefferson County. As Louisville outstripped it in population and political muscle, rural Jefferson County became one of Kentucky's leading agricultural producers. In 1860 it was first among counties in value of animals slaughtered, production of hay, market gardening, and orchards; and second in production of barley and butter. The county both supplied city markets and provisioned steamboats.

Jefferson County also led in the number of slaves in 1860 with 10,304, although only about half this number were in the rural precincts. Small farms predominated. There was only one farm of more than 1,000 acres in 1860, but there were 1,100 of three acres and more, and most were twenty to ninety-nine acres. Many farms were owned by the Germans who came in the wave of immigration in the 1840s and 1850s. A number of agricultural associations were formed, and in 1853 the Southwestern Agricultural and Mechanical Association established a thirty-eight-acre fairground in what is now the Crescent Hill neighborhood in Louisville's East End. Annual agricultural fairs were held there until about 1872. In 1877 the Fern Creek Farmers' and Fruit Growers' Association began a long span of annual fairs at Fern Creek on the Bardstown Road. This area was noted for strawberry production, just as St. Matthews, east of Louisville, became a potato-growing area. At the turn of the century, an onion farm on the Bardstown Road near Doup's Point was among the world's largest.

The county remained important agriculturally until the post-World War II spread of urbanization consumed much prime farm acreage. In the agricultural setting a number of smaller unincorporated communities developed. They included St. Matthews (originally Gilman's Point) east of Louisville on the Shelbyville Road, Buechel and Fern Creek south of Louisville on the Bardstown Road, OkoIona south of Louisville on the Preston Street Road (now Preston Highway), and Valley Station and Pleasure Ridge Park (originally a picnic ground) on the Valley Pike (now Dixie Highway). Typically home to a general store, a blacksmith, a saloon, post office, and perhaps a railroad station, the communities emphasized the rural character of the county. All have since become bedroom suburbs in an urban county.

In the prosperous years after the Civil War, many affluent city residents built impressive country homes, sometimes buying large acreages and becoming gentlemen farmers. Bashford Manor, built in 1871-72 near Buechel, was a typical example. In the 1880s it became a thoroughbred farm, which produced three Kentucky Derby winners. The home was demolished in 1972 and the farm converted to a shopping center as automobile-age strip development engulfed the area. Continued Below..........

Jefferson County, which in the nineteenth century was one of Kentucky's leading agricultural counties, has become in the twentieth century its most highly urbanized.

Most of the exurban development, however, took place in the eastern section of the county along the Louisville-Lexington railroad. Anchorage, a community of fine homes, grew up around the antebellum estate of Edward D. Hobbs. Incorporated as a town in 1879, it was the first municipality to be created since Jeffersontown and Middletown, in 1797. Another prestigious exurban community, Glenview, developed about the same time on the high hills overlooking the Ohio River above Louisville. Glenview, Harrod's Creek, and other exurban centers along the Ohio River were served by a narrow-gauge railroad completed in 1877 to Sand Hill (later Prospect)-the first built primarily to serve commuters from large estates to their Louisville offices. In 1904 it was converted into an electrically operated interurban line, and another interurban was built to Jeffersontown. Soon a network of such lines served the county, and two extended beyond-one to Shelbyville and another to La Grange. The interurban cars dashing through the rural landscape created corridors of urbanization as more city dwellers found their way to the countryside. By 1910 the dim outline of a metropolitan area embracing both city and county was evident. In that year 14.8 percent of the total county population of 263,000 lived outside Louisville, compared with 12 percent in 1900.

Urbanization was beginning to nibble at the county's rural tranquility and the pace increased as the automobile came onto the scene. The fiscal court (known as the court of claims until 1892), made up of ten justices of the peace, one from each precinct, became unequal to the increasing governmental burden of paving roads, building and administering schools, preventing crime, and the like. This, plus the nationwide trend toward shorter ballots, prompted the move toward a commission form of government. With the permission of the General Assembly and the approval of local voters, Jefferson became the first Kentucky county to adopt the commission form of government, replacing the justices with three commissioners on January 1, 1918.

The prosperity of the 1920s brought more urban incursions into county farmland and the creation of the small municipalities of Strathmoor Village (1928) and Strathmoor Manor (1931) near Bowman Field southeast of Louisville. As automobile ownership increased, even during the Great Depression years of the 1930s, the interurban electric lines quietly closed, one by one; the last, to Prospect, quit in 1935. Then in 1938 an act of the General Assembly changed the relationship of Louisville to the smaller municipalities in the county and paved the way to an explosive growth in small incorporated cities in the years after World War II.

With the repeal of prohibition in 1933, distilleries were reopened, many of the new ones choosing an area immediately southwest of Louisville known for many years as St. Helens. The plant built by Joseph Seagram and Son opened in 1937 as the world's largest distillery. Although Louisville had cast annexing eyes at these new enterprises, it had not yet done so when the 1938 General Assembly approved a bill requiring that at least 50 percent of the residents of an incorporated community facing annexation by a Class I city (a category that included only Louisville) must approve the action beforehand. Two months after the bill was passed, the city of Shively was created, including all the distilleries. The law effectively prevented Louisville from annexing the area.

The possibilities inherent in this legislation were not lost on the residents of the spate of new subdivisions that seemed to sprout overnight in the county, beginning in the late 1940s. Nor were they lost on established communities like St. Matthews, which took the precaution of becoming an incorporated city in 1950 to prevent annexation by its larger neighbor. Suburbanization, which began in the 1920s and was held in check for fifteen years by the Great Depression and World War II, burst the dam when the war ended. Between 1950 and 1960, county population outside Louisville nearly doubled, to 220,308, or 36 percent of the combined city-county total. By 1960 the number of incorporated cities, some very small, was about thirty.

A major factor in suburban growth was the expressway system, once seen as a way to discourage commercial growth on the fringes. That was the rationale advanced by the Louisville Area Development Association about 1947 for a belt highway around the city (now the Watterson Expressway) and a connecting spur to the central business district (now 1-65). The first sections were opened in the early 1950s, preceding the national interstate highway system that would bisect the county from east to west and north to south. Each interchange became a node of commercial and residential development. By 1972 the county population outside Louisville exceeded the city's. In fact, were it not for signs posted along its perimeter, it would be impossible to identify the Louisville boundaries.

Attempts to merge city and county into a single entity to meet the new circumstances have been consistently rebuffed by the suburban areas in 1956, 1970, 1982, and 1983. The problem of divided governmental authority was partially solved, however, with the approval by the state legislature of a city-county compact effective January 1, 1987, and continuing until the end of 1998. Louisville has agreed not to annex unincorporated county areas, and no new small cities will be created in the county-which counted a total of ninety-three when the agreement took effect. City and county share occupational tax revenues under a complex formula, a single economic development office has replaced the former two competing agencies, and the county has increased its share of funding to joint city-county agencies.

Jefferson County, Kentucky
History, Records, Facts and Genealogy

Jefferson County Court, Probate and Tax Records

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Jefferson County Birth, Marriage, Divorce and Death Records

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Jefferson County Census Records

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Jefferson County Maps & Atlases

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Jefferson County Military Records

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Jefferson County Genealogical Addresses

See Also Other Kentucky Genealogical Addresses

Jefferson County Church & Cemeteries

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Family Trees & Genealogy Tidbits

Extended History

Jefferson County, Kentucky History, Records, Facts and Genealogy

See Also Kentucky Land Records, Marriage Records, Court, Tax & Probate Records

See Also Vital Records in Kentucky

Cost of certificates

Processing Time

Phone, Fax, On-Line, or Credit Card

See Also Research In Census Records & Statewide Records that exist for Kentucky

See Also Research In State Map Collections

See Also Military Records in Kentucky

See Also Other Kentucky Genealogical Addresses

See Also Church & Cemetery Records in Kentucky

Jefferson County, Kentucky
History, Records, Facts and Genealogy