Freedom Park: A Journey to Freedom

Freedom Park: A Journey to Freedom. Settlement. , Between 1750 and 1840, British colonists and later United States citizens acquired and settled millions of square miles between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. The Ohio River bisects this vast region, flowing 981 miles from Fort Pitt (Pittsburgh) to the Mississippi River with only one natural break in navigation at the rapids, misnamed "the Falls of the Ohio.", To the north, in the "Old Northwest," dozens of Native American societies coexisted with thinly scattered French fur trappers and traders. Far to the south, the "Five Civilized Indian Nations" the Choctaws, Cherokees, Chickasaw, Creeks and Seminoles-occupied most of the modern southern states., Kentucky was the crucial middle ground, the first American "west," settled after the French and Indian War (1754-1763) by explorers and land-hungry pioneers primarily from Virginia, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. However, the search for freedom and prosperity for some meant displacement and enslavement for others. Because Kentucky was an extension of Virginia, the state with the largest slave population in the nation, Kentucky was settled both by slaveholders and those in search or what Daniel Boone called "a good poor man's country.", Settlement was not without its challenges., The Iroquois Confederacy, the Shawnee, the Delaware, the Chickasaws and the Cherokees all claimed some portion of the region and resisted settlement by launching frequent raids well into the 1780s-one of which cost the life of Abraham Lincoln, grandfather of the future president, at Long Run Park near Louisville on May 19, 1786., Notwithstanding the dangers, the "Buzzel…about Kentuck… as a new found Paradise" attracted thousands of hopeful settlers from the east seeking freedom and opportunity in the west., In 1778, General George Washington, then in command of the Continental Army, issued secret orders to Lieutenant Colonel George Rogers Clark to raise an army, descend the Ohio River and attack Kaskaskia (near modern St. Louis) and other British strongholds in the Northwest Territory. Clark mustered roughly 150 men with whom, along with several families of settlers, he floated down the river from Pittsburgh, reached the Falls of the Ohio on May 27, 1778, landed on Corn Island, and his troops built block houses and cabins. On June 26, 1778, with a portentous full solar eclipse in progress, he departed for Kaskaskia where he won decisively and secured American "ownership" of the Northwest. In the spring of 1779, the settlers moved ashore and, at a public meeting on April 17, 1779, established the town of Louisville named in honor of Louis XVI of France., The history of Louisville, from the beginning, has been many interlocking histories. British colonists and European immigrants, poor frontiersmen and members of the Virginia gentry with political and family connections that led to massive land-grants-all crossed the Appalachians seeking opportunities unavailable to them in the east. Although the Falls determined the location of Louisville, the geography of the Ohio Valley near the Falls determined for two generations the overall patterns of settlement in Jefferson County. Early settlements in the county radiated from a network of partially fortified "stations." Settlers lived in or near such stations, in which they sought refuge when threatened by Native American raiding parties., Steamboats appeared on the Ohio River in 1811 and, by 1830, a canal coiled around the Falls of the Ohio, and Louisville evolved from a frontier outpost into the key city on the border between North and South. By 1850, Louisville was the tenth largest city in the nation-a thriving urban, mercantile and industrial city in a largely rural and agricultural state.