George Keats of Kentucky: A Life

The Pivotal Year 1827-1828

1 the PivotaL year 1827–1828 Perched on a gentle bluff overlooking the falls of the Ohio River, the George Keats and Company’s Steam Planeing, Grooving, and Tongueing Mill was turning out 4,000 board feet of lumber daily at a nice profit.1 Its proprietor, who lived with his young family adjacent to the mill on Brook Street, had good reason to be pleased. It was November 1827, and Louisville’s trustees, as part of a petition to the state legislature to incorporate as a city, had just asked the thirty-year-old Englishman to join the Ohio Bridge Commission, along with James Guthrie (a future U.S. treasury secretary) and other civic leaders.2 With this action, George Keats was accepted into Louisville’s leadership community, even though just three years earlier he had written to his sister, Fanny, in London, “Our circumstances will not allow us to associate with what is called the first or in other words the richest people here.”3 Given that recent years had been a struggle on many fronts, headlined by the premature loss of his brother John Keats in 1821, this was a pivotal moment, presaging a highly productive decade for George. It was also a pivotal time for Louisville as it emerged from its rugged frontier origins and transformed into a vibrant mercantile entrepôt. Left of George’s view of the falls was a vast construction project, the Louisville and Portland Canal, running about two miles from Louisville past Shippingport and south to Portland.4 The falls, the only natural barrier on the east-southwest river system between Pittsburgh and New Orleans, were crucial to Louisville’s early development. The north-south bridge project would later prove to be nearly as important. Just fifty years earlier, George Rogers Clark had placed about sixty settlers on Corn Island at the falls, as protection against Indian raids.5 By 1827, Louisville’s population had burgeoned to almost 10,000.6 The falls, with about a twenty-six-foot drop over two miles that required the portage of goods and people,7 were responsible for Louisville’s pioneer settlement. Later, the steamboat ushered in its mercantile boom period. These shallow-draft, paddle-wheeled vessels fascinated George Keats from 2 GeorGe Keats of KentucKy the moment he arrived at the headwaters of the Ohio River in Pittsburgh in 1818.8 Steamboats would later prove to be his undoing on two occasions . The export trade from west of the Allegheny Mountains followed gravity downriver to New Orleans. At the same time, settlers in Illinois and Missouri who required farm implements and other items from the East depended on Ohio and Mississippi River haulage. Warehouses sprang up along the waterfront above and below the falls to handle the transshipment of all these necessities around the water break (before the construction of the canal). The petition to incorporate Louisville as a city was approved by the legislature two months after it was filed.9 The 1830s would be a golden era for Louisville and for George. The city’s construction required wood, and lots of it. The city would also require hotels, and George’s family had operated a London hostelry and inn. The children of Keats and his wife, Georgiana Augusta, included Georgiana Emily, Emma Frances, Isabel, and John Henry. John Henry, the middle surviving child, was born in November 1827. Their second child, Rosalind, had died. Clarence George, Ella, and Alice Ann would arrive later during the 1830s. The parents called each other George and their eldest Georgey; thankfully, Clarence George was called Clarence. One cannot reconstruct what was on George’s mind that November day in 1827, but we do know the issues he had been dealing with during the year. In 1825 George had given his former guardian in London, Richard Abbey, the power of attorney to pay all the remaining debts of his late brother John. Although the debts had been covered, George had not received confirmation due to a mix-up with the power of attorney and the vagaries of the postal service. Meanwhile, Charles Brown, a friend of the poet, insisted that George repay Brown’s loans to John, with interest. Brown had criticized George for taking £700 to America in 1820, leaving John with only £60 to £70, or about £20 less than his debts totaled (although each had upward of £1,500 in a Chancery trust, unbeknownst to them at the time). Brown’s disparagement of...