Shantyboat Life

When the shantyboat waterfront disappeared around 1960, after a life of more than one hundred years, the stories of how its people survived on the edge of an urban and industrial landscape also faded. However, an environment increasingly characterized by deforestation, air pollution, foul water, and industrial waste suggests that the issues the shantyboaters faced are relevant today. Although the community and its stories became almost invisible after the city bulldozed many of its buildings and turned the site into a municipal garbage dump, the Filson's holdings can help us imagine what life was like in this lost neighborhood.

Henry Dutchin's shantyboat on the upper end of the point between the canal and the Ohio river, Louisville, Kentucky, October 6, 1922. Rogers Clark Ballard Thruston Photograph Collection.

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As a neighborhood, Shantyboat Louisville originally stretched from around First Street east to the northern end of Towhead Island. Rerouting the Beargrass Creek in the 1850s moved the point at which the Beargrass entered the Ohio upriver, and reduced the size of the shantyboat neighborhood by about one third. The eastern portion of this area was a neighborhood known as "The Point," which existed until about 1945.

The Filson's excellent map collection reveals the changes in the waterfront that shantyboaters called home and helps establish its boundaries and sense of place. That waterfront was dynamic not only because the river altered itself due to erosion but also because the citizens of the Falls of the Ohio knew the falls were the key to Louisville's settlement and growth. One of the city's largest civic improvements and engineering feats was the construction of the Louisville and Portland canal. The rise of steamboat transportation and the creation of a steamboat industrial complex led to the canal's construction and completion in the early 1830s.

"Locks of Louisville" by John T. Bauscher, 1930.

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There was a problem with the south bank of the Ohio River downtown. Beargrass Creek emptied into the river only a few blocks north of the canal's downriver entrance, bringing silting and small boat traffic, including shanty-boats, into the mix of larger steamboats and barges. During the 1850s, city leaders decided that the expansion of Louisville's wharf was so important to freight and passenger traffic that they decreed the mouth of Beargrass Creek be moved upriver about a mile and a half. The lower Beargrass, long used as a harbor for small watercraft, was abandoned and its natural mouth closed, filled, and made part of the levee. A new creek entrance into the river was created by digging a canal, the Beargrass cut-off, to the river near the north end of what was commonly called Towhead Island, owned by the Ohio River Sand Company according to the 1913 New Map of Louisville and Jefferson County, Kentucky, Compiled from Actual Surveys, and Official Records.¹

The early efforts to change the waterfront were intended to support industry, so it is not surprising that the maps in the Filson's collection reveal that the city's early shantyboaters lived in the center of Louisville's first industrial center, not on the banks of a bucolic stream surrounded by farmland.

Towhead Island and The Point.

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The Point, Louisville, Kentucky, April 1913.

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During the late nineteenth century, another transportation technology—railroads—made the southern bank of the Ohio an even more chaotic place to live and work. The main tracks and extensive railyards effectively cut off entire city blocks of shoreline from downtown. This was particularly true after the completion of the Big Four Bridge to the river bank just downriver of Towhead Island. The 1913 city map shows the extent of this barrier and the marginalization of people living along the shoreline. In addition to railroad mainlines and yards, which partially filled in Beargrass Creek's natural bed, in some places, unfilled pools...