Naming Louisville’s Parks: A Story of Tribes, Politics, and the Filson President

Louisville’s Olmsted Parks are among the city’s most treasured assets. Yet, important aspects of their early history—including the naming of the three major parks—are not widely known.

Drinking Fountain in Cherokee Park.

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Some in the community have recently maintained that Frederick Law Olmsted himself—the prominent landscape architect who in the 1890s contributed so much to the park system’s design and subsequent reputation—named Cherokee, Iroquois, and Shawnee parks. But this speculation has no basis in fact, and as the noted philosopher John Rawls has observed, “a theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue.” Almost thirty years ago, local historian Samuel W. Thomas cautioned his readers against giving the talented Olmsted too much credit for developing the city’s park system. The history of how and why these three flagship parks acquired and retained the names they have today underscores his point, while also revealing a rich and complex story.¹

Beginnings

During the second half of the nineteenth century, American cities began to emulate their European counterparts in establishing public parks. As urbanization accelerated with factories and their labor forces living in close proximity, civic leaders began establishing parklands within and on the edges of their rapidly growing cities. Such areas were seen as features that would attract residents, improve property values, and provide all classes of the population with cleaner air and opportunities for aesthetic enjoyment and relaxation. They would also help a city move ahead of, or at least not lose ground to, its urban rivals. New York City’s Central Park, begun in 1857, was the first among thousands of landscaped public parks in the United States.²

It would be 1880 before Louisville got into the act. That initial step was taken when the city’s former graveyard, in use from 1786 until 1832, became its first public park, on Jefferson Street between Eleventh and Twelfth Streets. The city council named it Baxter Square in honor of the retiring mayor, who had long been a parks advocate. It is still there.³

According to local historian George Yater, one reason for Louisville’s delay in embracing public parks was the proximity of the countryside, “only a brisk walk away.” But parks advocate Andrew Cowan identified a more important constraint. “Large and influential property owners,” he recalled many years later, “were opposed, almost unanimously, to Public Parks. How often did we hear it said, and read in the papers, that ‘Louisville is a city of homes, where nearly every family has its home with a garden, so the people did not need parks.’”⁴

In his annual message of 1881, Mayor John Baxter called for much more than had been done so far. “A public park would contribute more to the health, wealth, and moral purity of this community than anything I can imagine,” he wrote. “There is not a city in the United States of even half our size which does not possess a public park. We have no place either for a drive for our own citizens, or where we can show strangers and visitors.” Making clear how inadequate he considered the two-acre plot that would bear his name, he added: “The park should contain from 500 to 1,000 acres of land.” Baxter’s successor, Charles D. Jacob, also called for action and for funds, in the process stimulating many suggestions for possible sites.⁵ But it would be several more years before tangible progress was made.

Louisville’s present-day park system has resulted from the work of many hands, but during the early years Andrew Cowan contributed much more than anyone else. Born in Ayrshire, Scotland, and reared in New York State, Cowan served more than four years in the Union army during the Civil War. At Gettysburg in July 1863, twenty-one-year-old Captain Cowan was in charge of a battery of six artillery pieces, with more than 110 officers and...