Owensboro, KY

Owensboro, Kentucky
Type	City (second class); county seat
County	Daviess County
State	Kentucky
Former names	Yellow Banks; Rossboro; Owensborough
First settler	William Smeathers, c. 1797–98
Post office	Yellow Banks 1806; Owensborough 1816; Owensboro 1893
Selected as county seat	1815
Platted	March 1816, by Capt. James W. Johnson
Named for	Col. Abraham Owen
City charter	February 16, 1866
Population	About 8,000 (1875)
Location	South bank of the Ohio River, 75 miles southwest of Louisville

Owensboro is the seat of Daviess County, Kentucky, on the south bank of the Ohio River about seventy-five miles southwest of Louisville. Known to river travelers from the 1770s as the Yellow Banks for the color of the clay bluff, it was settled permanently by William Smeathers near the turn of the nineteenth century, platted in 1816 under the proposed name Rossboro, and named instead for Col. Abraham Owen, who had been killed at the Battle of Tippecanoe. It was chartered as a city in 1866 and grew through the nineteenth century on tobacco, distilling, river traffic and the railroads.

The Yellow Banks

The site was known as the Yellow Banks by river travelers as early as 1776, though the first recorded use of the name dates from 1798. The Navigator, a journal issued for Ohio River boatmen at Pittsburgh, recorded in its 1814 edition that the place was named for the yellow appearance of the banks of the river. The name was applied to the whole bank for three or four miles, and specifically to the landing where the first settler had his cabin.

William Smeathers, also recorded as Bill Smothers, was born in Virginia in 1762 and was a woodsman, hunter, scout and soldier. He had helped build the fort at Hartford, in Ohio County, about 1782 to protect settlers, and moved from there to the Yellow Banks — by his own account, for more elbow room. He made the first permanent settlement in the area about 1797–98. Some historians have reported a frontier military post at the banks as early as 1795.

Smeathers was an officer in Kentucky's "Corn Stalk" militia in 1803 and served in the War of 1812 under Samuel Hopkins. He later went to Texas as a hunter, guide and Indian fighter, and died there in 1837. A highway marker in Owensboro commemorates him.

A post office was established as Yellow Banks on July 1, 1806. The old name clung to the place long after the town had been renamed.

Founding and naming

The site was selected as the county seat in 1815 by commissioners appointed by the first county court, held in April of that year. The town was surveyed and platted in March 1816 by Capt. James W. Johnson, the first county surveyor, and an eighty-acre town was laid off and approved by the Daviess County Court.

The name proposed to the Kentucky legislature was Rossboro, or Rossborough, honoring David Ross, who died in 1817 and was one of the wealthiest Virginia merchants and landowners of his day and a friend of Thomas Jefferson. The legislature declined the proposal in favor of a name honoring one of its own members, Col. Abraham Owen. The county had already been named for Joseph Hamilton Daveiss more than two years earlier, and the naming of the town for Owen was understood as a companion tribute: the two men had been friends in life and both fell at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811.

Abraham Owen was born in Prince Edward County, Virginia, in 1769 and came to Kentucky in 1785. His father, Brackett Owen, had built Owen's Station, a frontier post about four miles from present-day Shelbyville. Abraham considered Shelby County his home and represented it in the legislature; he helped lay out the town of Shelbyville and served as its trustee and magistrate and as county surveyor, and was a member of Kentucky's second constitutional convention in 1799.

The post office name was changed from Yellow Banks to Owensborough on March 9, 1816, with James M. Rogers as postmaster, and the spelling was shortened to Owensboro on October 10, 1893. Owensboro received its charter as a city from the legislature on February 16, 1866.

Early history

Owensboro, the County seat of Daviess County, is located on the south bank of the Ohio River, at what was known to the early keel and flat-boat men as the Big Yellow Banks. The name was given because of the deep yellow color of the river bank, composed of yellow clay, extending about six miles along the river, and from ten to twenty feet above the highest floods in the Ohio. The site was selected as the County seat in 1815, by Commissioners appointed by the first County Court, held in April of that year. The survey of the first plat of the town extended from the Ohio River and a ravine on the north, to Fourth Street on the south, and from Lewis Street on the east to Walnut Street on the west. The survey and plat thereof was completed by Captain James W. Johnson, the first County Surveyor, on the 23rd day of March, 1816, and approved by the Commissioners and Court with the name of Rossboro, and ratified by the agent and owners of the land, George Hanley being agent for Ross and other proprietors. Later the name was changed to Owensboro, in honor of Colonel Abram Owen, formerly of Shelby County, Kentucky. Colonel Joseph Hamilton Daveiss and Colonel Owen were both officers serving under General W. H. Harrison at the bloody battle with the Indians under Tecumseh at Tippecanoe, now Indiana, but then Indiana Territory. Both fell in the thickest of the fight. The County had already received the name of Daveiss, and the old settlers, some of whom had been in the same battle in which Daviess and Owen were killed, determined, as a mark of respect, to link the names of the two together for all time to come. They had been associates and friends in life, fell together in battle, and it was appropriate that their names be joined after death.

The old name of "Yellow Banks," however, still clung to the place, and the town was hardly known by any other name, even by the citizens, until about 1839 or 1840. The post-office bore the name of 'Yellow Banks' up to the time of 1837 or 1838. In 1833, the population was scarcely 200 all told, and not a single church edifice or organization. The increase in population was small until 1850. A branch of the Southern Bank was located in Owensboro about that time. The power of the Trustees had been enlarged by Legislative action, and those officials began to drain and improve the streets. The action of the Trustees, and the fact that the Bank was one of the institutions of the place, gave assurance that there was some money in town, and seemed to infuse new life into the citizens, even the old fogy part of the population, which had been averse to enterprise. Improvements began to be made. Better houses were commenced, new-comers poured in and a steady growth was maintained until 1861, when the war put a stop to all enterprise and public improvement. The population decreased, and not until 1866 did improvements begin again or was an increase of population noted. A moderate but perceptible degree of progress and growth has continued until now in 1875, when the population is estimated at about 8,000.

Early trades and manufacturing

No record survives of when the first forges were established in Owensboro. Abe Bear of Frederica Street, one of the city's oldest residents when he was interviewed in the 1930s, recalled that three were in business in 1864: Simon Kuntz, at the corner of Daviess and Second; John Robinson, also on Daviess Street; and Smith & Johnson on Fifth Street. All were called blacksmiths in those days. He also recalled that the Owensboro Foundry was founded about 1875 and operated by Thomas Guthrie at Fifth and Poplar.

The first courthouse in Owensboro was built of logs, and was soon followed by a brick structure. In 1881 the Planters' Bank became the First National.

The early settlers of Daviess County came from Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas, and were largely of Scots and Irish descent. Nearly all were involved with tobacco in some way — growing it or owning warehouses — and the tobacco export business was substantial from an early date.

Newspapers

The date of the first printing press in Owensboro is not recorded. Urey Woodson, for many years owner of the Owensboro Messenger & Inquirer, described the city's early papers in an address entitled "The Good Old Days" delivered to the sixty-second annual meeting of the Kentucky Press Association at Paducah in 1931.

James A. Munday founded the Owensboro Messenger in November 1877 and was, in Woodson's estimate, a writer of wonderful ability who fought many a paper battle with Henry Watterson. An earlier paper, the Owensboro Monitor, had been established some years before the Messenger by Thomas S. Pettit and edited by Dr. A. L. Ashby. The Southern Shield was edited by J. C. Ford. In a much earlier period the future senator George Vest of Missouri edited an Owensboro newspaper as a young man.

See Owensboro Newspapers for a fuller account.

The city in 1883

Owensboro contains churches of the following denominations: Baptist, Cumberland Presbyterian, Catholic, Methodist, Southern Presbyterian, Northern Presbyterian, Christian or Campbellite, Baptist, Episcopal, German Catholic, German Lutheran. The above have been named in the order of their establishment. There is also a colored Baptist, and a colored Methodist church. All, except two, of the houses of worship, are substantial brick structures, with a capacity of seating over one half of the entire population. There are three banks-the Deposit Bank, Planters' Bank, and Savings Bank. The public schools are two in number, each with a full roll of professors and teachers. The school buildings are large and commodious brick edifices, with a capacity for 900 to 1000 pupils. The Catholic Sisters have a female school with about 100 pupils, and the Vaughan Female Seminary, of which Mrs. E. S. Phillips is proprietress, is an institution richly meriting the patronage of the community. There are several other private schools in the city, altogether accommodating from 1000 to 1100 pupils. There are also one or two schools for colored children. Prominent among the other institutions of the city are sixteen stemming and prizing tobacco establishments. The smallest has a capacity for handling 600,000 pounds, whilst several of the largest have each a capacity for handling 2,000,000 pounds of tobacco each season. All of the together have a capacity of almost 20,000,000 pounds. There are also two planing mills, one furniture factory, a wheel, hub, and handle factory, chair factory, stave and barrel factory, with quite a number of wagon and carriage factories, blacksmith shops, carpenter shops, cabinet shops, etc.

In the "professional" class of the community is numbered twelve or thirteen physicians, some of them quite eminent in their professions. About thirty practicing lawyers constitute one of the strongest bars in the State. Merchants, grocers, and all the trades are well represented.

Seven Hills

The Seven Hills section of the city was laid off in town lots about 1900 on some 150 acres, and took its name from the seven small hills on which it sits. A post office called Seven Hills operated there from July 29, 1901, with John T. Hubbard as postmaster, until it was discontinued at the end of March 1905 and its mail transferred to Owensboro. Seven Hills Baptist Church grew out of a mission established on Alexander Avenue in 1901 by the Third Baptist Church of Owensboro. The section was later annexed into the city.

Owensboro in 1936

A survey of the county compiled for the Works Progress Administration in June 1936 described Owensboro as one of the large dark tobacco markets of the world, with two loose-leaf sales companies handling Daviess County tobacco and eight processing and grading factories. Apples and peaches were also important to the area. Two distilleries were located in the city, along with two electric appliance plants, and furniture, milling machinery, and brick and tile plants. There were a number of coal mines in the county and several oil wells then being further developed.

The city was a stopping point for the Illinois Central Railroad, and the Louisville, Henderson & St. Louis ran through from Louisville to St. Louis. Owensboro was served by local and interurban buses connecting with out-of-state lines, and had one ferry within the city and two more within three miles of the city limits, running day and night without fixed schedules.

The compiler noted that the May 15, 1936 issue of Forbes magazine had included Owensboro in a list of the ten best cities in the United States, placing it among outstanding towns for business gains since the first of that year.

The Griffith House on Griffith Avenue, built by William R. Griffith in 1828 from materials found on the place, was described at that time as the only home in Owensboro remaining so nearly in its original state.

Floods

Flood stage of the Ohio River at Owensboro is fixed at 41 feet. The great flood of 1883 reached about that height, and the 1883 History of Daviess County was published just late enough to carry a lively account of it, quoted from the Saturday Post and probably written by its editor, George Vest Triplett.

Its championship was short-lived. The next spring the high mark was exceeded by four and a half inches — a small figure until one considers that those inches were spread over many square miles. The crest of the 1884 flood came at the same time of year as those of 1883 and 1832, its only rivals: February 17, or in 1884 the 17th or 18th. The water did much damage to the surrounding country, worsened by a storm that struck while it was at its height, and Owensboro raised a relief fund of several hundred dollars for the sufferers. The city itself stayed, as the saying went, high and dry.

The 1884 record stood for twenty-nine years. A stone had been set at the corner of St. Ann Street and the river marking the height the water reached that year; in 1913 a brick was laid edgewise on the stone and the water came to the top of it, exceeding the old mark by the brick's width of four inches, for a maximum of 48.9 feet. Still the river did not invade the city.

Then in January 1937, through what contemporaries considered an unprecedented coincidence of meteorological conditions, the earlier floods were made to look like pleasant spring freshets. Once the creeping water passed flood stage there was some apprehension that previous records might be equalled. On the 18th a stage of 46 feet was predicted; three days later some bold spirit ventured that it might reach 50. On January 24 it stood at 50.7 feet, with water in Third Street from Elm to Sycamore and in other western streets. The rise continued until the 29th, when the crest was reached at 54.85 feet.

The flood then held almost stationary for two or three days — on January 31 it had receded only a tenth of a foot in twenty-two hours, and on February 2 it was still 53.9 feet. By the 8th it was down to 46.4 feet and falling rapidly. Owensboro could no longer boast of being high and dry at any stage of the river, though even in this greatest of floods the greater part of the city was untouched and no part suffered serious damage. At its height the water lay a few inches deep in Second Street at St. Ann.

Source: Sixty Years of Owensboro, 1883-1943, William Foster Hayes.

Daviess County organization

Daviess County was formed in the year 1815. The County received its name from General Joseph H. Daveiss, whose residence for some years was on the Ohio River above Owensboro. The name should have been spelled "Daveiss," but through a mistake in enrolling the bill during its passage through the Legislature, the name was spelled "Daviess," and from that time down this way has been adopted of spelling the name of the County.

County officials

The following embraces the persons who have filled the various official positions in enumeration with the government and organization of the County:

Judges of the Circuit Court
Henry P. Broadnax	1815-1822
Alney McLean	1822-1842
John Calhoon	1842-1851
John P. Devereux	1851
Jesse W. Kincheloe	1851-1856
James Stuart	1856-1867
James L. Johnson	1867
George W. Williams	1867-1870
Martin H. Cofer	1870-1874
James Stuart	1874-1880
Lucius P. Little	1880-

Besides these, special Judges were appointed at various times, among whom were John. H. McHenry and George H. Yeaman.

Clerks of the Circuit Court
George Handley	1815-1827
Horace Allen	1827-1832
John S. McFarland	1832-1845
William B. Wall	1845-1856
John P. Thompson	1856-1862
Ward Payne	1862
Joseph Thomas	1862-1868
M. L. Ogden	1868
John P. Thompson	1868-1872
Joseph Thomas	1872
John G. McFarland	1872-1874
Frank F. Conway	1874

The first Clerk, George Handley retained his position until April 1827, when he resigned the duties of the office. Horace Allen, who had previously acted as Deputy, became Clerk. Allen died while in office and was succeeded by John S. McFarland, who resigned the position October, 1845. John P. Thompson also died while server as Clerk.

Sheriffs of Daviess County
Charles Y. Duncan	1815-1821
William Glenn	1821-1823
John Piles	1823-1825
Remus Griffith	1825-1827
J. Leman	1827-1829
Warner Crow	1829-1831
John Daveiss	1831-1833
R. C. Jett	1833-1835
S. Hawes	1835-1837
E. McCreery	1837-1838
R. C. Jett	1838-1839
William Newton	1839-1841
William B. Baird	1841
Joseph M. Potts	1841-1843
John G. Howard	1843-1845
Henry Dugan	1845-1847
Abner Lee	1847-1849
C. D. Jackson	1849-1851
Thomas Landrum	1851-1855
Joseph G. Harrison	1855-1859
John Locke	1859-1863
Joseph G. Harrison	1863-1866
W. H. Perkins	1866-1868
H. W. Scott	1868-1872
W. H. Perkins	1873-1874
H. W. Scott	1874-1876
J. H. Gates	1876-1878
Ed. C. Davis	1878-1882
A. B. Miller	1882

County Judges
Thomas W. Watkins	1850-1854
George H. Yeaman	1854-1858
A. G. Botts	1858-1866
George W. Triplett	Elected in 1866-'70-'74
H. W. Scott	1879

Early representation

In 1788, when this portion of Kentucky was Nelson County, it was represented by John Steele and Matthew Walton, in the convention which ratified the present Constitution of the United States.

Of the earliest justices of the peace, we mention the names of John Calhoon, and eminent lawyer and great man; John Daveiss, who was acting in 1818; and Warner Crow, who had the office at least from 1818-1823.

Notes

The sources disagree on when the town's name changed from Rossboro to Owensborough. Post Office Department records give the change of the post office name as March 9, 1816. Hugh O. Potter's history gives 1817, and notes that the Kentucky General Assembly approved the act establishing Owensborough on February 3, 1817, thirty-five days after the county court had approved the town plat under the earlier name. The Works Progress Administration typescript compiled by Cecelia Laswell in 1936 gives 1818. The 1883 History of Daviess County records only that the plat was approved as Rossboro and that the name was later changed.

The surveyor's name appears as James W. Johnson in the 1883 history and as James W. Johnston in later place-name research.

The county's name was misspelled in the legislative act that established it in 1815 and was never corrected; the surname of the man it honors is properly Daveiss.