Col. Frederick Geiger & Early Butchertown
Louisville, Jefferson County, Kentucky
Marker Inscription
Col. Frederick Geiger/ Early Butchertown. Col. Frederick Geiger(1753-1832)- In 1796, Revolutionary War veteran Frederick Geiger came to Jefferson Co. from Md. Settled in Butchertown in 1807. He raised a company of Ky. Mounted Riflemen for Gen. W. H. Harrison’s 1811 Indian Campaign. Wounded at Battle of Tippecanoe. Col. in the War of 1812 & wealthy landowner. Buried in Cave Hill Cem. (Reverse) Early Butchertown- Butchertown land is part of the 1774 survey claimed by Hancock Taylor. By 1797, Henry Fait had a house and a saw & grist mill on Beargrass Creek. Frederick Geiger bought the mill in 1801 and ran a public ferry to Indiana after 1802. After 1815, the neighborhood was a pork packing site for steamboats engaged in the Ohio River trade.
Erected by Kentucky Historical Society
The Story
A Revolutionary War veteran from Maryland, Frederick Geiger settled in the Louisville area in the 1790s and grew into a prominent landowner, ferry operator, and mill owner along Beargrass Creek. He raised a company of Kentucky Mounted Riflemen for the 1811 campaign against Native forces, was wounded at Tippecanoe, and served as a colonel in the War of 1812. The neighborhood he helped shape, Butchertown, became a bustling pork-packing district supplying the Ohio River steamboat trade.
Why it matters
Geiger's life spans the early republic's frontier soldiering and commerce, while Butchertown shows how river-town industry and immigrant labor built the antebellum American economy.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Frederick Geiger
- · William Henry Harrison
Related events
- · Battle of Tippecanoe
- · War of 1812
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
The Fair Grounds, 1853–1873
Louisville, KY
For two decades beginning in 1853, this 38-acre tract on the eastern edge of Louisville hosted National Agricultural and Kentucky state fairs, drawing crowds by rail to a stadium seating 10,000 and a sprawl of exhibition halls. Crescent Avenue served as the grand promenade into the grounds. During the Civil War the fairgrounds were pressed into service, first by the Kentucky State Guard and then by Union troops, before the land was subdivided into lots and sold off by 1875.
Louisville's Steamboat Era
Louisville, KY
When the steamboat New Orleans reached Louisville in the autumn of 1811, it opened a new age on the western rivers, and the city — perched at the Falls of the Ohio — quickly became a steamboat hub with six lines and hundreds of boats built nearby. Its wharf teemed with traffic through the Civil War and welcomed a remarkable procession of Americans, including eight presidents and writers from Washington Irving and Charles Dickens to Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville.
U.S. Marine Hospital
Louisville, KY
In the mid-19th century, the Ohio and Mississippi rivers were America's great commercial highways, and Louisville sat at the Falls of the Ohio, a natural break in the traffic where boats had to portage or lock through. Built between 1845 and 1852, this marine hospital was part of a federal system created to care for the boatmen, deckhands, and rivermen who powered the booming steamboat trade but who fell sick or were injured far from home. Its handsome design reflected the young government's growing sense that the men who moved the nation's commerce deserved proper medical care.
Bibb-Burnley House
Frankfort, KY
In 1786 the English boatbuilder John Instone settled on this Frankfort street—naming it Wapping Street for a district of London—to build river vessels for General James Wilkinson's Ohio Valley trade. Decades later John B. Bibb, a War of 1812 veteran and state legislator, built the present house in 1845 and cultivated the tender, sweet Bibb lettuce that still bears his name.