La Grange: the Oldham County seat with trains on Main Street

Oldham County (opens in a new tab) was cut from Jefferson, Shelby and Henry counties in the 1820s, the state’s 74th county. The state marker on the La Grange courthouse lawn (opens in a new tab) says it was named for Col. William Oldham, a Virginian who led Kentucky militia in Gen. Arthur St. Clair’s 1791 campaign and was killed with more than 800 others in that defeat on the Wabash. The county’s first seat was Westport (opens in a new tab), a river town on the Ohio.

In 1827 surveyor William Berry Taylor proposed a new town where the Shelbyville–Westport road crossed the Louisville–New Castle road, according to Grokipedia’s history of La Grange (opens in a new tab). Taylor donated fifty acres, and the town was named for the Château de la Grange, the French estate of the Marquis de Lafayette. The general had just finished his 1824–25 farewell tour, which passed through Shelbyville and left Lafayette names across the state.

The courthouse did not settle at once. Court moved to La Grange in 1827, and a marker at Westport (opens in a new tab) records court sessions back at the Westport courthouse from 1828. Those Westport records include sales, hire-outs and escapes of enslaved people; one case involved the family of Henry Bibb, who escaped slavery and became a famous abolitionist. The court moved to La Grange for good in 1838, and the legislature incorporated the town on January 23, 1840.

The railroad changed the town again. The Louisville and Frankfort Railroad (opens in a new tab) laid its line straight down Main Street through the business district, a choice that still defines downtown, Grokipedia says. Sources disagree on when the first trains arrived, giving both 1850 and the late 1850s, but by mid-century La Grange was a rail link between Louisville and Frankfort.

During the Civil War the town leaned Union, and its tracks carried troops. In 1921–22 the La Grange Training School was built as the ninth school for African American children in Kentucky supported by a Julius Rosenwald grant, its state marker (opens in a new tab) says; students then had to travel 25 miles to Lincoln Institute in Shelby County for high school until integration.

Kentucky today

La Grange is still the Oldham County seat, and its main line is one of the few in the country that runs down the middle of a commercial street. Grokipedia counts about 20 to 30 CSX freight trains a day on the line between Louisville and Cincinnati, and live railfan cameras stream them. The Oldham County marker stands on the courthouse lawn, and the filmmaker D. W. Griffith’s later home is a few blocks away.