Note 038 — Chapter I

Corn Island was the site of the first settlement at Louisville. George Rogers Clark built a fort on the island in the spring of 1778, to protect his supplies. The twenty families who had followed him to Kentucky established themselves at the lower end, where the land was most elevated, and during the summer raised the crop of corn from which it is said the island derived its name. It stood just above the present Louisville-Albany bridge, in the elbow of the stream; in Clark's time it had an area of at least seven acres, but it has now been almost entirely obliterated both by the erosion of the stream and the operations of a neighboring cement mill which has used the island as a quarry.—Ed.