Editor’s Note: A version of the following Did You Know originally published in Hoptown Chronicle’s weekly newsletter, The Scoop, on Sep. 12, 2019.
All the numbered streets in the heart of downtown Hopkinsville originally had names that referred to a geographic feature or a person. The switch to numbered streets occurred following a vote of the city council around 1886, according to Christian County Historian William T. Turner.
“It was announced in the paper,” Turner said.
The original street names can be found on the 1878 Christian County map published by D.G. Beers and Co. in Philadelphia. The map includes insets for Hopkinsville, LaFayette, Fairview, Crofton, Pembroke and Casky Station.
Interestingly, a portion of a road originally called Last Street at the northern edge of Hopkinsville later became First Street.\
The original street names running east-west at the city’s core were:
- Last (First)
- Jackson (Second)
- Burgess (Third)
- Broad (Fourth)
- Market (Fifth)
- Court (Sixth)
- Bridge (Seventh)
- Spring (Eighth)
- Nashville (Ninth)
- Buttermilk (10th)
- Hickory (11th)
- William (12th)
- Adams (13th)
- South (14th)
Many of the city’s oldest property deeds, wills and other official records refer to homes and businesses by the old street names, so knowledge of this is helpful to historians, attorneys, real estate agents and genealogists doing research in Hopkinsville.
Today approximately half of the estimated 22,930 incorporated places in the country have some form of street numbering, according to research published by Reuben Rose-Redwood and Lisa Kadonaga in The Professional Geographer and elsewhere.
New York and Philadelphia were among the first American cities to use a numbered grid for streets. Other communities, probably looking to modernize, changed from named to numbered streets decades after they had incorporated. That was the case in Hopkinsville.
“The most obvious explanation is that it was an effort to satisfy the utilitarian desire for spatial legibility by making it harder to get lost, even in a city where one had never been before,” Rose-Redwood told CityLab.
Jennifer P. Brown is co-founder, publisher and editor of Hoptown Chronicle. You can reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org. She spent 30 years as a reporter and editor at the Kentucky New Era. She is a co-chair of the national advisory board to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, governing board president for the Kentucky Historical Society, and co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition.
