Louisville ( LOO iss vil) is a city in Stark County, Ohio, United States. The population was 9,521 at the time of the 2020 census. Located 7 miles (11 km) northeast of Canton, it is a suburb in the Canton, Massillon metropolitan area.
At a Glance
- County: Stark County
- State: Ohio
History of Louisville
On October 8, 1834, Louisville was formally settled by Henry Lautzenheiser, from Germany, and Frederick Fainot, a French Huguenot. The city was named after Lautzenheiser’s son, Lewis, and called Lewisville, Ohio. The name of the town was also considered appropriate because it was initially surveyed by the similar sounding name of Lewis Vail. When the post office was established in 1837, with Sam Petree as its first postmaster, it was discovered Ohio already had a Lewisville, so the spelling was changed to Louisville.
Within Louisville’s early days, the town competed with the fellow Nimishillen Township community of Harrisburg (also known as Barryville) for growth. Harrisburg initially flourished due to its accessibility as a stagecoach stop between Canton, Alliance, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh. Meanwhile, Louisville also grew, due to its location upon the east branch of the Nimishillen Creek, which flows toward Canton. However, when the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago Railway was laid through Louisville in 1852, Louisville began to grow more quickly than Harrisburg, which struggled with the difficulty of hauling its main product, wheat, by barge. Today, Harrisburg is now an unincorporated community, marked only by a handful of businesses and a Roman Catholic parish.
Text adapted from the Wikipedia article Louisville, Ohio, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.