24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Shively, KY

Shively is a home rule-class city in Jefferson County, Kentucky, an independent suburb of Louisville that sits about 5 miles southwest of downtown within the Louisville Metro area.

The community is named for the Shively family; Christian William Shively opened a mill and tavern on his 1,000-acre tract near Mill Creek, and the settlement that grew around them became known as the Shively precinct.

In 1816, Christian Shively donated the land for a church that survives today as Parkview Methodist, and a stagecoach stop opened in the area in 1831.

German immigrants, mostly from Bavaria, settled the area before the Civil War and built St. Helen's Catholic Church in 1897, and the community was commonly called St. Helen's until its post office opened under the Shively name in 1902.

After Prohibition ended, eight whiskey distilleries opened just outside the community, and when Louisville moved to annex and tax them, the distillers persuaded residents to incorporate Shively on May 23, 1938, and annex the distillery district instead.

The distilleries' roughly $20 million revenue stream left the young city unusually well funded, and during the 1950s Shively was the fastest-growing city in Kentucky.

Shively was the site of the 1954 Andrew Wade home bombing, a nationally known civil rights case in which the new home of a Black Korean War veteran was dynamited after activists Carl and Anne Braden bought the house on the Wades' behalf in the then whites-only suburb.

Shively's population peaked at more than 19,000 residents in 1970, and the 2020 census counted 15,636 residents living in 6,500 households.

At the 2020 census, about 55 percent of Shively's residents were Black or African American, giving the city a Black majority.

Bourbon remains central to Shively's identity: Brown-Forman's Early Times distillery still operates there and produces Old Forester, first made in 1870 and the first bourbon sold exclusively in sealed bottles, while the former Stitzel-Weller distillery became a Kentucky Bourbon Trail stop for Bulleit Bourbon in 2014.