“Olde England on the Ohio: Louisville’s Tudor Revival” was an exhibit at the Filson Historical Society (November 2022 - March 2023), guest curated by Dr. Daniel Gifford. Louisville’s residents and visitors often note the city’s proliferation of Tudor Revival architecture. From homes to businesses, churches to charities, Louisville has retained an impressive Tudor Revival collection, including several neighborhoods where it is the dominant style.

“Olde England on the Ohio: Louisville’s Tudor Revival” used Louisville as a microcosm of a larger national movement that peaked in the 1920s and early 1930s. Tudor Revival not only manifested through architecture, but also in consumer products and popular culture. The exhibit showed the range of ways Americans looked to recreate a near-mythic “Merrie Olde England” in the early twentieth century.

Importantly, it was no accident that this turn towards an imaginary English past coincided with a wave of Eastern European immigrants, a massive African-American migration to northern cities, and the refinement of continued systems of racial, religious, and ethnic injustice. Many explicitly saw Tudor Revival as a way of claiming and elevating Anglo-Saxon heritage for a select few.

But in Louisville these attempts ultimately failed. “Olde England on the Ohio” demonstrated how diverse groups across the city used Tudor Revival to make their own assertions about belonging and participation in American culture. The objects, images, and artifacts gathered in the exhibit ultimately suggested that Tudor Revival succeeded as a movement built from the ground up, not the top down.

Topics: Tudor Revival, Louisville, 1920s