It was also during this year that the first of a series of smaller towns, attracted by the growing position of Louisville and hoping soon to rival it, began to spring up. Jeffersonville, situated nearly opposite Louisville, on a high bank of the Ohio, and in the State of Indiana, was laid out in November of this year. Its progress until recently has not been rapid, but it has gradually gained ground until within the last seven or eight years, during which it has come to be a very useful and valuable suburb to the city. More will be said of its history in a proper place. Within the next year we come to the earliest organization of the town of Shippingport. This place, now so utterly decayed, once promised not only to rival but to surpass Louisville. The site occupied by it belonged to Campbell's division of the two thousand acres mentioned in the earlier pages of this history, and was by him sold during this year to a Mr. Berthoud. Upon coming into the possession of this latter gentleman it was surveyed, a plan of the town drawn and the lots advertised for sale. Its progress however was not rapid until 1806, when the Messrs. Terascons purchased the greater part of the lots embraced in the survey, and to their enterprizing endeavors did the town owe its rise. Its present importance is so trifling compared with its past greatness, and the probabilities of its future eminence among towns are so small that we shall probably not have occasion again to refer to it; and as its brief history belongs rather to this than to a later era it will be as well to close this account of it in the words of one who wrote when it was at the apex of its fame. "This _important_ place," says Dr. McMurtrie in his sketches of Louisville published in 1819; "is situated two miles below Louisville, immediately at the foot of the rapids, and is built upon the beautiful plain or bottom which commences at the mouth of Beargrass creek, through which, under the brow of the second bank, the contemplated canal will in all probability be cut."[10] The town originally consisted of forty-five acres, but it has since received considerable additions. The lots are 75 by 144 feet, the average price of which at present (1819) is from forty to fifty dollars per foot, according to the advantages of its situation. The streets are all laid out at right angles, those that run parallel to the river, or nearly so, are eight in number and vary from 30 to 90 feet in width. These are all intersected by twelve feet allies, running parallel to them, and by fifteen cross streets at right angles, each sixty feet wide.