1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/New Albany

NEW ALBANY, a city and the county-seat of Floyd county, Indiana, U.S.A., on the N. bank of the Ohio river, at the head of low water navigation, nearly opposite Louisville, Kentucky, with which it is connected by three railway bridges, and 156 m. below Cincinnati, Ohio. Pop. (1890) 21,059; (1900) 20,628, of whom 1363 were foreign-born and 1905 negroes; (1910) 20,629. It is served by the Baltimore & Ohio South-western, the Chicago, Indianapolis & Louisville, the Pittsburg, Cincinnati, Chicago & St Louis and the Southern railways, by electric railways to Louisville, Indianapolis, &c., and by steamboats on the Ohio; it is connected by a belt line with the Louisville & Nashville, the Chesapeake & Ohio, the Illinois Central and other railways. The city is situated on an elevated plateau above the river, in an amphitheatre of wooded hills. It has a good public library, a well organized public school system and several private schools and academies. Within the city limits is a national cemetery. The manufactures include leather, iron, foundry and machine shop products, furniture and veneer, lumber, cotton goods and hosiery, distilled liquors and stoves. The value of the factory products in 1905 was $4,110,709, 13% more than in 1900. Originally settled about the beginning of the 19th century, New Albany was platted in 1813 and was chartered as a city in 1839. The city owed much of its early industrial importance to the plate-glass works successfully established here by Washington Charles de Pauw (1822–1887), who endowed the De Pauw College for Young Women (opened as the Indiana Asbury Female College in 1852). The glass works left the city because of the superior and cheaper fuel supplied by natural gas in central Indiana. The De Pauw College for Young Women was relatively unimportant after the endowment of Indiana Asbury University (now De Pauw University) by W. C. de Pauw in 1883, but it continued to give instruction until 1903.