In my featured photo for Becky’s Square Challenge, we have a Medal of Honor Memorial in front of some of Louisville’s buildings. Our military watches over a lot of roofs in the world………….

You don’t see many roofs with bats leaning against them! Louisville is home to the “Louisville Slugger” bat.

J. F. Hillerich opened a woodworking shop in Louisville in 1855. During the 1880s, Hillerich hired his seventeen-year-old son,  John “Bud.”  In 1884, Bud, who played baseball  himself, slipped away from work one afternoon to watch Louisville’s major league team, the Louisville Eclipse. The team’s star, Pete “Louisville Slugger” Browning, was in a hitting slump and broke his bat.

Bud invited Browning to his father’s shop to hand-craft him a new bat to his own specifications. Browning accepted the offer, and the first day he used it, he got three hits to immediately break out of his slump. Browning told his teammates, which began a surge of professional ball players to the Hillerich woodworking shop.

J. F. Hillerich was uninterested in making bats; he saw the company future in stair railings, porch columns and swinging butter churns. In fact, for a brief time in the 1880s, he even turned away ball players. Bud, however, saw the potential in producing baseball bats, and the elder Hillerich eventually relented to his son.

The bats were sold under the name “Falls City Slugger” until Bud Hillerich took over his father’s company in 1894. The name “Louisville Slugger” was registered with the U.S. Patent Office. In 1905,  Honus Wagner signed a deal with the company, becoming the first baseball player to officially endorse a bat. By 1923, the company was selling more bats than any other bat maker in the country, and legends like Ty Cobb,  Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were all using them.

During World War II, the company produced wooden rifle stocks and billy clubs for the  U.S Army.

If you have a bat you will also have broken windows!  The Kentucky Mirror and Plate Glass has their advertisement on the side of a building, near the bat roof.

There are many very modern roofs along the skyline in Louisville…………

And older ones too…………

Some rooftops have the lamplighter to light the way through the neighborhood…….

and some roofs float along the Ohio River………

Won’t you join the challenge with your square today? Be sure to look and see what other squares are posted!