These historical markers are part of a program started in 1949 by the in partnership with community members. The program has installed over 2,400 markers throughout the commonwealth to share the state’s rich and complex history. Several of them can be found across UofL’s campuses, each commemorating influential people, pivotal events and the evolving identity of the university.

Learn more about the significance of six of them:

Louis D. Brandeis

• Location: Near the steps to the right of the east front entrance of the .
• Significance: This marker honors Louis D. Brandeis, a prominent lawyer and Supreme Court justice, who graduated from the UofL School of Law in 1875. He actively supported the rights of speech and assembly, consumer protection and women’s rights. The law school was renamed the Louis D. Brandeis School of Law in 1997.

Brandeis Burial Site

• Location: In front of the law school
• Significance: This marker commemorates the burial site of Louis D. Brandeis and his wife Alice Brandeis, a social activist who supported health care and education.

Founding of Jefferson Seminary

• Location: Off 3rd St. near Grawemeyer Hall��
• Significance: This marks the site of the original Jefferson Seminary, which evolved into the University of Louisville. April 3, 1798, is the university’s symbolic founding date. On this date, eight Louisvillians pledged financial support for a new school. The Louisville Medical Institute opened in 1837 and merged in 1846 with Louisville College, an outgrowth of Jefferson Seminary. A law school was added, and the new entity was named the University of Louisville in 1846.

Charles H. Parrish Jr.

• Location: In the courtyard between Gardiner and Gottschalk Halls.
• Significance: This marker honors Charles H. Parrish Jr., a noted sociologist and a lifelong civil rights activist, who became the first black professor at UofL when it became integrated. His work as an activist yielded friendships with many Civil Rights era luminaries.

Belknap Campus

• Location: On Third Street in front of Oppenheimer Hall.
• Significance: The University of Louisville’s Belknap Campus was originally the site of the Industrial School of Reform and House of Refuge, founded in 1860. During the Civil War, Union troops used the institution as barracks and parade ground. In 1923, the University of Louisville took over the property, including its original buildings, and named it the University campus. It was renamed the Belknap Campus in 1927 to honor its benefactor, William R. Belknap.

Gottschalk Hall

• Location: In front of the building.
• �������Ծ��ھ������Գ���:��The most recent addition to the historical markers at UofL. From its completion in 1894 until 1923, the building served as a dormitory for African American girls at the Louisville Industrial School of Reform. UofL acquired the building in 1923 for the chemistry department, then social sciences. Today, it is fittingly the home of the history department. The hall is named in honor of Louis Gottschalk, a distinguished historian of the French Revolution who was a valued member of the UofL history faculty from 1923 to 1927. Learn more

UofL’s law school has been named after Brandeis since 1997 – a nod to his significant investment and his vision of building a “law school of distinction.”

The Brandeis School of Law is home to much of his personal library, including rare texts on early civil and common law and his personal papers, compromising about 250,000 items.

After Brandeis’ death in 1941, his last remains were buried unobtrusively beneath the portico. Later, his wife Alice Goldmark Brandeis was buried next to him.

Twice a year, you’ll notice coins, stones and occasionally a box or two of animal crackers strewn across the graves. These tokens are found during the exam period, when students use them in hopes that doing so will bring them good luck. ��

The animal crackers tradition began after Laura Rothstein served as dean from 2000 to 2005. Rothstein, who is a distinguished university scholar, gives an annual presentation about Brandeis’ life and influence. She is well versed on his legacy, including his favorite food – animal crackers.

“After I gave one of my talks about Brandeis, a box of animal crackers showed up on the grave just before finals,” she said. “That continues to happen every so often.”

Of course, squirrels tend to find the crackers, but that doesn’t deter anxious law students.

As for the coins, no one is really sure when this tradition began. David Ensign, director of the Law Library, started at the law school in 1989 and said this tradition was being done well before his arrival.

Also, occasionally you will see stones on the grave. According to Rothstein, this reflects the Jewish tradition of leaving a stone on a grave to indicate that the person has been remembered.��Brandeis became the first Jewish Supreme Court justice at the time of his appointment in 1916.

Scott Campbell, technical services librarian and Brandeis scholar, has been at the law school since 1994. In 2009, he published a blog about this tradition:

“ … a tradition has developed over the years of students placing pennies over the Brandeis’ markers during finals week to ensure good luck. The tradition had nearly died a few years ago, but when self-described ‘Brandeis groupie’ Laura Rothstein arrived here, her proselytizing for Brandeis began to pay off, both figuratively and (in this case) literally. … The tradition seems to have evolved. There are still some pennies, but mostly now it’s quarters and one person even threw in a Sacagawea dollar coin. … There were a couple of buttons and rocks (and an after-dinner mint!) …

One final note: One of things Laura always mentions in her presentations on Brandeis was his professed fondness for animal crackers. Apparently this is something else the students have taken to heart. If you look closely at the picture you can see the shredded remains of a couple boxes of animal crackers–all that was left of one student’s offering after the campus’ always ravenous squirrels got a hold of it.”

The program started in 2002 by the nonprofit Greater Louisville Pride Foundation with the original intent of honoring Louisville native Muhammad Ali.

According to the Louisville Heroes website, the program has since grown to honor “a diverse group of famous Louisvillians from a variety of professions – all of whom have inspired others and represented our community to the rest of the world.”

The University of Louisville is well represented in this program, having a direct or peripheral connection to more than half of the 30 existing banners, underscoring the institution’s influence on its city.

The UofL ‘heroes’

The most recent banner was unveiled in October, honoring Alberta Jones, who graduated third in her business class from UofL in 1953. Jones went on to become the first African-American woman to pass the Kentucky Bar exam, as well as the first female prosecutor in the state (she was also Muhammad Ali’s first attorney). Jones’ life ended tragically in 1965 when she was abducted and murdered at age 34. The case remains unsolved.

Jones’ banner hangs on the River City Bank building at Sixth Street and Muhammad Ali Boulevard.

Her client, Muhammad Ali – the impetus behind the Hometown Heroes program – is honored with a banner on the LG&E building downtown. Though the boxing and civil rights icon is not a UofL alum, . Prior to his death in 2016, Ali received the inaugural Grawemeyer Spirit Award, which was established to recognize an individual whose beliefs, actions and impact are in accord with Charles Grawemeyer’s reason for founding UofL’s awards program that bears his name. UofL also boasts the Muhammad Ali Institute for Peace and Justice, and the Ali Scholars is a part of this institute.��

Other UofL-related “Hometown Heroes” include:

American sculptor Ed Hamilton is honored with a banner on the Glassworks Building downtown. Among his many famous work, his public work, “The Spirit of Freedom” is a national memorial in Washington, DC. He received a Doctor of Arts Honorary Degree from UofL in 2004, when he was also the commencement speaker. Hamilton was honored as a 2005 Alumni Fellow and his work has been commissioned by the UofL Athletics Department.

Bob Edwards, the longtime NPR host, attended night school at UofL in the 1960s in order to graduate in four years to avoid being drafted without a degree. During his senior year, he started his radio career at WHEL in New Albany, Indiana, and went on to produce and anchor TV and radio news programs while in the Army. After completing his service, Edwards moved to Washington, DC, and eventually helped launch NPR’s “Morning Edition,” where he spent 25 years as the host. He has won numerous journalism awards and was inducted to the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2004.

Speaking of well-known journalists, Diane Sawyer did not graduate from UofL, but she did attend one semester of law school on campus. Her Hometown Heroes banner hangs on the Starks building on Muhammad Ali Boulevard.

Drs. Harold Kleinert and Joseph Kutz appear on the Jewish Hospital Heart and Lung Building, visible from I-65. The two helped make Louisville an internationally known destination for hand and upper extremity surgery and the center that bears their names produced the nation’s first five hand transplants. The hand transplant program, under the Louisville VCA Program, is a partnership of physicians and researchers at Jewish Hospital, the Christine M. Kleinert Institute, Kleinert��Kutz��Hand��Care��Center��and the��University��of��Louisville. Kleinert was a clinical professor of surgery emeritus at UofL. Kutz, who received his postgraduate training at UofL, also worked as a clinical professor of surgery at the UofL School of Medicine.

The Bulleit Distilling Company was created in 1987 so Tom Bulleit could revive his great-great grandfather’s (Augustus Bulleit) bourbon legacy. Prior to that first batch, Bulleit Bourbon had not been in production since 1860. Tom Bulleit is a graduate of the University of Louisville School of Law and his banner is located on South Third Street, between West Market and West Main streets.

Another UofL law graduate, Tori Murden McClure, appears on a banner on the Kentucky Exposition Center. In 1999, McClure became the first woman and American to row solo across the Atlanta Ocean. She also holds the distinction of being the first woman and American to travel over land to the geographic South Pole, skiing 750 miles from the ice shelf to the Pole. McClure has served as the president of Spalding University since 2010.

Though not a UofL graduate, Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis has a strong connection to the institution nonetheless, having donated his entire personal library and correspondence to the law school, which was named after him in 1997. After his death in 1941, his last remains, and later the remains of his wife Alice Goldmark Brandeis, were buried beneath the law school’s classical portico. Brandeis’ banner hangs on the Chase Bank building downtown.

In 2016, New York Times bestselling author Sue Grafton, who received a BA in English from UofL in 1961, was honored with a banner on the Springhill Suites/Fairfield Inn hotels on East Jefferson Street. Grafton received the Distinguished Alumni Award from UofL in 1993 and the Alumna of the Year Award in 1997. Grafton’s work is published in 28 countries and 26 languages and all of the books in her Alphabet Series are international bestsellers. Grafton passed away in December 2017.

The banner honoring Patrick Hughes is draped on the side of the OK Storage Building on East Broadway at Barrett Avenue. Hughes was born without eyes and with arms and legs that can never fully extend, but that didn’t stop him from studying piano and trumpet as a child. In 2006, at the suggestion of marching band director Dr. Greg Byrne, Hughes joined the UofL marching band and played trumpet while his father pushed him in his wheelchair. Hughes graduated from UofL magna cum laude with a Spanish major, and later wrote the book “I Am Potential,” which was turned into a movie in 2015.��

Actress Jennifer Lawrence has been snapped by the paparazzi on a few occasions wearing her UofL gear. Though she didn’t attend the school, she is an ardent supporter, lending her voice to UofL’s ACC entrance video in 2014, donating money toward arts grants that benefit UofL programs and more.

Lisa Harrison’s banner hangs on her alma mater – Southern High School. The basketball star, who played for the University of Tennessee from 1989 to 1993 and later in the WNBA until 2005, joined UofL’s athletic department after her playing career to serve as an outreach coordinator.

Speaking of putting Louisville on the basketball map, Darrell Griffith, UofL’s all-time leading scorer, is honored on the Watterson City Building along 1-264 East. The player, known as “Dr. Dunkenstein,” helped deliver UofL’s first NCAA men’s basketball championship in 1980. He went on to play for the Utah Jazz, was named the NBA’s Rookie of the Year in 1981, and was inducted into the College Basketball Hall of Fame in 2014.

Griffith’s UofL coach, Denny Crum, is also honored with a Hometown Heroes banner, located on the Marriott Courtyard building across from the KFC Yum! Center. Crum led the Cardinals to 23 NCAA tournament appearances during his 30-year career, including the 1980 championship. Crum was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1994.��

The Hometown Heroes program is slated to end, but at least three more murals are in the works before that happens. These tentative banners include the late Enid Yandell, a sculptress whose work has appeared on the Belknap campus, and the late artist Julius Friedman, who received a graphic design degree from UofL. The remaining banners are expected to be put into place by the end of the year. More information on the program, including how the banners are made, is .

Still, that doesn’t mean the university doesn’t have any mystery or intrigue. After all, the cremated remains of Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis and his wife, Alice Goldmark Brandeis, are buried underneath the portico at the law school. Students leave coins and animal crackers on their graves before exam week, attempting to conjure up some luck from the dead.

We asked Tom Owen, archivist for regional history in Archives and Special Collections, if he knew of any more detailed campus ghost stories.

“The only thing we can come up with is the fact that before our campus was developed as a city-owned orphanage/reform school in 1860, it was a city cemetery for almost 10 years called, variously, Southern or Oakland,” Owen said. “We have evidence that there were burials, but our sources indicate that the bodies were disinterred and reburied at Cave Hill.”

There is, however, the story of UofL’s Chi Omega sorority house, which is outlined in the book, “,” by Michael Norman (2006). He writes:

“The sisters at the Chi Omega sorority house got along famously with a ghost named George. They knew it was a male because passersby looking through the large front window at night sometimes noticed a bulky figure wearing a suit and standing on the staircase. Just who it was no one seemed to know. In absence of an identity back in 1984, someone took to simply calling him George.

“The Chi Omega women didn’t live in the house, so there weren’t many instances of nighttime shenanigans by George. They did figure out that he seemed to live on a back staircase that connected with the kitchen because footfalls as if someone was trooping up those steps were heard during the daytime …”

One of the sorority sisters told a reporter that when she was alone in the house, lights would blink on and off, which seemed to be George’s favorite activity.

“The plink-a-plink of single notes struck on the living room piano also alerted sorority members that George was about.”

Uncomfortable moments aside, the sorority sisters described George as a friendly ghost.��

In 2012, throughout the city, noting some haunted downtown landmarks such as the Palace Theater and the Brown Hotel. The only UofL connection mentioned in the story was the old Medical Department, 101 W. Chestnut St.

The building was formerly a part of Louisville Medical College and was acquired by UofL in 1909. It is now owned by the Greater Louisville Medical Society Foundation and it is said to harbor mysterious footsteps, squeaky gurney wheels and other heart-racing noises that are likely unsettled spirits from the old Medical School, which opened in 1893.

From the Cardinal:

“The school has a tradition of innovation in medicine. For example, in 1911, the facility launched the nation’s first trauma care center, in 1970, the Pap Smear was invented, and in 1999, the first successful hand transplant was performed. But the school has a tradition of spooky happenings as well … The medical school is home to the Wolf Gallery, a location where the art of physicians and their families is displayed. On the tile floor at the end of the gallery is a permanent stain. This stain developed when the rooms of the Wolf Gallery were still anatomy classrooms. Students would often leave the rooms carrying trays of heads or limbs which were soaking in blood or formaldehyde. Sometimes the students would let their guards down, and the solution would slosh onto the floor. After years of this treatment, the stain formed, and cannot be removed …

“In the basement of the building is the old embalming room, which was not a popular hangout for medical students. In it was a vat in which cadavers would soak in formaldehyde in the fetal position. When a body was required, it would be removed from the vat and hung on a hook to drain into a trough. This trough led directly into the city sewer. In 1996, the basement was renovated. While redoing the ceiling of one room, workers were surprised when a body part fell out of the ceiling. The school’s coroner ruled that the part had simply been misplaced.

“In the late 1930s, one student at the school failed an exam which caused him to be expelled from medical school. Distraught, the student hung himself in the school’s four-story stairwell. Some time later, his professor noticed that he had made a grading error on the mathematics portion of the test, and that the student had actually passed. The professor was so upset that he committed suicide in the same way that his student had …”

For obvious reasons, the building has been a stop on many ghost walking tours in the city.

But it wasn’t until he got further into his role as dean that Burnett says he truly began to understand the depth of that bond.

Burnett came to admire Brandeis’ respect for small institutions, his appreciation for federalism, his interdisciplinary insights and his vision of universities as hubs of innovation. Burnett especially admired Brandeis’ commitment to pro bono work.

“He really thought that was part of the obligation of lawyers and part of the noble calling of the law as a career,” said Burnett, who served as dean of the law school from 1990-2000.

Burnett knew that Brandeis had been a generous donor to the law school, helping the school financially as well as donating his personal library and correspondence.

In light of all this, Burnett began advocating to change the name of the law school in honor Brandeis. Many law schools are named for donors, after all, and Brandeis’ gifts helped shape the law school in more ways than one.

“His contributions were more meaningful than money alone,” Burnett said. “They were the contributions of someone who exemplified with the highest value and the greatest potential of the law.”

Working with colleagues, including then-Associate Dean Linda Ewald, Burnett began circulating the idea among faculty, alumni, the local bench and bar, university leadership and the Brandeis family itself. There was broad support for naming the law school in honor of Brandeis.

On Feb. 24, 1997, the UofL Board of Trustees made it official: the law school became the Louis D. Brandeis School of Law.

But before that change, Brandeis’ legacy took life in another way: In 1990, the law school established one of the first five mandatory pro bono requirements in the country. The first semester the program was instated, administrators saw a huge, positive student response.

“We realized we were doing something very substantial to a large number of our students,” Burnett says. “It spoke to their sense of professional responsibility —��the highest calling of the law.”

Carrying the Brandeis name has given the law school a unique advantage in the national landscape of legal education, Burnett says. Prospective students know this is a school that carries on the name and spirit of a towering figure who saw law as a noble calling.

“His legacy has its home at the University of Louisville.”

“Because service is such a big part of Brandeis (School of Law), it’s a great way we can serve the community. I’m new to Louisville so this is a way for us to get connected to the city,” said Elizabeth Mosley, a first-year law student.��

Each year, UofL students donate more than a half million hours of community service to the university’s non-profit partners.��

“They are good, good people. They’re going to make a difference in their communities. They’re going to be the civic leaders we want to educate,” said Brandeis Dean Susan Duncan.��

Watch the students in action below:��