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James Breckinridge Speed was born in Missouri in 1844 and died
in 1912 in Rockland, Maine, where he spent his summers. His parents
and grandfather were Kentuckians, and he himself came to Louisville
at the age of eleven. He studied at Louisville Male High School
and went to work in a bank at the age of sixteen. Mr. Speed enlisted
with an Ohio regiment in the Volunteer Army of the United States
in 1861, later becoming Adjutant of the 27th Kentucky Regiment
during the Civil War.
Returning
to Louisville after the war, he became superintendent of the Louisville
Cement Co, and then president. As such he carried out the building
of extensive cement works in Clark County, Indiana, the reorganization
of a successful coal business, and the office of President of
the Louisville Street Railway Company. He became president of
the Ohio Valley Telephone Company and had installed in his home
at 505 West Ormsby the first telephone in the city.
Mr. Speed’s
first wife, the mother of his two children, was Cora A. Coffin
of Cincinnati. After Cora’s death, he married Harriet “Hattie”
Bishop in 1906, a concert pianist and teacher. In 1925, Hattie
Bishop Speed founded the museum and dedicated it as a memorial
to her late husband in 1927.
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