Throwback Thursday: Reporting from 2050: a look at Bowling Green 100 years ago in 1950

With Norman’s, Sears, Pushins, and Woolworth’s department stores on Fountain Square, Downtown was the place to be. Bowling Green High School sat between Downtown and Western Kentucky University’s hill. Jonesville and Shake Rag were busy African American neighborhoods. This was the Bowling Green of 1950. In this week’s Throwback Thursday, we revisit what was going on in Bowling Green 100 years ago.
Because passenger rail service was still the most popular mode of transportation, the interstate was still more than a decade away from making its way to the eastern side of Bowling Green and Warren County. If you did any traveling across major parts of the region, you visited the L&N Depot and hopped aboard a passenger train.

Duncan Hines, the real man behind the cake mix and namesake for the city’s modern day week of culinary and adventure heritage, was still alive and working from his home office on Louisville Road in Bowling Green. By the 1950s, over 100 products had the Duncan Hines label, and thousands of restaurants, motels, and attractions across the country had the Recommended by Duncan Hines signs hanging at their front doors, beckoning travelers with a seal of approval.

Bowling Green High School’s main campus was on Center Street, with several buildings serving as the gymnasium and classrooms. The 4,300-seat gymnasium was under construction in 1950 and completed in 1951. The school would not be moved to its current Rockingham Lane location until 1970.

Jonesville was a thriving African American neighborhood of over 500 people that sat on 30 acres along the edge of the main university campus. It was founded in 1881 by free Blacks who had fought for the Union in the Civil War. The neighborhood would be entirely dismantled by the 1960s as part of an Urban Renewal Program to make way for the university’s stadium, arena, and baseball facilities. Along the same vein, the Shake Rag neighborhood around the 6th Ave area of Downtown, was also a thriving neighborhood, with as many as six or seven thousand people calling it home by the 1950s. It would be dismantled by Urban Renewal by the 1970s.

Much of Bowling Green development was still focused on Downtown and the Bypass, which had been completed in the 1940s. Grocery stores and restaurants were mostly local. Only gasoline stations and the continued affordability of the automobile pushed development eastward toward our modern day Scottsville Road and Campbell Lanes.

Look at us now, here we are 100 years later in 2050. How much of that Bowling Green 2050 Project was brought to life with the What Could BG Be civic engagement experiment? Throwback Thursday is brought to you by the Kentucky Museum. And for all of you in the real time 2025 watching right now, what would you like the future of Bowling Green to be? Share your voice. Take the online survey at WhatCouldBGBe.com now.