The beginnings of the East End—originally called Audubon—are shrouded in myth. Annexing that area to the city of Henderson was a more troublesome tale.
I’ve always been told the reason it was called Audubon was because John James Audubon built the first house there. Trying to nail down that nugget of information has led me to conclude it’s highly doubtful.
The earliest mentions of that myth I’ve seen are two stories in The Gleaner of Sept. 24, 1950, which featured articles about the history of the Audubon community. According to those stories, Audubon built a two-story house at the northeast corner of Loeb and Shelby streets in 1815, which is now a vacant lot. A fire about 1902 made that house unusable. Audubon also supposedly built a smaller house at the rear of his lot…