Paul Booker Reed was Mayor of Louisville, Kentucky from 1885 to 1887. His father, William Decatur Reed was a lawyer and Kentucky Secretary of State under Governor William Owsley. P. Booker Reed studies at Centre College were interrupted by the Civil War, during which he served the Confederate Army for four years as a private in the Orphan Brigade and the Kentucky Ninth Infantry. After the war he attended medical school in Europe. He started a successful manufacturing business in Louisville in the 1870s.