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(WHAS11) - One long-standing Kentucky manufacturing company will continue to call Louisville home.  It was a close call, though, for Kentucky Trailers, a local custom trailer manufacturing company.  They've operated from South Third Street for 72 years.  Now they are expanding and relocating... To Jefferson Riverport International (Riverport).  The University of Louisville will buy their current facilities.  It was only five weeks ago that they had plans to move to Harrison County, Indiana.

“We had our bags packed,” said Gary Smith, CEO of Kentucky Trailer at a press conference Wednesday.  “We were headed to Corydon, Indiana.”

The manufacturing company employs 286 people in Louisville.  The Kentucky Economic Development Financing Authority (KEDFA) approved $13.5 million in tax incentives to keep those jobs in state and create as many as 183 new ones.

"We stepped up.  The county stepped up,” says Governor Steve Beshear (D-Kentucky).  “In 5 short weeks, we worked this out and turned a situation around.  We now have a Kentucky company that will stay a Kentucky company from now on."

The company has called the address on South Third Street home since 1936.  Now, it will a 240,000 square foot facility home at Riverport.  And the old land -- goes to the University of Louisville.

"We've got a chance to acquire property right in the middle of our campus," said James Ramsey, University of Louisville’s president.

But what the new space will become at U of L is still  up in the air.  They say the development is so new that nothing definite has been decided.  But it will give the Belknap campus another 33 acres of land.  Right now that land is flanked on two sides by athletic facilities -- the lacrosse and football fields to the east and the baseball field to the south.

"Manufacturing jobs are going all over the world these days,” said Mayor Jerry Abramson (D-Louisville) at Wednesday’s press conference.  “But in Louisville, KY when you talk about KY trailer, they are staying right here in our hometown."

The company expects to be up and running in their new facility as early as the first quarter of 2009.