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Some galaxies are observable with the naked eye, so people have "observed" them (though not always knowing their true nature) as long as there has been humans. As mentioned in @ghoppe's answer, the idea that they were actually large formations of stars like the Milky Way formed gradually through the age of Enlightenment, which I guess are the first "models", albeit non-quantitative, of galaxies. So they had been observed for millennia before any scientific explanation for them came up.

That is certainly not the case with Black Holes; they are extremely hard to observe, so it makes sense that people only started looking for them once they suspected from physical theory that they had to be out there.

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