History of Cincinnati, Ohio, with illustrations and biographical sketches, Part 38

Author: Ford, Henry A., comp; Ford, Kate B., joint comp
Publication date: 1881
Publisher: Cleveland, O., L.A. Williams & co.
Number of Pages: 666

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In the year 1838 Gottfried Frankenstein succeeded in bringing to life again in Cincinnati the Academy of Fine Arts, and became its first president. It was, however, of but short duration. Another artist, Friedrich Franks, was in 1828 the founder of a gallery of fine arts in Cincinnati, and afterwards the owner of the Western museum.

THE ART SCHOOLS.

It is worthy of notice that the various endeavors to found academies of art in Cincinnati have always pro- ceeded from Germans; for Franks also was commonly taken for a German.

About the efficiency of these artists' schools it need only be said that some of the most prominent American

artists have come forth from them; as Miner K. Kellogg, William H. Powell, the brothers Beard, the American artist and poet, Thomas Buchanan Read, and others. Mr. Rattermann thus speaks of their artistic worth in his lecture :

The artists of this first period of art in Cincinnati were principally the pupils of nature, and only reached in their studies the point where greater justice is done to the real than to the ideal. They belonged, therefore, more to the realistic school, if I may express it in that way. Only Eckstein, who was a pupil of the celebrated Schadow, and who has been honored by the title of professor, was an idealist. His pupil Powers, however, in spite of all his efforts at idealism, had a natural tendency to realism, as is observable in all his productions. His aspi- mations after ideal beauty give to his works more the appearance of bare coldness than the warmth of feeling which shines through the higher light. His figures are pure as snow and sinooth as ice, but also cold as ice and snow.

THE GERMANS AND MUSIC.

That music has been introduced by the Germans, and has been especially fostered by them in Cincinnati, as as well as throughout America, is self-evident. Already, in the year 1823, there existed here a musical society, the Apollonische Gesellschaft; and in 1839 another sing- ing society was founded, from which originated in 1844 the Deutsche Liedertafel. Ever since 1846 the three German singing societies, which existed at that time in Cincinnati, have celebrated every year a musical festival, and in 1849 the first great German musical festival of the United States was held in this city. On this occa- sion the first German Sangerbund of North America was founded, whose musical festivals have now gained a world- wide reputation, and have prepared the way for the foundation of the grand Music hall and the Cincinnati College of Music, for a while under the direction of Theodore Thomas.

THE GERMAN IN MANUFACTURES.

In the year 1831 an organ factory was established in Cincinnati by Mathias Schwab, from which have gone forth great numbers of excellent instruments, which pro- claim in all parts of the country the praise of German superiority. This factory, the oldest of its kind in this country, is still in existence, under the management of the experienced workmen, Johann H. Kohnken and Gallus Grimm, both having worked for thirty years under Mr. Schwab's direction.

At that time (1836) was also made the first attempt to use machinery extensively in the fabrication of furniture. The invention of Woodworth's planing machine induced Friederich Rammelsberg, a Hanoverian, who was the foreman in Johann Geyer's furniture factory, to make all sorts of experiments in this department. Some years later Robert Mitchell, who had served his apprenticeship under Rammelsberg's guidance, began also some experi- ments, but without gaining any practical results. After inheriting a little property, he associated himself with Rammelsberg in 1846. The practical knowledge of Rammelsberg, thus united to a moderate capital, and not any longer restrained, as formerly, by his over-prudent principal, now began to realize important results. Not only does the gigantic building, which is still in existence under the name of Mitchell and Rammelsberg's furniture factory, employing more than one thousand five hun-

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dred workmen (the largest furniture factory in the world), owe its existence to him, but the general successful rise of the furniture trade in Cincinnati and in the west is due to him. Rammelsberg died in 1863.

S. N. PIKE. .

We now come to a man whose name-at least the name by which he is known-announces him to be either an Englishman or an American. It was known only to a few of his nearest neighbors that Samuel N. Pike, the builder of the beautiful opera houses in Cin- cinnati and in New York, was a German. He was the son of Jewish parents by the name of Hecht, and was born in the year 1822, at Schwetzingen, near Heidel- berg. He came in the year 1827 to America with his parents, who at first staid in New York, and then set- tled in Stamford, Connecticut. In Stamford young Pike (his father had changed the name; Hetch means Pike in English) received a good school education; went, in 1839, to St. Joseph, Florida, where he opened a store, which he kept for about a year, and then went to Rich- mond, Virginia, where he carried on business as an im- porter of wines. From Richmond he removed to Balti- more, then to St. Louis, and finally, in 1844, to Cincin- nati. At all three of these places he tried to build up a dry-goods business. He married in Cincinnati the youngest daughter of Judge Miller, and then began a liq- uor business, by which he soon gained enormous wealth. When Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale, travelled through America, Pike was one of the most zealous at- tendants at her concerts and admirers "of her divine voice," as he used to express himself, and resolved, if he should ever acquire sufficient wealth, to build for the Muse of Song a temple which should do honor to Cin- cinnati. When in the year 1856 the foundation of this magnificent palace was being erected, but very few antic- ipated the purposes of this colossal building. Inter- rupted by the crisis in business in the autumn of that year, the building was discontinued till the fall of the next year, and was completed in the winter of 1858-59. On the 22d of February, 1859, the opera house, at that time the largest and most beautiful in America, and one of the largest in the world, was opened with due solem- nity. It was an epoch in the musical and dramatic his- tory of the city; and when Pike's wealth rapidly increased he began to build in 1866 also a grand dramatic palace in the city of New York, the Grand opera house, which he afterwards sold to James Fisk, jr., for eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars. But he had hardly begun with the building of the New York opera house when the magnificent opera house in Cincinnati became, in the spring of 1866, a prey to the flames. The structure was afterwards rebuilt, and is still one of the principal orna- ments of the city. A gigantic speculation in land in the neighborhood of Hoboken, New York, brought Mr. Pike an immense profit; so that, at his death in 1875, his for- tune was valued at several millions of dollars.

Pike was not an uneducated man. He was a great lover of music, and played himself on several instruments. He was also well versed in literature, and wrote some

English poems, which appeared in print anonymously. They show, however, more depth of feeling than tech- nical construction. His slight intercourse with Germans and his imperfect knowledge of the German language contributed, perhaps, to his being taken by almost every- body for an American. "In a small company," observes somebody who was more intimately acquainted with Pike, "he confessed one day that he was a German by birth; and he has continued since then to converse often in his mother-tongue with this company." In politics he be- longed to the Democratic party, but could not be persua- ded in 1867 to accept the nomination as candidate for the office of mayor of Cincinnati.

GERMAN INSTITUTIONS.

In 1841 we find in Cincinnati a German society, for intellectual entertainment, called Harmonie, and several years later the association, Freunde der gesellschaftlichen Reform. A German theater was founded in 1845.

FATHERLAND CELEBRATIONS.

The zeal with which Germans participated in American politics did not interfere at all with their interest in the events of their old Fatherland. Several of their national memorable days were celebrated, as for instance the birthday of Jean Paul and of Goethe. As in other places, so also in Cincinnati, was founded an institution for the aid of liberty movements in Germany, and large sums of money were sent by the Germans for the relief of the much-oppressed patriots, Wirth, Seidensticker, Jordan, and the children of the martyr Weidig. And at a public meeting of that time, participated in by the Germans of all classes, without regard to their religion or their politics, eight thousand dollars were collected for the benefit of the poor sufferers in Germany .*

The first Turner society of Cincinnati was founded in 1848. The revolutionary agitations of Europe, and especially those of Germany in 1848, found naturally the greatest sympathy among the population of Cincin- nati. The friends of liberty were encouraged and helped by them by all possible means. The arrival of Hecker and his friends in the autumn of 1848 was an occasion for a great ovation, in which the American pop- ulation participated with active interest. Hon. J. B. Stallo welcomed the new-comers by an address, which was a masterpiece in form and tenor. More associations were founded for financial aid in the revolutionary agitations, and large sums of money were procured, which soon afterwards, when the change of affairs in Germany had come, were used mostly for the assistance of political fugitives.

GERMANS IN OFFICE.

It is a matter of course that, through the growing in- fluence which the Germans exercised, their right to the holding of public offices became more readily acknowl- edged. About the year 1840 we find Germans as well in the legislature as in the offices of the city departments ; and their number would have been there still greater if the language had not stood in their way, and if the em-

* Klauprecht's Deutsche Chronik, p. 179.

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igrating Germans, who had to work hard in the begin ning to earn an honest living, had been more ambitious to hold public office. It has taken a longer sojourn in America to arouse also in them this usually fruitless ambition.

THE STALLOS.

We have had occasion several times before to mention the name of Stallo. There is no man of whom Cincin- nati, the State of Ohio, and all the Germans of the United States, should be more proud, than of Johann Bernhard Stallo. His life is not remarkable on ac- count of strange events; he has never inhaled the air of prisons, has not escaped by a bold flight the persecuting powers, like Follen, Lieber, and many other Germans before and after him. His new home gave him a most friendly reception, and he was spared the hard struggles for subsistence which so many, even the best of the new- comers, have to experience at first. He has spent the greater part of his life here, in a happy family circle, but little shaken by the storms to which men of his promi- nent importance are usually exposed.

It will not take many lines to describe Stallo's career. When asked how he had been able to acquire his thor- ough knowledge of the classic languages, and especially his knowledge in mathematics, at so early an age, having emigrated to America in his seventeenth year, and hav- ing commenced teaching at once, he answered: "There are no riddles in my life; at least none which cannot be easily solved. All my ancestors, as well on my father's as on my mother's side, were, as far as I can trace back our family genealogy, village schoolmasters. My grand- father, after whom I was named, was my first teacher. He was an honorable old Frisian (Stallo is not an Italian name, but a real Frisian name, meaning forester), and wore up to the time of his death a three-cornered hat, knee-breeches, and buckled shoes. He reserved my ed- ucation to himself, notwithstanding his seventy years, and was made very happy when I could read, and solve all sorts of arithmetical problems, before my fourth year."

Stallo's own father had a great predilection for mathe- matics, and instructed him in this science; as he also took care that his son should study, not only the ancient lan- guages thoroughly, but also should make the French lan- guage his own, behind his grandfather's back, who hated everything French. In his fifteenth year (Stallo was born the sixteenth of March, 1823, at Sierhausen, near Dam- me, Grand Dukedom of Oldenburg), he was sent to Vechta to attend the teachers' seminary. He had at the same time the advantage of being able to avail himself of the teachings of the professors at the excellent gym- nasium which was there. His knowledge in language and mathematics advanced so rapidly that in a short time he became ripe for the university. His father's means, however, would not allow him to enter a univer- sity. He says himself: "The only choice left to me was either to lengthen the chain of schoolmasters in our family by another link, or go to America. The idea of emigrat- ing was brought near to me through my father's brother, Franz Joseph Stallo, who, about the year 1830, had led the line of emigrants from the Oldenburg country."

This uncle had been also one of Stallo's educators, having instructed him especially in physics. He was a very eccentric man, who, although he carried on a suc- cessful business as printer and bookbinder, could not re- sist an inborn inclination for physics and mechanics. He made several useful inventions. To him is attributed the burning of the moorland and the introduction of buck- wheat in his neighboring country, as well as the irrigation of barren tracts and the sowing of them with pine seed, "by which lands, on which not even heath would grow, were transformed into pine forests."* But, as is so often the case with such self-taught men, he lost himself often in the fantastic and unattainable. His business was neg- lected, and, on account of his liberal political and reli- gious opinions, and especially his activity in inciting the oppressed to refuse paying taxes and to emigrate, and his distributing inflammatory writings, he came in conflict with the Government. The agitator was arrested, and for several months imprisoned and his printing establish- ment confiscated; so emigration seemed to be the only thing left for him.

Having arrived in Cincinnati in the year 1831, he worked at first at his former trade. But he continued the agitation in his old home more than ever by numer- ous letters; and really a very great emigration followed in the year 1832 from Damme, Vechta, Hunteburg, Osnabruck, and the surrounding country. Franz Stallo's thought was now upon a German settlement. An asso- ciation was formed, land was chosen in Auglaize county, and the little town which was to be built was to be called (against Stallo's wish) Stallotown. Like Rome, which was in the beginning but a space of land, with a ditch for a boundary, so was also Stallotown at first only recog- nizable by a wooden board, on which stood the word "Stallotown," which was nailed to a large oak tree.

Stallo made himself useful in the new settlement as surveyor, and, on the whole, the little colony giew very soon, in spite of the rather unfavorable situation, which was improved afterwards by drainage. In the summer of 1833 they counted as many as a hundred souls. The cholera, however, which was raging during this year in Cincinnati, reached Stallotown, and called proportion- ately for a greater number of victims there than in larger towns. Franz Joseph Stallo was also among the number who fell. The little town, which counts at present about two thousand inhabitants, has exchanged the name of its founder for that of Minster.

Johann Bernhard Stallo emigrated to America in the year 1839. Provided with letters of introduction from his father and grandfather to several ministers and teachers in Cincinnati, he found at once a position in a private school. There he compiled his first literary work, a German A-B-C spelling and reading book, which was published without the name of its author. He showed already by this first book his deep insight into a child's faculties of conception and understanding. There had been a great want of just such a book in the lower classes of the schools, so the work became soon very popular,

* Deutscher Pionier, volume VII, page 5.

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and has appeared in many stereotype editions. At that time the directors of the newly-founded Catholic St. Xavier's college, in Cincinnati, were in search of teachers; . and their attention having been called to Stallo by this very work, and hearing also about his superior knowl- edge, especially in mathematics, they offered him a posi- tion as teacher of the German language at this college. That was, however, only a nominal title, for in fact a class was assigned to him from the very first for instruc. tion in the ancient languages and in mathematics; and he advanced with this class for the next three years in the several grades of the course of studies. Together with one of his associate teachers, who devoted himself with great zeal to the studies of physics and chemistry, and assisted by the rich library of the institution, Stallo ex- pended now almost every leisure hour in the study of these sciences. He devoted himself to the study of physics and chemistry for three years, from 1841 to 1843, with all the zeal of learning within him, and with a certain passion; and he has gained from it great satis- faction. In the autumn of 1843 he received a call as teacher of mathematics, physics, and chemistry at St. John's college, in the city of New York, which position he filled till the end of the year 1847. The study of the higher mathematics led him to German philosophy, and in 1848 appeared the fruit of his studies, a philosophical work-General Principles of the Philosophy of Nature- published in Boston, by Crosby & Nichols.

Although the profession which Stallo chose afterwards may have withdrawn him somewhat from his investiga- tions in the province of philosophic science, he has always remained true to philosophy. A number of his philosophical essays have been published in the most prominent American scientific journals, especially in the Popular Science Monthly. A valuable philosophical library, the like of which is hardly owned by any other private gentleman, gives evidence of the wide field of his investigations. After having returned to Cincinnati, he resolved to devote himself to the study of law. To so ripe a mind as his it was easy to become soon ac- quainted with all the principles of law in their widest meaning, including the laws of government and national economy. Having been admitted to the bar in the year 1849, he distinguished himself soon in his new calling in such a way that in the year 1853 he was appointed by the governor of Ohio as judge of the court of common pleas of Hamilton county, to fill a vacancy. The people elected him the same year for the regular term of that office. As honorable and estimable as the office of judge may be in the United States, it is not, or at least was not, sufficiently remunerative for men who had the prospect of a large practice. Stallo, who had married happily in the meantime, resigned therefore his office as judge in the year 1855, which he had filled to the highest satisfac- tion of the bar and the people, and returned to the prac- tice of law, in which he has labored ever since with the greatest success.

If "posterity winds no wreaths for the mimic," we can say the same as well of those who have won a high repu- tation among their contemporaries on the field of juristic

activity. The decisions of the judges of the supreme court are kept alive, to be sure, by the regularly published reports; but the words of the most eloquent lawyer, no matter how important a result they may decide for the moment, are blown away like autumn leaves. It was, however, reserved to Stallo to gain, by an argument made before the supreme court of Ohio, a brilliant reputation. This was in a case which excited not only general atten- tion in his own State, but also in several others.

The school board of Cincinnati had resolved to forbid the reading of religious writings, including the Bible, in public schools, as also to repeal the rule for reading every day at the opening of the school a chapter of the Bible, and for singing appropriate religious songs, this being, as was held, contrary to the spirit of a free school, for the children of parents of all religious sects and beliefs. This action of the school board had called forth great indignation among the different Protestant sects ; the re- ligious papers imagined their Zion in danger, and that atheism and Catholicism were on the point of taking possession of our Christian country. A judicial pro- cedure was commenced against the school board to pre- vent the carrying out of this resolve. Stallo, called upon to defend the measures of the board, did this with won- derful eloquence. Sustained by the spirit and the literal meaning of the constitution of Ohio, by leading decisions of judges, but especially by reasons of morality and of justice for all, this argument, lasting several hours, could not but convince all unprejudiced listeners. The greater number of the judges were, however, not convinced. Being probably themselves members of a Protestant church, and trammeled by the whole ecclesiastical in- fluence in Cincinnati, they were not able, with the best of intentions, to remain impartial.

In this argument Stallo attacked the claim, made be- fore by some teacher of jurisprudence, and made proba- bly without reflecting upon the consequences, that Chris- tianity is part of the law of the State. He fought against this opinion, as implying that our entire present civili- zation is founded only on Christianity. He claimed a strict separation of the church from the State, as being in unison with our constitution and the spirit of the times. He reminded the court that the fathers of the church had continued to build on the old, celebrated heathen phil- osophers, that the age of the reformation had been also the age of the Humanists and of the revival of the arts and sciences of the classic ages; that our declaration of independence and constitution had their origin during the skeptic, philosophic epoch which preceded the French revolution; that Thomas Jefferson, who was in the eyes of the orthodox an infidel, had conceived the first, and the "pious old heathen" Franklin had, with others of the same mind, helped to make the latter, and that the fathers of our republic had read the "Rights of Man" of infidel Thomas Paine.

"I deny," proclaimed Stallo, "not only that Christi- anity is the law of the State, and that the freedom of our institutions is grounded in Christian civilization; but I deny, also, that our modern European and American civilization can in any just sense be called Christian. By

James Af Buckner

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HISTORY OF CINCINNATI, OHIO.

the term civilization we designate the materials and forces of the physical, intellectual and moral culture of a people. Now, in the first place, the intellectual possessions which make up the stock of our culture, and their correspond- ing material possessions, are not only not the gains and emoluments of Christianity, but have been acquired in spite of its resistance and recalcitration. It is not Chris- tianity which has expanded our mental and physical hori- zon to co-extension with spatial infinity, which has re- vealed to us the laws according to which the stellar, planetary and satellitic orbs form or develop themselves in the ethereal expanse, and in obedience to which they rotate and revolve, under the invisible guidance of im- mutable attraction, in their perennial courses; it is not Christianity which has unveiled the mysteries of our planetary history, or armed us with the power by the aid of which we subject the elements to our dominion. Copernicus dedicated his immortal book to a Pope; but a Pope sealed it to the eyes of all faithful believers, and his inquisitors interposed the walls of a prison between the heavens and Galileo, because he had dared to look into their depths through a telescope, and to open his mind to the truth of the heliocentric theory. Nor was it the Pope or the Catholic church alone who sought to extinguish the dawning light of the new era or to obstruct the vision of awakening humanity. Luther and Melanc- thon denounced the Copernican system as fiercely as the inquisitors of Rome; and John Kepler, the discoverer of the laws of which Newton's Principia are but the mathe- matical verification, had to turn his back upon a Protestant university-his alma mater-because of his heliocentric belief, and to scek employment as a tutor in a Catholic Austrian college. There is hardly one of the eminent investigators to whose labors we owe the sciences of astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology, physiology, etc., who has not been under the ban of the churches .and proscribed by the monopolists of salvation. When, in the lapse of ages, after the first centuries of the Chris- tian era, has Christianity baptized or stood sponsor to any of the new truths which were born into the world to redeem it from a part of its miseries and woes, or when has it welcomed them with a benediction ? Whenever, of late, as of yore, the precursory glimmer of an unwonted light has brightened the skies, the surest and readiest way to discover its source has been to look in the direction in which the Pope and his church have driven their latest anathema, or a Protestant ecclesiastic has sent his loud- est curse. At this very moment Europe is in a roar from the discharge of ecclesiastical artillery at the zoologists and physiologists who seek to refer the evolution of organic beings to the same immutable laws which pre- side over the genesis of all the phenomena of this uni- verse."

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History of Cincinnati, Ohio, with illustrations and biographical sketches, Part 38

Author: Ford, Henry A., comp; Ford, Kate B., joint comp Publication date: 1881 Publisher: Cleveland, O., L.A. Williams & co. Number of Pages: 666

Author: Ford, Henry A., comp; Ford, Kate B., joint comp
Publication date: 1881
Publisher: Cleveland, O., L.A. Williams & co.
Number of Pages: 666