History of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, Ohio; their past and present, Part 10

Author: Nelson, S.B., Cincinnati
Publication date: 1894
Publisher: Cincinnati : S. B. Nelson
Number of Pages: 1592

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HISTORY OF CINCINNATI AND HAMILTON COUNTY.

many families of workingmen, were once small producers, who have grown up by degrees, gathering skill with experience, and strength with their skill. The result is a large intelligence in the prosecution of business. Then, as a sequel to this, we find that the capital used by our manufacturers consists largely of the accumula- tions from their business. Their surplus has not been committed to the treacherous wave of speculation, but has been turned into their business to enlarge their useful- ness.

"Again, our manufacturers largely own the real estate which they occupy. Among the great producers, those who are manufacturing under the roofs of other people are limited in number. These conditions secure a stability which is not attainable under other circumstances, an endurance during periods of financial dis- tress which is peculiar, and an ability to accommodate production to reduced wants, without impairing, in any way, the capacity of the manufacturer for promptly and advantageously providing for increased demand, when such demand may be war- ranted by the improved condition of the country."

The accumulation of property in private fortunes, public trusts, and in the resources of the municipality itself, makes it possible, when a demand arises, to raise a large guarantee fund, to consummate a vast purchase, or to bestow a great benefaction upon a worthy cause. The strong individuality of leading citizens, the stubborn personal opinion of capitalists, and the prevailing spirit of independence among the citizens of Cincinnati, render it difficult to induce a unity of feeling and a concentration of action in matters of general interest. While all have city pride and public spirit, each insists on his own mode of accomplishing a good object, and no one will submit to dictation as to how he should spend his own money. The quick tendency to association and combined effort which has done so much for the institutions of Boston, and the up-building of Chicago, is not so pronounced in Cincinnati. And yet the popular enterprises of the city have not been few or small. Nor have the wealthy citizens locked up their money from the public. The University lacks adequate endowment, and the parks and public drives require a liberal expenditure to make them what they should be, and there is crying need for more money to establish several new institutions and to place old ones on a secure financial basis; but, on the other hand. the city owns a railroad, has an excellent system of streets, and enjoys the benefit of as magnificent public buildings as can be seen in America. On occasion the city can open her purse and pay one million eight hundred thousand dollars for a bridge, six million dollars for pavements, or thirty million dollars for means of transportation to the south. In like spirit, her philanthropic citizens, her Springer, her Longworths, Probasco, West, Sinton, Mc- Micken, Greenwood, Butler, Wilson, Dexter, and a shining list of others as gener- ous, have made bequests and given gifts of princely cost to the endeared city that bestowed so much on them. The Music Hall, the Art Museum, the Davidson- Probasco Fountain, the University and the High Schools, the Y. M. C. A. and the Union Bethel, are a few examples of the fruits of a noble liberality on the part of private citizens. When lavish wealth is thus bestowed, no one can reproach the motives of the rich.

A COSMOPOLITAN CITY.

Some enthusiastic natives of Cincinnati claim that their city is the freest city in America, therefore the freest in the world. This may be a hasty conclusion founded on insufficient knowledge, and smacking of provincial vanity. Founded only five years after the close of the Revolutionary war, only twelve after the first Fourth of July, the new town on the banks of the Ohio inherited all the glorious memories of the the past and few of its cramping influences. In a sense she was the first strictly American city that grew up on the continent, certainly the first great western city. It is true that her geographical position, on the border line between the South

HISTORY OF CINCINNATI AND HAMILTON COUNTY.

and the North, involved her business interests with those of a slave-holding people, and therefore, for a time, embarrassed her action concerning the moral questions which eventually drove the sections to civil war. But the very fact that slavery found apologists and supporters in the city was the direct provoking cause why Cin- cinnati became the burning focus of abolitionism. In this town Birney was mobbed; Phillips was egged; colored men were persecuted; but in this town Lyman Beecher erected the citadel of anti-slavery, Mrs. Stowe meditated her revolutionary story; and the union party that rallied around Lincoln was organized. When the fighting began, Cincinnatians did not waver. Their record in the war proves them worthy to be citizens of a city claiming to be the freest on the globe.

The two great political parties are here pretty evenly matched, and each vies with the other to represent and advance the rights of the people. Though the city suffers, too frequently, as all large American cities do, from the evils and corruption of par- tisan politics and the temporary rule of the gang-the people, in the main, control the bad element, and have both their will and their way, in vital matters. The administration of public affairs is reasonably wise and honest, the council is generally prudent, the courts are almost invariably true to their duty and dignity. We had a courthouse mob, but even this had its origin in a sentiment sternly just.

The several national and racial elements of our population, whether derived from England, Germany, Ireland, Scotland, Italy, France, or from other lands in Europe, Asia or Africa, all agree in claiming the fullest and freest rights of Amer- ican citizenship, and each is willing to concede to others what it claims for its own privileges. There are many Germans in the city-one third of its population; there are many Irish, not a few from Russia and other north European states; not a few from south Europe. These people bring their national peculiarities, their habits, their modes of thinking. They have their organizations, their memories, their hopes, their politics, their religions. The Queen City has ever been an arena of wrestling ideas and beliefs, therefore it has become a city of practical toleration. Extreme rad- icalism lives amicably side by side with extreme conservatism, and though discus- sion never ceases, discord seldom arises, and the Cincinnatian is distinguished for his customary obedience to law and order, no less than for his irrepressible opposi- tion to what he deems injustice or folly. There have been as yet no inflamed and perilous disturbances of the relations of capital and labor, no long continued waste- ful strikes, no vindictive and tyrannical lockouts.

The free play of public opinion, in matters of social, moral and religious charac- ters, has given the city a cosmopolitan variety of standards of personal conduct, faith and belief. Here are agnostics who profess to know nothing, and gnostics who think they know everything. Here Jews and Gentiles meet in harmony and emulate one another in forbearance. Catholic and Protestant, while opposed in the- ology, agree in forwarding the common truths of Christianity. The city supports a Presbyterian Theological Seminary; a Hebrew College and several Synagogues; a Catholic College and priesthood. Orthodoxy "fights" heterodoxy, but each concedes the right of the other to exist, to proselyte and to worship in its own way. The city is full of churches, and while each congregation thinks itself in the right, every preacher grants that his brother clergymen, in a hundred neighboring pulpits, are like himself trying to do good and disclose truth. An occasional trial for heresy forms the exception that proves the rule. No sight more interesting to the thought - ful stranger who visits Cincinnati can be pointed out, than the impressive variety of steeples that rise from the houses of worship which one may take in at a glance from the corner of Eighth and Plum streets. There the sacred minarets of a Synagogue gaze across the street at the stone pinnacle of St. Peter's Cathedral, and in near proximity the domes and towers of Protestant churches of half a dozen different denominations lift their spires toward Heaven, and in the goodly company of these

HISTORY OF CINCINNATI AND HAMILTON COUNTY.

religious edifices the Children's Home stands, a practical illustration of the applica- tion of faith to good works.

A CENTER OF EDUCATION.

That Cincinnati is a center of education and polite culture, is sufficiently shown in the chapter of this work devoted to the history of schools and literary institu- tions, to which the reader is referred. Perhaps it will not be inappropriate or untimely here to remind the interested student of Cincinnati's progress and achieve- ment, that, in the Columbian Exposition, our city's showing of educational, sci- entific and artistic work, was highly creditable to the exhibitors. Cincinnati and Cleveland each had a beautiful and elegant apartment in the "Ohio Building," while in the " Woman's Building" the ladies of this city had the only room appro- priated to a particular city-a magnificent room, decorated with perfect taste, and made the depository of works in art and artizanship that were the admiration of all beholders.

A UNIQUE AND PICTURESQUE CITY.

It is not easy for a stranger, withont a guide, to obtain a just idea of Cincinnati by a hurried attempt to observe its varied features. There is no one point from which even a correct birds-eye-view of it can be taken. Unlike New York, Chicago and other cities, which, though extensive are very simple in plan, owing to the pre- vailing regularity of surface on which they are built, Cincinnati is singularly com- plex and confusing, on account of the different levels to which it is accommodated, and the many windings of the streams and valleys that cut their way through it. He who sees the town in the low part where most of the business houses are located, without going to the hills; and he who sees only the hill portions without visiting the valley, are alike unprepared to say: " I am familiar with the Queen City." Mr. Charles Dudley Warner, in a study of Cincinnati, published in Harper's Monthly, confessed that he was glad the nature of his obligation to his readers did not require him to describe the topography of the city. But, in fact, it is upon the topography of the city that its distinctive external character depends. Nature, and the exigen- cies of engineering for the purpose of street-making, grading, drainage, valley-fill- ing, hill-carving, and hill-climbing, have given many sections of the town a remark- able aspect. The imperious caprices of the Ohio river, which sometimes .falls to a shallowness of two or three feet, so that boys can wade it, and sometimes floods up to a high-water mark of over seventy feet, gives the city now the look of a town to which navigation is impossible, and now the appearance of a seaport when the tide is in. The serpentine valleys of the Miami, of Mill creek, of Deer creek, of Craw- fish creek. with deep ravines dividing the bordering hills, and the long, arbitrary line of the old Miami canal. stretching, with many turns and angles, from southeast to northwest, through the city, are things that puzzle the tourist who can not under- stand how nature fashioned this locality before man transformed the scene. Poor little Deer creek. the "Dameta " of the Indians, the purling stream which was the delight of Dr. Drake in 1800-who that is unacquainted with the fact would suspect that the captive stream now creeps its diminished way along its vaulted prison below his feet, seeking the Ohio, as the waste water of the canal does, through a sewer ? Not only is Deer creek buried, the entire valley of "Dameta " is largely lost and sunk under the dump-heaps of the city carts. And Mill creek. at the oozy mouth of which are moored the swarming crafts of "Shanty-boat Town," and whose valley is rapidly filling up with high-piled roadbeds for railways-who would now think of singing the beauty of Mill creek banks, once celebrated in song as " Makatewa's Flowery Marge?" But while many of the original natural charms of the city proper are lost and gone forever, the general contour of the locality remains unchanged, and art has added much to compensate for what the needs of business have taken away.

HISTORY OF CINCINNATI AND HAMILTON COUNTY.

Cincinnati rambles along the Ohio river, up and down, for a distance of ten or twelve miles. The low plateau or bottom ground on which it, and the Kentucky cities, Covington and Newport, are located, is, in form, irregularly oval or almost circular, with a rim of hills all round, except where the river cuts through, pursuing a southwesterly course, with a deep bend to the south sweeping down from Dayton to Covington, and a northward curve from West Covington to Ludlow. Near the lower curve of the southern bend the Licking flows in from the south, and near the highest point of the northern curve Mill creek runs in from the north. This alluvial plain, on which the compact business part of the city mostly lies, is not flat, slopes gently back from the river, for a varying distance, with an average width of three miles, and then rises abruptly. The highest of the hill-tops is about 300 feet above the level of the river, the whole valley with its several terraces having been cut, in the course of ages, by the erosion of the water. Strictly, we have no hills; that is the earth was not bulged up by pressure from below, but hewn down and sculptured by the busy fingers of rain and flood.

The streets of old Cincinnati, the original town plot, and its extension, from Ludlow, on the east, to Smith, on the west, running from the river toward the hills, and then intersecting them at right angles, from Water street to 'far beyond Four- teenth, were not conformable to the points of the compass, as are most of the streets and avenues recently platted. Main street, for example, does not run due north and south, but one in walking down it toward the Ohio goes in a southeasterly direction. Freeman and Linn, and the streets parallel to them, run exactly north and south, and Liberty street runs straight east and west. Going toward the river is not neces- sarily going south, for the river constantly bends.

When the comparatively level tracts spreading back from the river and between the two creeks became pretty well occupied by houses, business began to press upon the residential parts of the city, and, as there was no more space below for building, the people sought places for homes on the uplands. They began to scale the ter- races. Streets and winding roads were projected to the most eligible situations, not too far from the conveniences of the mart, the school and the church. The city, grad- ually extending its limits in all directions along the lines of least resistance, and to the most inviting regions, met and was met by the widening corporations of neighboring towns and villages, and the many gradually coalesced into one. Thus it came about that Cincinnati, being an aggregation of once independent towns, each built without reference to the plan of the other, or of the great city, is now about as irregular in its structure as a "crazy quilt," made of different shaped patches. But to this acci- dental irregularity the city owes much of its unique charm. If we except certain monotonous areas of the old city, which remind one of the least interesting parts of Philadelphia; and some oppressively uniform squares, "over the Rhine," and in the northwestern part of the city between the canal and Mill creek, we will find the remaining parts of Cincinnati abounding, not only in variety of surface and scenery, but in striking architectural features and picturesque surprises. Long ago the city swallowed up Fulton, Pendleton, Buxton ("Buck Town"), and Texas, so that these have as entirely lost their identity as Losantiville itself. In 1868 the city began a reg- ular policy of annexing, and since then Mount Auburn, Columbia, Mount Tusculum, Walnut Hills, Woodburn, Corryville, Clifton Heights, Mount Harrison, Barrsville, Fairmount, Camp Washington and other places have been annexed. * The traveling guest, exploring the maze of hill and hollow answering to the common name Cincin- nati, may be pardoned for not mastering in a day the confused topography and nomenclature of twenty towns in one. By street-car lines he may be conveyed through much of the labyrinth; from the deck of an excursion steamer he will see a world of striking scenes and objects, that no view from land could give an idea of;

* Since this chapter was written Clifton, Avondale, Linwood, Westwood and Riverside have been an- nexed to the city.

Engraved 1

Lawie W. Fishw Qual W.

KRET SAMUEL WARE FISHER

SIXTH PRESIDENT OF HAMILTON COLLER

HISTORY OF CINCINNATI AND HAMILTON COUNTY.

and by a twenty-mile drive through "Cincinnati on the Hills," he would be made to realize why the people of this city are so enamored of their home, and why they hold on to its pseudonym, Queen City of the West, and are quick to quote Long- fellow's verses about:

The Queen of the West In her garlands drest.

Access to the diversified platean, that half encloses and overlooks the lower city, is afforded not only by numberless declivitous roads and footpaths, not only by electric cars and cable cars that ascend by winding roads of steep grade, but, more than all, by a series of strongly constructed inclined planes, up which passenger cars and heavily-laden wagons are lifted, as if flying, over tracks varying from 788 to 1,000 feet in length. There are four of these, one ascending Price Hill, west of the city; one leading up to Mount Auburn, one at the foot of Elm street, lifting the passengers on the way to Clifton, and one bearing them up to Eden Park, and sum- mit of Mount Adams, east of the smoke of the city.

It is owing, of course, to the beautiful river and its tributaries that such variety of surface and altitude, so many hills and dales, entitle Cincinnati to the epithets unique and picturesque. The manner, also, in which the city was built, the modes of street engineering, and the styles of architecture add to its peculiarities and its attractiveness. The luxurious, almost tropical abundance of trees and shrubbery which embower the town give it another charm. The landscape views, which take in the river and the hills of Ohio and Kentucky, are not excelled in beauty anywhere in the world.

THE SUBURBS.

New York has her Broadway and her Hudson river; Chicago has her system of parks and bouvelards; Cleveland shows her miles of Euclid avenue, but the pride of Cincinnati is her suburban scenery and palaces. Of the seven city parks within the corporate limits, though they comprise 539 acres, only two are of considerable impor- tance, Eden Park and Burnet Woods; but to compensate for the lack of sufficient park space within the city proper, the entire region immediately surrounding the incorporated area is a continuous park and pleasure ground, though owned by pri- vate individuals. All the parks in Cincinnati together occupy less ground than Jackson Park. Chicago; and the whole space devoted to parks and public squares in Chicago is 1,974 acres. There can be no question that it is now high time for the people of Cincinnati to demand and secure additional land for public pleasure grounds, by purchasing suitable tracts in the suburbs. There is crying need for provision of this kind in the East End, in the vicinity of Tusculum Heights, and in the neighborhood of Avondale.

The suburbs of Cincinnati combine, in a most remarkable manner, the charms of nature and the superadded adornments of human skill, taste and imagination, exhibited in the arts of the landscape gardener and the architect. There are numer- ous villas, near the city, which for harmony of relation between the buildings and the grounds, and for general effects of elegance and beauty, must command the admiration of the most critical beholder. An old citizen of Cincinnati, writing in 1855, and referring to a time before the city had much encroached on the plateau, says: "At that time these hills formed a border of such surpassing beauty, around the plain on which Cincinnati stood, as to cause us who remember them in their beauty, almost to regret the progress of improvement which has taken from us what it can never restore." Fortunately the grand features of the wide-spreading, infinitely varied plateau, that like the terraces of an amphitheater half encircle the city on the east, north, and west, have, thus far, been devoted mainly to residential purposes, and to gardens, parks, reservoirs, and public resorts which add to, rather than detract from, the original attractiveness of the scene. It is upon these majestic

HISTORY OF CINCINNATI AND HAMILTON COUNTY.

hill-tops that the Queen City of the West really has her throne. Twenty- five years ago, James Parton, writing for the Atlantic Monthly, used the following language : "Behold the Fifth avenue of Cincinnati ! It is not merely the pleasant street of villas and gardens along the brow of the hill, though that is part of it. Mount to the cupola of the Mount Auburn Young Ladies' School, which stands near the highest point, and look out over a sea of beautifully formed, umbrageous hills, steep enough to be picturesque, but not too steep to be convenient, and observe that upon each summit, as far as the eye can reach, is an elegant cottage or mansion, or a cluster of beautiful villas surrounded by groves, gardens and lawns. This is Cincinnati's Fifth avenue. Here reside the families enriched by the industry of the low, smoky town. Here upon these enchanting hills and in these inviting valleys will finally gather the greater part of the population, leaving the city to the smoke and heat, when the labors of the day are done. As far as we have seen or read, no inland city in the world surpasses Cincinnati, in the beauty of its environs. They present as perfect a combination of the picturesque and the accessible as can any- where be found. There are still the primeval forests and the virgin soil to favor the plans of the artist in 'capabilities.' The Duke of Newcastle's party, one of whom was the Prince of Wales, were not flattering their entertainers when they pronounced the suburbs of Cincinnati the finest they had anywhere seen."

With the quarter century which has passed since Parton wrote his enthusiastic description, his prophecy in regard to the exodus from the business part of the city to the hill-tops has been realized. The lower city is largely given up to business purposes, and the people have built them new homes in the suburbs. They have, in many cases, erected fine schoolhouses and stately churches on the hills. The delightful Mount Auburn, which Parton mentions as belonging quite to the environs, is now thickly settled and closely built, and must soon give up the rural distinction of being a place of secluded villas. The large estates have been divided, and sold in parcel, and blocks have taken the place of pleasure gardens. The suburbs have receded, and are receding. The circle is constantly widening. Hundreds, and thousands, and tens of thousands, retaining their business houses and connections, in the city, have removed their place of residence to Clifton, Avondale, Madisonville, Norwood, Pleasant Ridge, Delhi, Fern Bank, Home City, Riverside, Mt. Airy, West- wood, Addyston, Bond Hill, Carthage, College Hill, Elmwood, St. Bernard, Winton Place, Mount Tusculum, Linwood, Mt. Lookout, Arlington, Wyoming, and twenty other suburban towns; while, on the Kentucky side, multitudes doing business in Cincinnati have their homes in Covington, Newport, Dayton, Bellevue, Ludlow, and points farther away. These surrounding cities, towns and villages, constitute the present suburbs of the Queen City, who sits in their midst, and smiles upon their prosperity, as a mother smiles on a family of fair daughters.

THE STREETS AND BUILDINGS.

For the most part, Cincinnati is well and solidly built, as to her streets and bridges, her reservoirs and retaining walls, her railways of all kinds, and her edifices, public and private. The drainage of the lower or business portion of the city is almost perfect, owing to the fortunate circumstance that a vast bed of gravel and sand furnishes a substratum that absorbs and purifies any waste fluids that may penetrate to its depths. The upper city is founded upon a rock. The sewer- age is pronounced excellent by the best judges of such engineering, and the sanitary condition of the city, though it may be much improved by a stricter cleanliness, is better than in most large cities. That the city is one of the healthiest on the globe is the clear testimony of statistics. The streets are from fifty to a hundred feet wide, and are laid out as regularly as the uneven character of the surface will allow. They are paved in a manner that gains the city credit and applause from the trav- eler. The principal avenues have been paved with granite at a cost of about three

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History of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, Ohio; their past and present, Part 10

Author: Nelson, S.B., Cincinnati Publication date: 1894 Publisher: Cincinnati : S. B. Nelson Number of Pages: 1592

Author: Nelson, S.B., Cincinnati
Publication date: 1894
Publisher: Cincinnati : S. B. Nelson
Number of Pages: 1592