History of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, Ohio; their past and present, Part 8

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

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After the tragic vanishing of Filson, his interest in the company was disposed of to Col. Israel Ludlow, who had come to the west as a surveyor for Judge Symmes. A part of the original Indian fort "Ludlow Station," erected in 1790, was built into the locally famous Ludlow Mansion, which is still standing in Cumminsville, near Mill Creek. Israel Ludlow laid out the town, which, it is probable, Filson had begun to survey.

The first colonists of Losantiville, or Cincinnati proper, like those of Columbia, made the town of Maysville their place of rendezvous before setting out for their permanent destination. They embarked on the 24th of December, 1788, perhaps somewhat late in the afternoon. The river was choked with floating ice, which made navigation difficult and perilous. The voyage was safely accomplished, and the company, consisting of twenty-seven men, landed on December 28, 1788, at a small inlet near what is now the foot of Sycamore street. This point, and others of his- torical significance, should be marked by appropriate granite tablets, for the benefit of future generations, and as a matter of municipal duty and pride. The little har- bor in which the boat was moored for many years bore the name of "Yeatman's Cove," and near it was erected the first noted public resort of Cincinnati in pioneer days, " Yeatman's Tavern."

No part of history is more useful than correct names and accurate dates, for the man and his time are essential facts. The names of the men who stepped ashore on the border of Yeatman's Cove, December 28, 1788, now (1893) one hundred and five years ago, are Col. Robert Patterson, Israel Ludlow, Noah Badgely, Samuel Black- burn, Thaddeus Bruen, Robert Caldwell,. Matthew Campbell, James Carpenter, William Connell, Matthew Fowler, Thomas Gizzel, Francis Hardesty, Captain Henry, Luther Kitchill, Henry Lindsey, Elijah Martin, Wm. McMillan, Samuel Mooney,

Mestern Biogl. Pub, ' :

P. R. Springer

HISTORY OF CINCINNATI AND HAMILTON COUNTY.

John Porter, Evan Shelby, Joseph Thornton, Scott Traverse, Isaac Tuttle, John Vance, Sylvester White, Joel Williams.

We subjoin a complete list of the names on the record of the distribution and sale of lots in the town Losantiville, 1789-90: Adams, Dr .; Adams, George; Adams, John; Atchison, Henry; Badgeley, Noah; Baker, Melyn; Barns, Stephen; Bates, Daniel; Bates, Isaac; Beazeley, William; Bechtle, Henry; Bedell, William; Benham, Richard; Benham, Robert; Black, Thomas; Blackburn, James; Blackburn, Samuel; Blanchard, John; Bostwick, Truman; Brown, Thomas; Bruen, Thaddeus; Brunton & Dougherty; Burd, Moses; Burns, James; Caldwell, Robert; Campbell, James; Campbell, Matthew; Campbell, William; Carpenter, James; Cavender, Garret; Cheek, John; Cochran, Thomas; Coleman, Ephraim; Colwell, James; Cook, Peyton; Cooper, Daniel C .; Coulson, John; Covert, John; Cummings, John; Cun- ningham, James; Cutter, John; Cutter, Joseph; Cutter, Seth; Danalds, Matthews; Darling, Edward; Davis, Jonathan; Davis, Elijah; Davison; Denman, Matthias; Devin, William; Dillan, William; Dougherty (Brunton &); Dorrough, William; Dument, Benjamin; Dument, James; Ellis, John; Farnum, Russell; Ferguson, Captain; Filson, John; Finlay, Joshua; Finley, Elijah; Fitts, Jonathan; Flinn, Benjamin; Ford, Lieut. Mahlon; Fowler, Jacob; Freeman, Isaac; Freeman, Samuel; Fulton, Jesse; Funk, Adam; Garrison, Abraham; Gaston, John; Gates, Uriah; Gizzel, Thomas; Goald, James; Gowen, William; Gray, Archibald; Greves, George; Griffin, John; Hamblen, Joel; Hardesty, Hezekiah; Hardesty, Uriah; Harris, William; Harway, James; Hedger, William; Heooleson; Hinds, Robert; Hole, Daniel; Hole, Darius; Hole, Dr. John; Hole, William; Hole, Zachariah; Hol- land, Edward; Holt, Jerum; Hunt, Israel; Hunt, Nehemiah; Johnston, Nicholas; Joyce. David; Jones, Nicholas; Kearsey (or Kearney ?), John; Kelly, Joseph; Kelly, William; Kemper, Rev. James; Kennedy, Francis; Kennedy, Samuel; Kibby, Ephraim; Kingsbury, Lieutenant; Kitchell, Bethuel; Kitchell, Daniel; Kitchell, Luther; Kitchell, Samuel; Lindsay, Jarry; Lindsicourt, Cobus; Logan, David; Lore, John; Lowry, James; Ludlow, Israel; Ludlow, John; Lyon, James; McClure, Daniel; McClure, David; McClure, George; McClure, John; McClure, Mary; Mc- Clure, William; McConnel, James; McCoy, William; McHendry, Enoch; McHendry, Joseph; McKnight, James; Mclaughlin, Henry; Mclaughlin, John; McMillan, William; Marshall, James; Martin, Elijah; Martin, Isaac; Martin, Margaret; Martin, Samuel; Mellen, Luke; Menser, Jonas; Mercer, Jonathan; Millan, James; Miller, James; Miller, Moses; Mills, Jacob; Mooney, Samuel; Moore, Alexander; Moore, Robert; Morrel, Dr .; Mott, Jesse; Munn, Capt. John; Murfey, George; Murfey, John; Neilson, Mr .; Niece, George; Noon, Christopher; Orcutt, Darius C .; Parks, Andrew; Parks, Culbertson; Patterson, Col. Robert; Peck, Presley; Persons, Thomas; Phillips, Jabesh; Pierson, Matthew; Pierson, Samuel; Porter, John; Potter, Enos; Pratt, Captain; Pursley, James; Reed, Henry; Reeder, Jacob; Reeder, Steplien; Richards, Thomas; Riddle, John; Ritchison, Abraham; Rolstein, Nathaniel; Rolstein, William; Rood, Reuben; Root, Asa; Ross, Jonathan: Ross, John; Ross, John, Jr. ; Ross, Moses; Ross, William; Rusk, William; Sargent, Col. Winthrop; Sayre, Levi; Scott, David; Scott, James; Scott, Obediah; Seaman, John; Seaman, Jonas; Shaw, Niles; Sheets, Casper; Shoemaker, Daniel; Stewart, Archibald; Stewart, Jesse; Stibbins, Ziba; Strong, Captain; Sullivan, Dennis; Symmes, John Cleves; Tapping, Jacob; Taylor, Henry; Terry, Enos; Terry, John, Sr. ; Terry, Robert; Tharp, John; Thornton, Joseph; Traverse, Scott; Turner, Judge George; Valentine, Benjamin; Vance, John; Van Cleve, Benjamin; Van Cleve, John; Van- Doran, Jacob; Van Eton, John; Van Meter, Isaac; Van Nuys, Cornelius; Wallace, James; Warwick, Jacob; Welch, David; White, Sylvester; Whiteside, Samuel; Wiant, John; Williams, Joel; Winters; Wood, Amos; Woodward, Levi.

HISTORY OF CINCINNATI AND HAMILTON COUNTY.

LOCATION OF CINCINNATI.

The site chosen by Denman and others, for the location of a city, was most ad- vantageous. It would seem that Nature suggests where great towns will flourish best, and she refuses to aid man when he selects unsuitable places to build for mul- titudes. Environment determines the character and controls the growth of a city. There must be some strong and lasting motive to draw or drive many people together in one compact community for purposes of organized gregarious life. The sagacity of self-interest often fails to " boom " a badly situated town into importance; and the untutored reason or instinct of primitive tribes sometimes reveals to them where they may wisely pitch their tents or build their social villages. Richness of soil, abundance of mineral products, nearness to water courses, and natural facilities for road making, are among the essential requisites to supply man's needs. The site of Cincinnati was occupied in the remote past by a permanent encampment or town of mound-building savages. Those strange prehistoric people, whether Indians or belonging to some other race, left mysterious records of themselves in endless earth- works long since erased to give place to streets and blocks. One of our streets bears. the name, Mound, and at its southern terminus, where Hughes High School now stands, once rose a great tumulus, the monument of a forgotten people.

Subsequent to the time of the mound-building folk, the site of Cincinnati was the temporary abode of the wild red men of the Miami tribes, and, after it was abandoned as a camp the spot continued to be familiar to the roving savages, who bent on war, or the hunt, or trade, or theft, followed the worn paths southward through Ohio, or northward across Kentucky, or up and down the Ohio in canoes to a converging point at the mouth of the Licking. It is conjectured, not altogether fancifully, that these wild bow-and-arrow men were guided in their course toward the future Queen City by tracks and roads which the buffalo and the deer had trod- den, these animals seeking richest grazing fields and sweetest waters, as, led by a similar instinct, the wild turkeys flocked to Turkey Bottom. Thus centuries before the white man's foot was attracted to pursue the obscure paths and traces that led. to the charmed garden, "opposite the river's mouth," the Indian, the Mound- Builder, and the wild beasts of the forest and birds of the air had sought out the same well-omened spot. We may say with perfect truth that Creative Power formed the peculiar geological and geographical features of the locality in such a. way as to point out to living creatures an area of subsistence strikingly adapted to the needs of man and brute,

In the year 1829, only forty years from the time when settlement was first begun on the Ohio, Timothy Flint contributed to the "Western Souvenir " a fanciful story, entitled "Oolemba in Cincinnati." Oolemba was drawn to represent a Delaware chief, who tells us in the tale: "Five hundred moons have waned since I dwelt under a huge sycamore on the brow of the hill whose margin is washed by the silver wave of the Ohio. This sweet valley is bounded toward the rising sun by the gentle stream of Dameta, or the creek of deers; and on the side of the setting sun by the transparent waters of Elhena, or the stream of the green hills. Wood crowned ridges shut it in on the north." The chief goes on to relate events which caused him to leave his home and birthplace, and to wander far to the west. He is represented as finally returning, after long absence, and sometime in 1828 he first sees Cincinnati. The impression the town made upon his simple mind Oolemba thus conveys in words:

"At length I had clambered over a thousand fences, been barked at by a thou- sand dogs, been covered with dust, and scorched with the sun, when I arrived on the wooded banks of the Licking. I thanked the Great Spirit and prayed that the valley of Elsindelowa [Ohio] might be as green and wooded as these banks. But when I emerged from the woods at the mouth of the Licking-what a sight spread

HISTORY OF CINCINNATI AND HAMILTON COUNTY.

before me on every side !- Spirit of my fathers! Would that I had fallen to the earth at the sight. The hills still remained, as if to mock me. They rose in the blue air, and were covered with green trees as when I left them. The waters of the Licking still made their way over their rocky bed. But how was everything else changed! All the vale of Elsindelowa was filled with the big cabins of the white

men. The big canoes and buildings vomited up smoke. A dim dust arose above the cabins, and a dull but incessant noise, as of all kinds of life and movement rose upon my ear. The big canoes covered the silver wave. Even the shore on which I stood was covered with the cabins of the whites. I stood amazed. My head became dizzy, and my thoughts confounded. 'Is this,' I asked, 'the place I left forty winters ago, one wide forest, without a white man's cabin in the land ?' "

The words put into the mouth of the Indian chief describe just what Flint him- self must have seen a thousand times. And the route traveled by Oolemba, on his approach to Cincinnati, was the one marked out by Nature and surveyed by Filson, and which is still a main highway of communication into the south. Hon. Job E. Stevenson, in a communication to the "New England Magazine," says, speaking of the favorable location of his adopted city: "A slight knowledge of Ohio and Ken- tucky will convince anyone that the situation of the Miami Purchase was advanta- geous. The Licking river, opposite the purchase, gave an outlet from Kentucky, for two hundred miles; and the dividing ridge called 'Dry Ridge,' which stretches from Central Kentucky to the Ohio at Covington, formed a natural road without a bridge for fifty miles, and then, crossing a small stream, entered the Eden, called 'The Blue-Grass region,' of which Lexington was then, as she still is, the capital. This route was then the way from Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and the Carolinas, and is now the line of our Southern Railroad track. Between the Miamis, up the valley of Mill creek, was a corresponding route from the Ohio river northeast, extending to the watershed of the State. Here was the crossing of the river, the thoroughfare north and south, northeast and southwest, at the point of embarkation and debarkation to and from the Ohio. Add the fact of the unrivalled fertility of the Miami Country and of the Blue-Grass region, and we have an assemblage of excellences, which have been rarely if ever equalled."

PRIMITIVE CINCINNATI.

From 1788 to 1802 .- About ten months after the landing of Cincinnati's first settlers, at Yeatman's Cove in the winter of 1788, Maj. Doughty, of the United States army, began to build Fort Washington, a log structure made of large trees cut from the space on which it was located, a tract of fifteen acres sloping up from the river bank, in that part of the city now lying between Broadway and Main, and bounded on the north by a line somewhere between Third and Fourth streets. The site of the fort is now partly covered by the Lorraine building, which took the place a few years ago of Mrs. Trollope's Bazaar, on Third street near Lawrence and Broadway. The fort when completed, in December, 1789, was occupied by Gen. Harmar, with a garrison of ninety men, to protect the settlement against Indians. Most of the town plot was still covered by trees, sycamore, maple, oak and beech- primeval trees, stately and glorious. The first survey of the town marked its outer limits by the river and three streets-Northern row (now Seventh street), Eastern row (now Broadway) and Western row (now Central avenue).

Gen. Arthur St. Clair, governor of the Northwest Territory, came from Mari- etta to Fort Washington in January, 1790, and it was then that the town's name was changed from Losantiville to Cincinnati. Fort Washington was for several years the most important building in the town, and was a post of much importance during the Indian wars waged by Harmar, St. Clair, Zeigler, Wilkinson and Wayne. The post was abandoned in 1844, when the National Government removed its gar-

HISTORY OF CINCINNATI AND HAMILTON COUNTY.

rison to the barracks in Newport, Ky., where it remained until its recent transfer- rence to Fort Thomas, further up the Ohio river.

Some effort of the imagination is requisite to reproduce a true picture of the Cincinnati of St. Clair's day; Cincinnati the capital and emporium of the old Northwest Territory; Cincinnati the muddy-streeted, woods-surrounded, stump- dotted, log town, protected by the swaggering, whisky-loving, dare-devil soldiers of Fort Washington. During the first four years of the town's existence its inhabi- tants and the other settlers of the Miami Country lived in constant dread of the native tribes whose rich lands they had so long coveted. The military protection afforded by the troops at the fort was inadequate. Harmar was defeated in 1790; St. Clair's terrible repulse and defeat was in 1791; the people were panic-stricken; the settlements seemed on the edge of ruin, until, in 1792, the sword of " Mad Anthony Wayne" flashed along the border and led civilization to victory. Let some patri- otic citizen mark with a suitable enclosure and memorial stone the great elm tree near the corner of Chase and Dane streets, Cumminsville, under which encamped St. Clair in 1791 and Wayne in 1793. After the Treaty of Greenville, in 1794, the doomed Indian sullenly removed his tents to other fields. The farmers began to breathe easily, and could leave the rifle on its hooks over the chimney-piece while they went out to plow or to harvest. The traders under the shadows of the wooden walls of Fort Washington ordered new stocks of goods with gathering confidence. New families from the East floated down the Ohio on their "arks."

But the irresponsible soldiers, no longer on duty in the field, and doing the pro- verbial mischief which Satan finds for idle hands to do, became an intolerable nuisance to the citizens. The officers were insolent and overbearing; the men in the ranks were quarrelsome and intemperate. Dr. Drake tells us that the best trodden road in the village was that which led from the fort to a still house on Deer creek. The settlement was infested, as frontier places and river towns were wont to be, by law- less rascals of every description-thieves, gamblers, cutthroats and robbers. Law had not yet got a firm grip on the throat of license and crime. Society was not organized. Confusion reigned. Self-interest was the ruling motive of many indi- viduals. And yet the better class of people soon dominated the worse elements. Institutions took shape. The first church, the first school, the first ferry, each a classifying and regulating agency, were got into operation in 1792, even while "Mad Anthony " was expelling the wielders of the tomahawk and scalping knife. The jail and the newspaper, antagonistic forces, came in 1793. As for the court of justice, it was supplemented and sustained by those cheerful moral supports, the pillory, stocks and whipping-post, as in the good old days of Winslow and Endicott in New England.

The Opus and Epic of the border was singing itself all around. Man was doing over the old Sisiphus work of rolling the stone up hill. The gun, the axe, the plow, the boat, the assembling of men with ideas in the primitive wilds, to shape a new State of new material; the struggle with rude nature; the beginning of a city; that is what we must try to realize when we think of the doings and sufferings of Cincinnati's founders in the first decade from 1790 to 1800. The scene was rude, the life was hard and unpoetical. The men and women were actually forced to live, at the outset, like an earth-sprung race. They had not always enough to eat. They became victims of strange diseases. They wore uncouth dresses, as savages do -- clothing made, in part, of the fells of beasts, buckskin breeches, vests of the deer's hide, caps of fox-skin. They pounded their corn in a mortar, or ground it, as Arabs do, in a hand-mill. They ate the roots of wild grass. They went armed not only to the woods, but to the house of prayer. They killed wild deer, and bear, and turkey, for food, and are said to have relished an occasional rattlesnake stew. Such were the necessities of those who started civilization on the banks of the Ohio, a hundred years ago! As late as the year 1795, Cincinnati was a huddle of log cabins,

HISTORY OF CINCINNATI AND HAMILTON COUNTY.

direct " quotations from the forest," occupied by a population of not more than five hundred. There was not a brick house in the town, nor so much as a single brick to begin a house with. The original comers to Losantiville found the place mud, and left it logs. Nor did the town change much, except for the worse, as regards building and paving, for five years more; for in the year 1800, when the first census was taken, the figures show that only 750 inhabitants dwelt within the town. The Territorial legislature, organized in 1798, held its first sessions in Cincinnati, but, in 1801, the seat of government was transferred to Chillicothe, a change which gave a backset to the older village.

Cincinnati was incorporated as a town in 1802, the year in which Ohio was admitted into the Union as a State. Ohio had then a population of over sixty thousand, of which number, though Cincinnati had less than one-sixteenth part, she was yet far the largest town in the State. The officers who administered the town govern- ment when it was first incorporated were: President, David Ziegler; recorder, Jacob Burnet ; trustees, William Ramsay, David E. Wade, Charles Avery, John Reily, William Stanley, Samuel Dick, and William Ruffner; assessor, Joseph Price; collector, Abram Cary; town marshal, James Smith.

AGRICULTURE CREATES CINCINNATI.

A German botanist wrote a chapter to prove that man subsists on dust and air, since our breath and our food come directly or indirectly from earth and atmosphere. Surely the climate and the soil surrounding Cincinnati are her chief nourishers; tillage supplies her means of wealth. Cincinnatus was a Roman farmer, and his name, like. that of Putnam, suggests the plow first and the sword next. A historian tells us that the titular hero, Cincinnatus, whose statue adorns the front of a Fourth street business house, "was a frugal man, and did not care to be rich; and his land was on the other side of the Tiber, a plot of four jugura, where he dwelt with his wife Racelia, and busied himself in the tilling of his ground." After conquering the enemies of Rome, Cincinnatus retired to his country home; so George Wash- ington, surrendering military command, went back to Mount Vernon to cultivate his plantation. In like manner hundreds of Revolutionary officers and soldiers, when the war was over, beat their spears into pruning-hooks, and their swords into plow- shares. Not a few chose out their four or more jugura on the smiling banks of the Ohio.

It is impossible to conceive a more purely bucolic community than that which founded Cincinnati. An Ohio poet, John J. Piatt, in a poem called "The Lost Farm," surprises the reader by revealing in the closing line of his story that

The lost farm underneath the city lies.

The Queen City, like many other American cities, was farm-land before it was houses. The ground on which the business part lies, and that on the top of the surrounding plateaus, was as rich as soil can be. Even the side-hills and the aban- doned quarries are fertile, and soon clothe themselves with luxurious vegetation. Almost every original lot-holder planted a garden and an orchard. In 1795, Dr. Allison, Surveyor-General of the Army, had, we are told, on the east side of the fort, a large lot cultivated as a garden and fruitery, known as Peach Grove. Also, we read in the old records, that in 1795-1800, Hezekiah Flint cultivated, as a corn- field, the square between Fourth, Fifth, Walnut and Vine streets. At the same period, the grounds, where the Cincinnati Hospital now stands, were a half-cleared field overrun with blackberries. On the slope to the river, between Main and Wal- nut, was a small vineyard, probably the first in the Ohio Valley. There must have been at least a suggestion of apples on Walnut street, which was called " Cider street," by our not totally abstinent fathers. We still have an Orchard street, as well as a Vine, a Plum, and a Cherry street.

HISTORY OF CINCINNATI AND HAMILTON COUNTY.

The cluster of log cabins, into which the forest oaks, beeches and maples were turned, grew by aggregation, and spread from street to street, square to square, covering the fertile acres. The little town opposite the mouth of the Licking lengthened up and down the Ohio shore, and widened toward the hills, filling up the space of the bottom lands. Then the ambitious city began to climb the terraces, and to take possession of the uplands. The stimulating cause of this growth and expansion was agriculture. The surrounding country fed the town, and fattened it. The farms nourished the trade-center, and were, in turn, made valuable by the reac- tion of commerce. "Nothing," says Charles Cist, our best early annalist of the Miami Country, "Nothing could surpass the fertility of the soil, which was as mellow as an ash-heap. Benjamin Randolph planted an acre which he had no time to hoe, being obliged to leave the settlement for New Jersey. When he returned, he found one hundred bushels of corn ready for husking."

The lands immediately adjoining the city are surpassingly productive. The soil is deep and strong, sustaining the mighty roots of huge trees, and stimulating to quick thriftiness grasses and grains. The Blue Grass region of Kentucky, the opu- lent valleys of the Miamis, teem with vegetation. Every product of the farm known to the temperate zone, and many plants of an almost sub-tropical nature, bloom and fruit on the lowlands or the highlands that border the Ohio, and that spread away miles on miles in Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky. The cereals, the marketable " vegetables," orchard fruits, the grape, berries of many sorts, flax, hemp, tobacco, hay-all these, and other products as useful, grow abundantly within the continent and circle of Cincinnati's home trade.

Such products, the direct fruit of the earth, the farmer plucks from her bosom. Many of them are food ready prepared for his palate, not even requiring to be cooked. But from these vegetable treasures come the animals. All flesh is grass. Cincinnati came to be called " Porkopolis" because the corn of Ohio, Indi- ana and Kentucky was metamorphosed into hogs, and hogs are bacon, ham and lard. Cattle are beef and tallow and butter and leather; sheep are mutton and wool; poul- try is edible flesh, eggs and feathers; and the bee is honey. Agriculture created Cincinnati. Beginning a village of farmers, it became a farmer's city. From near and far the country wagons drove in with loads of farm products. Down the river floated the boats laden with the results of the husbandman's toil. In the cold weather the streets of the town were noisy with squealing processions of fat swine. The horse-market was a great feature of the town. The countryman was ever in touch with the city-man. No wonder that when, in the days of the Civil war, Cin- cinnati was threatened by an invading foe, the "Squirrel Hunters," the minute men of the farms, came swarming to town, with rifle in hand, to defend the city which their acres had done so much to build, and which was to them a storehouse and res- ervoir of strength.

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History of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, Ohio; their past and present, Part 8

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