forming part of the so-called Queen & Crescent Route to New Orleans), the Erie, the Baltimore & Ohio South-Western (Baltimore & Ohio system), the Chesapeake & Ohio, the Norfolk & Western, the Louisville & Nashville, the Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton, the Cincinnati Northern (New York Central system), the Cincinnati & Muskingum Valley (Pennsylvania system), and the Cincinnati, Lebanon & Northern (Pennsylvania system). Most of these railways use the Union Station; the Pennsylvania and the Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton, have separate stations. The city’s river commerce, though of less relative importance since the advent of railways, is large and brings to its wharves much bulky freight, such as coal, iron and lumber; it also helps to distribute the products of the city’s factories; and the National government has done much to sustain this commerce by deepening and lighting the channel. Formerly there was considerable commerce with Lake Erie by way of the Miami & Erie Canal to Toledo; the canal was completed in 1830 and has never been entirely abandoned.
Industries.—Although the second city in population in the state, Cincinnati ranked first in 1900 as a manufacturing centre, but lost this pre-eminence to Cleveland in 1905, when the value of Cincinnati’s factory product was $166,059,050, an increase of 17.2% over the figures for 1900. In the manufacture of vehicles, harness, leather, hardwood lumber, wood-working machinery, machine tools, printing ink, soap, pig-iron, malt liquors, whisky, shoes, clothing, cigars and tobacco, furniture, cooperage goods, iron and steel safes and vaults, and pianos, also in the packing of meat, especially pork,[1] it ranks very high among the cities of the Union. The well-known and beautiful Rookwood ware has been made in Cincinnati since 1880, at the Rookwood Pottery (on Mt. Adams), founded by Mrs Bellamy (Maria Longworth) Storer, named from her father’s home near the city, the first American pottery to devote exclusive attention to art ware. The earlier wares were yellow, brown and red; then came deep greens and blues, followed by mat glazes and by “vellum” ware (first exhibited in 1904), a lustreless pottery, resembling old parchment, with its decoration painted or modelled or both. The clays used are exclusively American, much being obtained in Missouri. Among the more important manufactures of the city in 1905 were the following, with the value of the product for that year: clothing ($16,972,484), slaughtering and meat-packing products ($13,446,202), foundry and machine-shop products ($11,528,768), boots and shoes ($10,596,928), distilled liquors ($9,609,826), malt liquors ($7,702,693), and carriages and wagons ($6,323,803).[2]
History.—Cincinnati was founded by some of the first settlers in that part of the North-West Territory which afterwards became the state of Ohio. It lies on part of the land purchased for himself and others by John Cleves Symmes (1742–1814) from the United States government in 1788, and the settlement was established near the close of the same year by immigrants chiefly from New Jersey and Kentucky. When the town was laid out early in 1789, John Filson, one of the founders, named it Losantiville (L for Licking; os, Latin for mouth; anti, Greek for opposite; and ville, French for town), but early in the next year Symmes caused the present name to be substituted in honour of the Order of the Cincinnati, General Arthur St Clair, the governor of the North-West Territory, being then president of the Pennsylvania State Society of the Cincinnati. St Clair arrived about the time the change in name was made, immediately erected Hamilton County, and made Cincinnati its seat of government; the territorial legislature also held its sessions here from the time of its first organization in 1799 until 1801, when it removed to Chillicothe. During the early years the Indians threatened the life of the settlement, and in 1789 Fort Washington, a log building for protection against the Indians, was built in the city; General Josiah Harmar, in 1790, and General St Clair, in 1791, made unsuccessful expeditions against them, and the alarm increased until 1794, when General Wayne won a decisive victory over the savages at Maumee Rapids in the battle of Fallen Timbers, after which he secured their consent to the terms of the treaty of Greenville (1795). Cincinnati was incorporated as a village in 1802, received a second charter in 1815, was chartered as a city in 1819, and received its second city charter in 1827 and its third in 1832; since 1851 it has been governed nominally by general laws of the state, although by the state’s method of classifying cities many acts for its government have been in reality special. When first incorporated its limits were confined to an area of 3 sq. m., but by annexations in 1849 and 1850 this area was doubled; in 1854 another square mile was added; in 1869 and 1870 large additions were made, which included the villages of Sedamsville, Price Hill, Walnut Hills, Mount Auburn, Clintonville, Corryville, Vernon, Mount Harrison, Barrsville, Fairmount, West Fairmount, St Peters, Lick Run and Clifton Heights; in 1872 Columbia, which was settled a short time before Cincinnati, was added; in 1873 Cumminsville and Woodburn; in 1895 Avondale, Riverside, Clifton, Linwood and Westwood; in 1903 Bond Hill, Winton Place, Hyde Park and Evanston; in 1904 portions of Mill Creek township, and in 1905 a small tract in Mill Creek Valley.
In 1829 Mrs Frances Trollope established in Cincinnati, where she lived for a part of two years, a “Bazar,” which as the principal means of carrying out her plan to benefit the town was entirely unsuccessful; a vivid but scarcely unbiassed picture of Cincinnati in the early thirties is to be found in her Domestic Manners of the Americans (1831). In 1845 began the marked influx of Germans, which lasted in large degree up to 1860; they first limited themselves to the district “Over the Rhine” (the Rhine being the Miami & Erie Canal), in the angle north-east of the junction of Canal and Sycamore streets, but gradually spread throughout the city, although this “Over the Rhine” is still most typically German.
For more than ten years preceding the Civil War the city was much disturbed by slavery dissension—the industrial interests were largely with the South, but abolitionists were numerous and active, and the city was an important station on the “Underground Railroad,” of which Dr Norton S. Townshend (1815 –95) was conductor, and one of the stations was the home of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who lived in Cincinnati from 1832 to 1850, and gathered there much material embodied in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In 1834 came the Lane Seminary controversies over slavery previously referred to. In 1835 James G. Birney established here his anti-slavery journal, The Philanthropist, but his printing shops were repeatedly mobbed and his presses destroyed, and in January of 1836 his bold speech before a mob gathered at the court-house was the only thing that saved him from personal violence, as the city authorities had warned him that they had not sufficient force to protect him.
At the time of the Civil War the city was strongly in sympathy with the North. In September 1862 the city was threatened by a Confederate force under General Kirby Smith, who led the advance of General Bragg’s army (see American Civil War). On the 28th of March 1884 many of the citizens met at Music Hall to protest against the lax way in which the law was enforced, notably in the case of a recent murder, when the confessed
- ↑ Before 1863 Cincinnati was the principal centre in the United States for the slaughtering of hogs and the packing of pork. The industry began as early as 1820 and rapidly increased in importance, but after 1863 Chicago took the lead.
- ↑ These figures are from the U.S. census, and are of course for Cincinnati proper: some of the largest industrial establishments, however, are just outside the city limits—among these are manufactories of soap (the Ivory Soap Works), machine tools, electrical machinery and appliances, structural and architectural iron work, and office furnishings.
