RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
us there were two very striking and imposing residences which lent distinction to the neighbourhood, and in which, as I grew up, were formed the pleasantest associations of my life. The one directly opposite was a large, square, red brick house which had an air of great dignity. It was the home of Mr. Larz Anderson. There were ten boys in the Anderson family and, though they were all much older than I and most of them had gone away before I grew up, I remember that it was a very lively household always. In my later girlhood we were specially linked to this family by the marriage of one of the boys, Charles, to my sister Jennie.
The house next to Mr. Anderson's, on the north, I knew as the Sinton home. A low, colonial structure, well set in a garden of green lawns and finely kept shrubbery, it is still one of the most beautiful residences in Cincinnati, and, indeed, in the whole country. Its architecture suggests that of the White House and it was, as a matter of fact, designed by the same architect, an Irishman named Hoban. The Sinton house is lower than the White House, being only one story high with a basement, but it has the same classic outlines and it bears, moreover, the stamp of time, which gives it a character all its own.
It was built about 1800 by a Mr. Martin Baum, but was purchased by the first Nicholas Longworth in the early part of the century and was the home of the Longworth family for a generation. Long before I can remember, it was bought by Mr. David Sinton, one of the most successful business men in Ohio, and to me it was always the Sinton home. When I was about twelve years old, Mr. Sinton's daughter Annie married my husband's brother, Charles P. Taft, and as they have always lived in this old house it has come to be known, since Mr. Sinton's death in 1901, as the Taft house. It is the only Taft house in Cincinnati now, the house where my husband was born having been sold
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