YESTERDAY

A-to-Z Guide to Greater Cincinnati:
"Best Place to Live in North America"

When Fort Washington was built at Losantiville,
it secured the site of the future city of Cincinnati.

The Land Between the Miamis

BY OWEN FINDSEN
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Burial mounds and earthworks around Cincinnati indicate that this land on the Ohio River was a thriving community a thousand years ago.

Two hundred years ago, Native Americans fought fiercely to defend the land against new Americans, from New Jersey and Virginia, who came down the Ohio River on flatboats and built the first cabins and blockhouses in 1788, three months before George Washington became president.

The land between the two Miami rivers on the north side of the Ohio River was named the Miami Purchase but was called the Miami Slaughterhouse during the years of warfare with the Miami, Shawnee and other Indians of the Northwest Territory. General Anthony Wayne's 1794 victory over the Indians of the Northwest Territory at Fallen Timbers secured the country for settlement by Revolutionary War veterans, who built Cincinnati.

There were three settlements on the north side of the Ohio:

Columbia at the mouth of the Little Miami River;
North Bend on the Great Miami;
Losantiville across the Ohio from the mouth of the Licking.

Fort Washington, headquarters for the U.S. Army in the west, was built at Losantiville, which Governor Arthur St. Clair renamed Cincinnati in honor of the Society of Cincinnati, an organization of Revolutionary War officers.

Across the Ohio, on both sides of the Licking, the towns of Newport and Covington were built in the new commonwealth of Kentucky.

Highway to the Wild West

The Ohio River was the highway into what was then the Wild West. When steamboats came to the Ohio after 1811, Cincinnati became the "Queen City" of the West, the fastest growing city in the nation, shipping goods via New Orleans to the Eastern states and foreign countries.

It was a city of foundries, tanneries, furniture factories, carriage builders, boat builders, candle and soap makers.

The hillsides were ideal for growing grapes for America's first domestic wine industry.

It was the nation's leading pork packer. Cincinnatians praised their city as "the London of America," but others called it "Porkopolis."

Breweries arrived with the German immigrants who flocked to the city in the 1840's, creating their own community north of the Miami and Erie Canal, nicknamed the Rhine River, labeling the German neighborhood Over-the-Rhine.

Before the Civil War, Cincinnatians were divided between pro-slavery merchants, fearful of losing their lucrative trade with the South, and abolitionists, who made the city an important part of the Underground Railroad.

When the war began, the city rallied to the Union, producing weapons, uniforms and gunboats for the Union Army. A Confederate attempt to siege the city failed, though General John Hunt Morgan's Raiders skirted the northern suburbs. The city was headquarters for the army in the West, and more than 40 Union generals are buried in Spring Grove Cemetery.

If it hadn't been for that cow

The city continued to grow, culturally and financially, after the Civil War, building Music Hall, the Art Museum and the University of Cincinnati and launching professional baseball. A series of industrial expositions attracted world attention to the city, which now claimed to be "the Paris of America."

It was the Chicago Fire, in 1871, that burned Cincinnati's dream of being the greatest city in America. The people of Chicago promised to build a new city - bigger than Cincinnati - and they built their commerce around the new railroads to the new West, while Cincinnati's steamboat trade with the old South went into decline. The canal, once an important trade route to the Great Lakes, was replaced by a parkway over a subway which was built during an era of political corruption and was never finished.

In this century Cincinnati settled down, describing itself as serene, solid and conservative. No longer claiming the commerce of London, the charm of Paris or the culture of Munich, it is now content that it has been named "Best Place to Live in North America."

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