Standing Right Here: the Built Environment As a Tool for Historical Inquiry

Standing Right Here: The Built Environment as a Tool for Historical Inquiry

A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy In the Department of History, College of Arts and Sciences

by Anne Delano Steinert October 2020 M.A. University of Cincinnati, 2015 M.S. Columbia University, 1995 B.A. Goucher College, 1992

Committee Chair: Tracy Teslow, PhD

Abstract The built environment is an open archive—a twenty-four-hour museum of the past. The tangible, experiential nature of the urban built environment—streets, valleys, buildings, and bridges—helps historians uncover stories not always accessible in textual sources. The richness of the built environment gives historians opportunities to: invigorate their practice with new tools to uncover the stories of the past, expand the historical record with new understandings, and reach a wider audience with histories that feel relevant and meaningful to a broad range of citizens. This dissertation offers a sampling of material, methods and motivations historians can use to analyze the built environment as a source for their important work. Each of the five chapters of this dissertation uses the built environment to tell a previously unknown piece of Cincinnati’s urban history. The first chapter questions the inconvenient placement of the 1867 Roebling Suspension Bridge and uncovers the story of the ferry owner who recognized the bridge as a threat to his business. Chapter two explores privies, the outdoor toilets now missing from the built environment, and their use as sites for women to terminate pregnancies through abortion and infanticide. The third chapter uses patterns in the construction of public elementary school buildings to illustrate urban change though population growth, annexation, and political maneuvering. Chapter four uses The Delmoor, an apartment flat in Clifton, to explore the lives and work of two women whose achievements were enhanced by their choice to move into the Delmoor in 1919. Finally, chapter five explores the stories of three diverse religious congregations once embedded in the walls of the now-demolished Revelation Baptist Church. The dissertation closes with a brief discussion of the tools of public history and historic preservation which offer historians fruitful strategies for engagement outside the academy.

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This work is dedicated to Louis Seneca Ely Steinert - my one true love, and to the memory of R. Kent Lancaster who taught me to believe in myself. 

Acknowledgements My completion of this project has been thanks to the efforts of brilliant and dedicated scholars and teachers. I stand on some powerful shoulders and I am filled with life-long gratitude for their support. I only hope I will make them proud as I move on to the next adventures.

To begin, this project has been made possible by seemingly countless dedicated archivists and librarians who have searched out an impossible find, or scanned a document, or helped with some last-minute “emergency.” I am indebted to them all, but some of the most important and helpful have been, Scott Gampher, Sandra (Mickey) DeVise and Jim DaMico at

Cincinnati Museum Center, Suzanne Maggard Reller and Kevin Grace and the University of

Cincinnati’s Archives and Rare Books Library, Sally Moffit at Langsam Library, Christopher Smith in the Local History and Genealogy Department at the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton

County, David Pittinger at the Hamilton County Recorder’s Office, Ketta Lubberstedt-Arjes at the Kendall Young Library in Webster City, Iowa, the great collector of Cincinnati views Dan

Prout, and the amazing Russell Welty in the Facilities Division of the Cincinnati Public Schools.

My run of great history teachers started in seventh grade at Walnut Hills High School with Jeanne Mathews, who told history as a story. I met my most untiring champion, R. Kent

Lancaster, when I arrived at Goucher College in the fall of 1988. He helped me practice deep observation and questions what I saw in the built world. For some wacky reason, Kent believed in me and that taught me to believe in myself. I was transformed by the time I got to spend with him. I wish there had been more of it. Andrew Dolkart has been a faithful friend and supporter since he I first took his preservation class in the New York/Paris program in the

v summer of 1990. He has been my role model for rigorous scholarship and the careful reading of cities ever since. I am also grateful to Andrew and Dan Bluestone who both agreed to be interviewed as a part of this project.

I have had incredible support at the University of Cincinnati. Three of the chapters of this dissertation began as papers in research seminars with Dr. Isaac Campos, Dr Kate Sorrels, and Dr. Brianna Leavitt-Alcantara. I thank them for their coaching and support. Dr. Fritz Casey-

Leininger was an essential part of the early stages of my research and has been a supportive booster all along. I thank Dr. Steve Porter for his consistent support and Dr. Rob Gioielli who has been an amazing sounding board on this project and an exceptional partner in our work together on the Over-the-Rhine Museum. Dr. Rebecca Wingo has helped in so many ways--with ideas, motivation, editing, walks, drinks, and hugs. Finally, I am incredibly grateful to Dr. Brianna

Leavitt-Alcantara for welcoming me into her accountability. I am honored to have been included and thank Bri, Dr. Kari Zimmerman, and Dr. Ryan Bremmer for all the wisdom and experience and support.

I would like to thank the members of my committee. Dr. Tiya Miles has offered her generosity, thoughtful attention, and strategic brilliance. It has been a joy to reconnect after many years. Dr. Jeffrey Tilman, has been the eyes of architectural history and historic preservation in this piece. I am thankful for his attention to detail and honest feedback.

I am forever indebted to Dr. David Stradling for getting this project finished. He provided a tight web of support to hold me up and keep me motivated. From my first day on campus,

David been a steady, pragmatic, and persistent guide. His prompt feedback on this dissertation

vi has been extremely helpful and he has given me countless opportunities to build my career. I am deeply grateful.

Lastly, I would like to thank Dr. Tracy Teslow for chairing my committee, offering thoughtful comments and deep reads of my work, and for pressing me to be more mindful of issues of race and diversity. Our conversations have made my work richer and better.

And finally, I thank my family. I am forever grateful to my parents Louis Steinert and

Ruth Steinert Foote for supporting me emotionally, financially, and with lots of babysitting. My gentle, loving, smart, strong, and powerful son Seneca and I couldn’t have done it without them.

At ten, Seneca doesn’t remember a world before I worked at UC. This history department has watched him grow up. I brought him, asleep in a stroller, to my first admissions meeting with David Stradling and just last night he was cheering me on as I struggled to finish the final footnotes. I will never be able to repay him for the hours of his childhood I have spent on schoolwork, teaching, and this dissertation. Thank you Seneca for all the snuggles and pep talks and urban adventures. You are my one true love.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements v

Introduction 8 Let’s Look Around

Chapter 1 49 The Man Who Moved The Bridge: Cincinnati’s Roebling Suspension Bridge and Its Inconvenient Site

Chapter 2 86 “Her Child was Born and Dropped into the Vault”: Urban Privies and Women’s Reproductive Choice in Nineteenth-Century Cincinnati

Chapter 3 135 Schools for the City: Cincinnati’s Elementary School Architecture 1829-World War II

Chapter 4 208 Apartments of Liberation: Suburban Multi-Family Dwellings in Early Twentieth Century Cincinnati

Chapter 5 263 Sanctuary of Change: Four Walls and the “Precious Data” They Contain

Conclusion 332 Public History and Historic Preservation as Tools for Public Engagement

Bibliography 371

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Introduction: Let’s Look Around Historians have been tardy to recognize that the environment, natural and [hu]man-made, is an amazing historical document. In our teaching and research we have not sufficiently explored how, rightly seen, a local landscape reveals as much about a society’s past as does a newspaper, a novel, or a Fourth of July oration. Nor have we thoroughly probed how urban, suburban, and rural terrains are palimpsests of linguistic, economic, technological and social history. 1 

This dissertation offers historians an opportunity. The pages that follow explore and then illustrate the use of the “amazing historical document” that is the human-made environment.2 Mining its rich possibility allows historians to invigorate their practice with new tools to tell the stories of the past, expand the historical record with new understandings, and reach a broader audience with histories that feel relevant and meaningful to a broad range of

1 Thomas J. Schlereth, “Above-Ground Archeology: Discovering a Community’s History through Local Artifacts,” Local History Today (1972) 53. 2 Ibid.

9 citizens. While the built environment is flawed like any other source, its use in historical inquiry holds significant promise. It is an open archive that historians have not yet made enough use of.

This dissertation offers a sampler of methods and motivations for historians to grapple with the built environment as a source for their important work.

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I have always felt the presence of the past in American cities. I remember, in the backseat on the way to preschool, being mesmerized by particular buildings and knowing that they had incredible stories to tell. As I got older, I had the great good fortune to attend fourth through sixth grade in a stunning elementary school built in the first decade of the twentieth century. I remember playing in window wells three feet deep, bounding up cast iron staircases, and leaning out palatial double hung windows. My body interacted with the physical space of that school building. I could touch it, climb it, live in it, and I knew that seventy-plus years’ worth of other students, just like me, had done the exact same things as the building had dictated our movements through it. I wanted to know those other students and their stories and how they felt and lived and dressed and played and learned in this very same space.

This desire is at the root of the power of the built environment. Buildings, bridges, and streetscapes connect us to the past physically. They make us feel a part of a continuity of humanity across time. Or more expansively, as historian Rhys Isaac writes, “the search for understanding of others—be it persons of a different time and place, or merely of different identity from oneself—lies at the heart of the whole humanistic experience.”3 Preservationist

3 Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia: 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1982) 325.

Tom Mayes points out, “Continuity…is not only about the past, but also about the present and future. That’s what continuity means—bringing the relevance of the past to give meaning to the present and the future.”4 This exactly what historians are trying to do, and the built environment can help them do it. At very least the built environment brings historians to the archive with a new question, but at its best, it can lead them to explore stories not to be found in a siloed formal repository.

The presence of buildings in space gives them incredible power to connect people to the past through sight, touch, and movement.5 This connective power provides historians with opportunities. First, it allows them to engage learners beyond what might be possible with a less accessible archival document. Second, the physical, tangible, experiential nature of the built environment allows historians to begin inquiry out in the built world, looking, exploring, touching, and wondering. Third, it gives historians the potential to uncover stories and histories not easily accessible in textual sources. The built environment gives us a sense of comfort and rootedness in the sometimes bewildering alienness of history. Finally, the built environment acts as a fixed and long-lived document of the past. As historian Rhys Isaac explains in his thoughtful essay on method, “Limited aspects of life [in the past] may be illuminated, but the whole can never be summed up in any interpretive scheme.”6 The built environment offers an entry point into forgotten nuances of past lives and helps us meaningfully interpret them for the present. As historian Andrew Hurley points out, “Only when associated with stories and

4 Thompson M. Mayes, Why Old Places Matter: How Historic Places Affect Your Identity and Well-Being (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) 4. 5 Daniel Bluestone, “Conservation’s Curatorial Conundrum,” Change Over Time 7, no. 2 (Fall 201) 235. 6 Isaac, 326.

11 imbued with meaning do yesterday’s material remains acquire the capacity to articulate shared values and visions.”7

A Brief Note on Language and Terminology

Throughout this work the terms “built environment,” “cityscape,” “urban landscape,”

“buildings,” “historic buildings,” and “built world” will be used roughly interchangeably to refer to the assemblages of buildings, structures, streets and other human-built forms that make up urban America. More often than not, the assemblages referred to here will be historic in nature, meaning they were created prior to the 1970 cut-off date for properties eligible for the

National Historic Register.8 Because these terms are not actually equivalent in their most precise use, it seems worth taking a moment to elaborate the nuances among them. Most general of all, the terms “built environment” or “built world” refer to the entirety of physical forms created through any human influence on the natural world. Because untouched natural landscapes are all but unknown in the United States today, our “built environment” is the entirety of our physical world (thus “built world”). These terms do not refer specifically to urban environments, though that is where they will be more frequently applied in this dissertation.

“Cityscape” denotes that which you would see looking out over a city. Whereas “streetscape” refers to that which you would see looking up and down a specific street, a cityscape is a larger unit made up of several joined streetscapes. It is distinctly urban and has a distinctly visual connotation and is about what can be known by looking. By contrast, the “urban landscape” is a

7 Andrew Hurley, Beyond Preservation: Using Public History to Revitalize Inner Cities. (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2010) ix-x. 8 Buildings are eligible for the National Historic Register if they exceed fifty years in age, so as of this writing in 2020, only buildings constructed prior to 1970 would be eligible.

12 more complete embodiment of a city including both observable characteristics of cities, and the information which may lie below the surface or hidden in a backyard. The urban landscape speaks more directly to a city’s geography, topography, transportation systems, cultural connections, and social, political, and economic structures. “Buildings” are structures built to provide shelter to living beings and “historic buildings” are those buildings which have survived beyond the era of their construction. While historic buildings have had more time to accrue stories of the past, both newer buildings and historic buildings can be valuable sources of historical and cultural information.

Another term used throughout this work is “material culture.” Material culture is the whole collection of physical material objects altered by human effort available to scholars for study. Everything from tires to tiaras, the smallest button to the largest building falls under the umbrella of material culture. Material culture or material culture studies is also the name of an academic field devoted to the study of these objects. Strictly speaking, the study of buildings and the built environment falls broadly under the umbrella of material culture, however in practice the field is more tightly focused around the study of movable objects than fixed elements of the landscape.9 As a result of this practical distinction, the term “material culture” will be used here to denote the study of movable objects rather than buildings unless a more inclusive use of the term is made clear within the text.

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9 Thomas J. Schlereth, “Material Culture Research and Historical Explanation,” The Public Historian 7, no, 4 (Autumn 1985) 22-23.

This dissertation is rooted in the idea that the physical city holds stories for us. They are not hiding, but they may not be immediately evident either. In his Pulitzer Prize winning work about early Virginia, historian Rhys Isaac put it this way: “A society necessarily leaves marks of use upon the terrain it occupies. These marks are meaningful signs, not only of the particular relations of a people to environment, but also of the distribution and control of access to essential resources. Incised upon a society’s living space appears a text for the inhabitants…of social relations in their world.”10 He writes that historians, “must seek to interpret such texts…to decipher as much as they can of the meanings that such relations assumed for those who were part of them.”11 Here Isaac gets at an important piece of our work as historians—to decipher and translate the social and cultural world of the past that we may view it clearly despite the lens of the present. We will never fully know the past, but the built environment allows us to expose and understand aspects of the past previously hidden from view.

My goal is to show historians how and why they can find and use the stories in the built environment. This may mean reclaiming lost, silenced, or forgotten stories. These are not just stories of fancy houses and buildings designed by famous architects. Every building and structure throughout American cities holds stories. By making some simple adjustments to their work, historians can daylight these stories and use them as a way to communicate much needed historical understandings to a broad audience. This dissertation provides five examples of this approach. Once uncovered, public historians and preservationists, both popular and academic, then use interpretation and the tools of public history to share the stories embedded

10 Isaac, 19. 11 Ibid.

14 in the built world. This is valuable work because, just as the past has had a significant impact on the present, an understanding of the historical forces which inform the present will guide

Americans to make choices for the future, or, as preservationist Daniel Bluestone writes,

“Spatializing history, both through design and through acts of interpretation can help spur a politics of place that clarifies the historical and contemporary relationship between human agency and the making and remaking of the landscape.”12 Simply put, reading the built environment to discover and understand the stories of the past can lead to more deliberate and thoughtful choices for the future.

The Built Environment is Accessible, Familiar, and Site-Specific

The exteriors of buildings in cities are accessible to everyone any time night or day. We can touch them and walk among them--activities with which we are all familiar. Architect and theorist Juhani Pallasmaa has called buildings, “museums of time,” but these museums are open all night with unlimited access for all and their familiarity allows us all to make meaning of the exhibit with ease.13 For example, Cincinnati, Ohio is home to more than one hundred public stairways left over from built in the late nineteenth century when Cincinnati was a dense, crowded urban center where most people walked everywhere they needed to go. After the

Great Depression many of these staircases were updated by the WPA. Since then many have fallen deep into disrepair. Despite their lack of nineteenth century materials and their often- advanced state of decay, walking up and down these often-overgrown stairways feels like

12 Daniel Bluestone, “Academics in Tennis Shoes: Historic Preservation and the Academy,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 58, no. 3 (September 1999) 306. 13 Mayes, 1-2.

15 stepping back in time. They serve as secret passageways, both through the city and through the past. Their placement tucked away in the urban landscape, their sometimes staggering length and slope, and their total lack of necessity in modern urban life teach us, just in the course or walking up two or three hundred steps, immeasurable lessons about nineteenth century urban life. These steps and these lessons are accessible to anyone. The kinesthetic experience of walking through a narrow, wooded path is a familiar activity we all, to greater or lesser degrees, know how to make meaning of.

Built environment historian Thomas Schlereth believes that the accessibility of the built world, and material culture more generally, is the source of its evocative power, an idea picked up by MIT professor of technology, Sherry Turkle.14 In Turkle’s edited collection, Evocative

Objects: Things We Think With, authors reflect on the power of an object of their choice in their lives. In the introduction to the book Turkle wrote about the power objects wield in our emotional lives, much like the powerful memories of my own elementary school. Turkle writes,

“When we focus on objects, physicians and philosophers, psychologists and designers, artists and engineers [and I might add historians here] are able to find common ground in everyday experience.”15 I would posit that this common experience is even more powerful in buildings which are readily accessible to all, existing out in the open public realm day in and day out. In his new introduction to Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, historian, designer, and

14 Schlereth, “Above-Ground Archeology,” 56. 15 Sherry Turkle, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011) 8.

16 observer John Stilgoe noted that Bachelard’s use of the house as a “metaphor for humanness.”16 Living in space is a universal condition.

Paradoxically, the built environment’s power derives not only from its broad accessibility and familiarity, but also from its specificity of place. For example, visiting the home of Eleanor Roosevelt at Val Kill in upstate New York is engaging because it teaches us about her work to create cooperative employment opportunities for women, and to build an environment of equal exchange among like-minded women apart from the power and judgment of men.

While those pieces of knowledge are interesting, they could also be gleaned from a book. What makes Val Kill so powerful is the idea that Eleanor Roosevelt inhabited this space. The visitor is enveloped by her presence there and connects on an intimate level by experiencing the low ceiling heights, the built-in bookshelves, and intimacy of each room. The space is powerful because it is THE place where Eleanor Roosevelt did this work. Her association with this specific place adds to its meaning. While not every building in every city is associated with a notable person or important historical event, this place-based specificity remains even in the most humble locations. There is a sense of resonant historical moments embedded in the space, even when we are unsure what they are. Preservationist Ned Kaufman explains this more fully when he writes, “When we say, ‘history happened here,’ we mean the history of how we became the city we are. We mean the aspirations and accomplishments—the sufferings and

16 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1994 Edition (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994) vii.

17 disappointments, too—of each of our communities. We mean the prologue to our future as a city.”17

The Built Environment is Spatial, Tangible, and Sensorial

I have made two visits to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, with nineteen years between them. These two visits provided a useful lesson in sensory experience of place. The first visit in 2000 was to a house filled with objects, crowded, and occupied. The famous bookshelf that blocked the door to the Frank family’s hidden annex was right there to touch.

The rooms were small and cramped. The space was wildly evocative, prompting tears and deep emptions on the meaning of liberty and dignity and the nature of brutality and prejudice. A second visit in 2019 was to a space now cleared of objects, artificially open, the bookcase and other surfaces now encased in plexiglass for their own preservation. The space felt different.

The voices of the past seemed to have been silenced. The power of the place had become muted by the inability to touch the authentic spaces where Anne and her family had laid their hands or experience how they would have moved through the once-crowded space.

As if to explain this phenomenon, Daniel Bluestone writes that the “palpable, three- dimensional character [of buildings] engages and envelopes, often drawing upon all our human senses in ways that written narratives, historic images, and told stories do not.”18

Preservationist Tom Mayes says, “This capacity to engage all the senses in the experience of history is unique to old places—and it provides information that documentary history alone

17 Ned Kaufman, Place, Race, and Story: Essays on the Past and Future of Historic Preservation (New York: Routledge, 2011) 233. 18 Bluestone, “Conservation’s Curatorial Conundrum,” 235.

18 cannot.”19 He further believes that the need to preserve buildings derives from, “the need for tangible objects that can support our identity,” and that the ability to use touch, smell, or hearing to fully take in the experience of an historic place transforms our relationship to that place and the history embedded within it.20 We intuitively use spatial cues and sensory inputs to build our own understandings of the past and this act of constructing knowledge for ourselves links us to the place in significant and resonant ways.

It is worth noting that some of this knowledge is culturally constructed, sometimes making it difficult for historians to translate meaning across time or cultures. Theorist Allan

Jacobs tested his ideas about reading cities through observation by exploring four neighborhoods in Italy to see if the cues he uses to read the built environment would be useful in an unfamiliar culture. He found that, “Some clues seem to be more universal and useful than others,” but that the real “question is not whether a clue has the same meaning everywhere, but whether it is usable in its context.”21 He discovered that, “in Italy , as in America, patterns of clues…are more important than the clues themselves.”22 Practically speaking he says, “the questions are the same as those we would ask in a familiar environment. They have to do with being aware of what we see, identifying patterns to known historical processes of urban development, asking why things are the way they are, gauging the moments and amount of change, [and] wondering if anything is missing.”23

19 Mayes, 40. 20 Ibid. 21 Allan B. Jacobs, Looking at Cities. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 130. 22 Ibid., 131. 23 Ibid.

The built environment offers an historical knowledge that, as Tom Mayes explains, “can be understood at the real place where history actually happened in a way that it can’t be understood through documents and books alone.”24 There is a power to standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and thinking, “this is the place that Marion Anderson sang after she was denied access to the DAR Constitution Hall and this is the place Dr. King delivered his ‘I

Have a Dream’ speech, right in this spot. It happened right here.”

Community historian Dorothy Spruill Redford asserts, “people…need tangibility. They need something they can touch, that they can hold, look at, point to…It’s an honest-to-god necessary for people to feel something with their fingers, not just their minds.”25 Similarly architectural theorist and historian Dolores Hayden explains, “From childhood, humans come to know places through engaging all five senses, sight as well as sound, smell, taste and touch.”26

Buildings are a sensory experience with the past. A way to imagine we are traveling out of our own time and into another. Thomas Schlereth describes the use of the American landscape as the vehicle for a journey to historical understanding as a vivid and intimate process.27 Each one of us experience this process in our own ways, connecting it to previous lived experience in ways that make the past present.

In thinking about the tangible, experiential aspect of the built environment, Sherry

Turkle explains that because we live with and among objects our familiarity with and

24 Mayes, 71. 25 Michael Ruhlman, House: A Memoir (New York: Penguin Group, 2006) 21; Dorothy Spruill Redford. Somerset Homecoming: Recovering a Lost Heritage. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. 26 Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995) 16. 27Mayes, 18; Schlereth, “Above-Ground Archaeology,” 79.

20 understanding of them means that, “material culture carries emotions and ideas of startling intensity.”28 She rightly notes that acknowledging the power lodged within physical objects has not come easily and that the study or material culture has often been disparaged by formal academic traditions rooted in more textual and quantifiable ways of knowing.29 Buildings share a special power with the wider field of material culture because “the objects’ physical realness create[s] a feeling of certainty, as if...touching proof of what the past was really like,” but they offer the added bonus of broad public access and familiarity.30

Bluestone believes that the tangibility and “essential materialism” of the built environment are the source of preservation’s “greatest strength and responsibility.”31 He cautions preservationists to be careful about the tendency to regulate historic buildings in such a way that saps their vitality and relevance.32 To overcome this pitfall, academic and public historians can harness our skills as researchers and story tellers to help preservationists use the materiality of historic buildings to invigorate public dialogue about the past. This project becomes all the more relevant within the current climate of racial unrest and the need for our nation to face and overcome our racist past.

The Built Environment Helps Us Tell Hidden Stories

Cincinnati’s Lower West End was once home to almost 25,000 African American residents. The area was razed beginning in 1959 as part of an urban renewal scheme that

28 Turkle, 6. 29 Ibid. 30 Karen Melvin and Sylvia Sellers-Garcia, eds., Imaging Histories of Colonial Latin America: Essays on Synoptic Methods and Practices (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2017) 14. 31 Bluestone, “Conservation’s Curatorial Conundrum,” 235. 32 Ibid.

21 demolished thousands of dwellings and displaced every resident.33 Disruptive as this destruction was sixty years ago, its story is virtually unknown today, especially to white

Cincinnatians. Using the built environment as a guide, I was able to reconstruct some of the history of this once vital urban space and share it with citizens in Cincinnati today to help us make sense of ongoing racial tension and inequality. While there are archival sources to tell the story of the lower West End, they all tell the story from the perspective of city planners and politicians who saw the neighborhood as an economic liability and a blight on the adjacent downtown. The built environment, and photographs of what was lost there, tell a different story—one of churches, shops, and families. Rather than a telling the story of a blight to be wiped out, we can use the built environment to tell the story of those whose lives and stories have been silenced.

Architectural historians Thomas Carter and Elizabeth Collins Cromley point out that buildings allow us to recover, “the stories of people who left no other kind of records” which gives historians an opportunity to correct what Kaufman calls, “the picture of American history presented by historic sites [that] continues to undervalue the experiences and contributions of immigrants, working people, and communities of color.”34 Of course, the picture of American history presented in books and classrooms across our nation also undervalues these experiences. Though this failure is a result of centuries of racism, classism, sexism,

33 Alyssa Konermann, “25,737 People Lived in Kenyon-Barr When the City Razed It to the Ground,” Cincinnati Magazine (February 10, 2017) https://www.cincinnatimagazine.com/citywiseblog/lost-city-kenyon-barr- queensgate/ 34 Carter, Thomas and Elizabeth Collins Cromley. Invitation to Vernacular Architecture: A guide to the Study of Ordinary Buildings and Landscapes (Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 2005) xx; Kaufman, 11.

22 homophobia, and xenophobia difficult to overcome, it is also difficult to correct because, since the stories of marginalized groups were not valued and, therefore were not intentionally preserved in archives.35 Only when someone rose to exceptional heights, usually achieving a level of equality or credibility within the mainstream power structure, did history take note. So even now, as historians strive to “diversify” the stories we tell in our textbooks, classes, and historic sites, history teachers have a hard time finding stories to tell. They cannot easily look them up in archives, but they can find them embedded in historic buildings. Kaufman explains that, “Looking at everyday experiences over time as they are embodied in the city’s buildings, parks, and pavements is an important way of getting at the intricate mosaic that is…history.”36

Obviously, this method, like all methods, is imperfect. Though the built environment does reveal stories of those history has sometimes ignored, we must also remember that much of the built environment was built, used, and destroyed by those in power, so it can also be another document to be read against the grain or used to search out the absences to illuminate hidden histories.

Ned Kaufman believes, “Heritage matters are inextricably intertwined with issues of race, diversity, and social justice,” and notes, as many others before him that racism shapes which sites are preserved or valued in our nation, what historical markers say or do not say, and who is welcome at the preservation table.37 The built environment can broaden the practice of history by helping us find and tell the stories of People of Color, low-income people, women,

35 Though not intentionally preserved in archives, these stories can be found there by historians and researchers who may “read against the grain” of traditional sources to find the silences and omissions that inform our understanding of these marginalized communities. 36 Kaufman, 235. 37 Kaufman, 8.

23 children, illiterate people, immigrants, LGBTQ people, non-English speakers, and others. These are people who had limited power in the past, and who often have limited power today. It is important to tell their stories both to expose both the ways they held agency and control in their own lives, and the ways in which those in power interacted with and undermined that control. As we think about whose stories to tell and how to tell them, the built environment offers us an opportunity to welcome more stories to our table.

Carter and Cromely elaborate on the value of the built environment as a source for discovering diverse histories when they write, “If we feel that history ought to be an endeavor that includes the widest range of people possible—rich and poor, black and white, ordinary and extraordinary, male and female—then we need to utilize the widest possible range of sources, and buildings are one such source.”38 Historians with this agenda, which is timely and important, might find more of what they are looking for in the built environment that in the archive. Mayes takes this even further in his belief that an understanding of the past can actually protect diverse peoples from manipulation by those in power. He writes, “The history we chose to tell can be manipulated, and it is important to question who is telling the history and for what purpose…people who are aware of history and capable of historical thinking— critical thinking based on evidence—are less likely to be duped by the manipulation of history by others.”39

Utilizing the built environment as a source for new kinds of stories is also a tool for community engagement, a practice likely to lead us to even more new stories. Dolores Hayden

38 Carter and Cromley, xx. 39 Mayes, 41.

24 presses historians to look beyond the built environment’s physical meaning. She argues, “The historian who confronts urban landscapes…needs to explore their physical shapes along with their social and political meanings.”40 She pushes to explore the built world, “in collaboration with the residents themselves” and to, engage, “social, historical and aesthetic imagination to locate where narratives of cultural identity, embedded in the historic urban landscape, can be interpreted to protect their largest and most enduring meanings for the city as a whole.”41 Here she implies that when historians work alone, we may miss some of the most important lessons the urban environment has to offer, but that community engagement facilitated by the accessibility of the built environment will guard against that pitfall

It is important to recognize that diversifying the stories we, as mainstream historians, tell is not a substitute for empowering people outside the academic power structure to tell their own stories. Hayden reminds us that, “Debates about the built environment, history, and culture take place in much more contested terrain of race, gender, and class set against long- term economic and environmental problems” and that, “the politics of identity—however they may be defined around gender or race or neighborhood—are an inescapable and important aspect of dealing with the urban built environment.”42 While it behooves us to broaden the way we present the story of the past, there is an inescapable reality that our own point of view and bias will color the way we present the past. As Bluestone notes, “The process whereby individuals, institutions, and committees chose to wield both private and public power to highlight certain histories and to ignore or render invisible others, is a critical dimension of

40 Hayden, The Power of Place. 13. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 6-7.

25 historic preservation and public history.”43 In an ideal world in which there is unlimited funding, historians would partner together with silenced constituencies including People of Color, immigrants, and LGBTQ people to open the structure of the establishment to them and bring them into historical practice as partners. They would, “facilitate opportunities for people to express what places matter to them” and why.44 Because we do not live in an ideal world and because community engagement and shared authority are both time consuming and intimidating, historians most often find themselves taking responsibility for telling other people’s stories.45 Of course, there are advantages to historians’ position as outsiders to help see some realities more clearly, but without community collaboration, historians take on the tremendous responsibility shepherding a past only tangentially our own. To do this well they need to record and document what has been left behind, often embedded in the built environment, and be as transparent and thoughtful about our interpretive choices as possible.

The Built Environment Gives us a Sense of Rootedness and Continuity Through Time

Putting words to what might seem intuitive, Bluestone writes, “familiar landmarks help people feel situated in place, locality, and history,” and preservationist Stephanie Meeks says,

“Old places…give us the chance to feel a connection to the broad community of human experience, a community that exists across time.46 Taking this idea even further in his memoir

43 Daniel Bluestone. Buildings, Landscapes, and Memory: Case Studies in Historic Preservation (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011) 17. 44 Thompson M. Mayes, Why Old Places Matter: How Historic Places Affect Your Identity and Well-Being (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) 116. 45 This is not universally true. For examples see Andrew Hurley’s Beyond Preservation. He shares numerous examples where, “academically trained public historians and archeologists have taken the lead in sharing these insights [about diverse populations] with popular audiences and developing collaborative projects.” (Hurley, 32.). 46 Bluestone, “Conservation’s Curatorial Conundrum,” 235; Mayes, xvii

House, journalist Michael Ruhlman explored the power of buildings to orient us across time, recounting his emotions around moving into a new home. As with my memories of Clifton

Elementary, Ruhlman writes, “These houses, they enrich the city and the people who live here by their durable presence every day in every season.”47 In using the phrase “durable presence,”

Ruhlman is getting at the idea of old houses as “survivors” remaining in the landscape to convey stories of the past and to inspire us to become a part of the building’s “inner life.”48

Schlereth affirmed the connection between these survivors and our understanding of ourselves when he wrote that historians should, “show average citizens various ways of knowing themselves and their communities through an understanding of their own pasts and the pasts of others” with the help of the built environment.49 Ruhlman felt this viscerally as he wondered,

“When we moved into a grand structure, as we were about to do, might we connect with what came before us in that space?”50 As Ruhlman explored the longing to use a physical place to root himself in time he wrote, “It’s not really a place I’m searching for; it’s time I’ve been after all along. I’ve been searching for the childhood and the youth that recedes before me instant by instant, lost, gone.”51 Because buildings often stand longer than people live, they have the ability to connect us to the past in a physical way. They carry physical, tangible, accessible evidence of the people who lived or worked or played in the same very place we are today.

They help us feel connected and rooted in the continuity of time. Reflecting on the meaning of place, Ruhlman wrote,

47 Ruhlman, 20. 48 Ibid., 21. 49 Schlereth, “Above-Ground Archaeology,” 78. 50 Ruhlman, 26. 51 Ibid., 166.

A love of home is ultimately a connection with the life cycle, no different from the seasons. To live here is to engage in the continuum of my father’s life, leading to mine, leading to my children’s, and this obliviates what otherwise might be our biggest fear—fear of death, ceasing to exist. A recognition of this continuum, and a deliberate effort to observe it, makes any such regret or worry, about death or the apparent lack of meaning in life—it makes all that inappropriate; it gives a sense of life integrity to each day.52 Though Ruhlman, in writing memoir, has the luxury of writing about his own personal feelings of connection. Heritage professionals also acknowledge the importance of this attachment in what some name “social value.” Kaufman writes this: “The concept of social value posits that feelings of attachment to places are fundamental to our identity as individuals and as community members. They anchor us in the world. Take the places away and our sense of security is weakened.”53

The Built Environment Documents the Past

In lobbying to rebuild the House of Commons after World War II, Winston Churchill famously said, “We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us,” but he was not exactly correct.54 While it is true that a building’s original shape dictates behavior in many ways,

Churchill over-simplified what comes next. Yes, our buildings do shape and constrain our lives, but we also reshape buildings to our own needs and the technology we have available to us. For example, nineteenth century Cincinnati tenements were built without indoor toilets. This shaped their inhabitants’ lived experience as they had to traverse the weather to relieve themselves or use and empty chamber pots in the night. As technology changed, shared toilets

52 Ruhlman, 237. 53 Kaufman, 248. 54 Winston Churchill, “House of Commons Rebuilding,” (October 28, 1943) https://api.parliament.uk/historic- hansard/commons/1943/oct/28/house-of-commons-rebuilding#S5CV0393P0_19431028_HOC_283

28 were moved into the tenements, often tucked under the stairs or into the corners of a public hallways. Later still, individual apartments were updated with a toilet for each unit. With each technological update and cultural shift, the building was altered and the behavior of the its residents responded to the change. Today these buildings bear the evidence of physical changes historians can use to reconstruct the experience of their residents.

Physical changes leave traces and layers that can be peeled back to reveal the stories of alterations to the physical space, the technologies that spurred them, and of the resulting lived experience of the building’s users. In her book, Architectural Agents: The Delusional, Abusive,

Addictive Lives of Buildings, architectural theorist Annabel Jane Wharton explains, “Most buildings…can both confirm our familiar patterns and behavior and modify them.”55 She uses the example of a classroom which was built, “to accommodate a certain kind of learning; the classroom in turn molds the kind of learning that we do or even that we can imagine.

Modifications to the room might lead to innovations in teaching practice.”56 I would add that changes in the needs of learners might then impact the room. This reflexivity of buildings impacting behavior impacting buildings is what John Stilgoe identifies as a key theme in Gaston

Bachelard’s Poetics of Space. Stilgoe writes, “He probes the impact of human habitation on geometrical form, and the impact of the form upon human inhabitants.”57 Similarly, social theorist Mark Gottdeiner writes that architecture, “possesses the dual characteristics of being both a product of social relations and a producer of social relations.”58 It is this probing and

55 Annabel Jane Wharton. Architectural Agents: The Delusional. Abusive, Addictive, Lives of Buildings. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), xix. 56 Ibid. 57 Bachelard, vii. 58 Carter and Cromley, xxii.

29 peeling back the layers of reflexive impacts which will give historians some of our richest stories. Remaining hall toilets in Cincinnati tenements ignite curiosity about why they were located outside of individual apartments, why they were not accompanied by sinks, and who used them. These questions then lead backward to the story of the now-vanished backyard privies which preceded the remnants we can see today.

Daniel Bluestone picks up on the lived experience embedded in the built environment as an appealing source of “authenticity” that allows us to explore the “fabric of human community”59 He writes, “Preserved places and material things bear authentic witness to history, a quality not as fully present in other forms of historical narration.”60 Isaac presents architecture as, “a potent medium for elaborately coded nonverbal statement” embodying

“comprehensive messages” clearly understood by those within the culture. He cites, for example, the symmetrical design of a slaveholder’s 1740 Virginian manor house of the which,

“was essential in maintaining the master’s part in social drama,” standing in “a dialectic relationship to him [the slaveholder]” and contributing “powerfully to the to the shaping of his patterns of behaviors.” In much the same way, Carter and Cromley note that buildings can be sources for histories meant to be hidden or concealed and can give us clues to behaviors so ordinary that we rarely find them mentioned in historical texts (like where the toilet is located).61 The built environment sits as an historical document ready to be read and analyzed.

In the words of Louis Sullivan, “As they [men] built, they made, used and left behind them

59 Bluestone, “Conservation’s Curatorial Conundrum,” 235, 248. 60 Bluestone, “Conservation’s Curatorial Conundrum,” 235. 61 Carter and Cromley, xxi.

30 records of their thinking…the building always the expression of the thinking.”62 Deciphering these messages offers the historian a rich source of information. The work of decoding these clues requires a particular skill set that can be nurtured and practiced.

Reading the Built Environment is a Skill Historians Can Learn

While hosting an exhibition about the demolition of the Lower West End, I met a man who had written an article about Harriet Beecher Stowe School and its famous principal Jennie

Davis Porter.63 I was excited to talk to this gentleman about the history of the school and

Porter’s groundbreaking work as an educator, but I was stunned when he asked me if I knew whether the Stowe School building was still standing and where it might be. Yes! Of course, it is still standing, one of the few structures to survive the mass demolition of the lower West End, now transformed into a television station wrapped by highways on three sides. How could he have written an article about this place and never once gone to see it, or even thought to look for it? How much more could he have learned about this school and the students who attended it if he had explored its presence in the city?

Why do historians choose not to utilize the built environment in their work? Do historians have a lack of confidence in their ability to read the language of the built environment? Clearly, historians are more at ease with archival and textual sources they understand how to decipher.64 Words have known meaning. Historians can take them at face

62 Louis H. Sullivan, “What is Architecture? A Study of the American People Today,” Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz Inc., 1918) 228. (Dover reprint) 63 David Sandor, “’Black as Good a Color as White:’ The Harriet Beecher Stowe School and the Debate Over Separate Schools in Cincinnati,” Ohio Valley History 9, no. 2 (Summer 2009) 27-53. 64 Carter and Cromley, xv.

31 value or can read between the lines, but either way they understand the syntax. With a building, the language is one an historian might not speak. Yet, historian Camile Wells insists that this is part of the appeal. She notes, “part of what attracts us to old buildings is their insistence on communicating, in some outmoded dialect we do not entirely understand, the energy and purpose, the achievements and hopes, and the disappointments and hardships of those who made and used them.”65 Kaufman acknowledges the need to learn this new language use of the built environment, but also notes the potential for the built environment to teach us now stories about the past. He writes, “Stories…live in places…they too are part of the meaning of places, and eventually, of their heritage…The cityscape becomes storyscape...”66

Yet, “learning to read architecture—an ability that centers around a kind of visual and spatially oriented analysis—is not easy.”67 As a result, researchers tend to “fall back on the customary written sources when confronting buildings as evidence.”68 While they understand that a wide range of sources are used to best make meaning of the built world, they center the physical building at the heart of their work.69 Isaac expands this idea of reading a building to the idea of reading a culture. He writes, “a culture may be thought of as a related set of languages, or as a multichanneled system of communication. Consisting of more than words it also comprises gesture, demeanor, dress, architecture, and all the codes by which those who share in the culture convey meanings and significance to each other.”70 He explains that, “sentences in a

65 Camille Wells, “New Light on Sunnyside: Architectural and Documentary Testaments of an Early Virginia House,” Bulletin of the Northumberland County Historical Society 32 (1995) 3, quoted in Carter and Cromley, xx. 66 Kaufman, 3. 67 Carter and Cromley, xvi. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid. 70 Isaac, 324-325.

32 given language cannot be translated unless… we ‘know’ the language,” a feat accomplished only through “repeated exercise in the handling of particular words and sentences” and that the same applies to what he calls “paralinguistic” forms of communication, including buildings.71 Though clearly there is graded scale of proficiency with reading the built environment, historian John Stilgoe believes that everyone can learn to read the built world if they slow down, observe carefully, and engage their curiosity.72 His belief is that the initial spark of curiosity lit by careful observation will lead to thoughtful questions, and the deeper investigation needed to answer them.

If historians want to think more concretely about the language of the built environment and the language of reading buildings and streetscapes, there are several practical guides. The least practical but most “magical” of these is John Stilgoe’s Outside Lies Magic: Regaining

History and Awareness in Everyday Places which presents, in its opening chapter, “a straightforward guide to exploring.”73 Stilgoe’s plan for observing the built environment is rooted in deep and thoughtful observation with the expectation that observation will lead to inquiry and that the observer will then be compelled to hypothesize answers to the questions they propose and then to attempt to answer those questions through research. In other words,

Stilgoe believes that observation of the built environment will jump start the process of historical inquiry (or what high school teachers might call the historic method, though it is largely the same as the “scientific method”). Stilgoe’s book goes on to explore some built

71 Ibid., 325. 72 John R. Stilgoe, Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places. (New York: Walker and Company, 1998), 1-19. 73 Ibid., 17.

33 systems more fully—electric lines, the postal system, roads, highways fences, main streets, and roadside motels—offering historical details (though without footnotes) to fill in the types of questions and answers we might glean for careful exploration of the built world. The main take away though, is that we need to slow down, move away from technology, and really look at the built world.

Steward Brand’s How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built explores the evolution of buildings through time in fine detail.74 While not technically a guidebook for looking at or formally analyzing buildings, Brand’s chatty prose and detailed well-illustrated examples provide scholars with myriad models to follow. His emphasis on peeling back the layers accrued over time helps historians more clearly separate one phase in a building’s life from the next. Further, Brand puts an emphasis on materials and technology which will help historians place historical changes within the larger context of technological change. While

Brand’s intention is not to teach people to read the built environment, but rather to encourage adaptive architecture to reuse existing resources rather than build new, his book is one of the best sources for understanding the ways buildings have evolved and changed across time.

Thomas Schlereth’s 1972 article “Above Ground Archeology: Discovering a Community’s

History through Local Artifacts,” provides a short practical guide for exploring and making meaning of the built environment. Schelreth takes his reader through reading: geological and geographical features (including a nice exploration of Cincinnati), vegetation and landscape

74 Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built (New York, Penguin Books, 1994).

34 patterns, place and street names, street histories, vernacular architecture, places of work, and commercial structures and corridors.75

Allan Jacobs’ Looking at Cities offers detailed descriptions of how to decode historical clues in the urban environment, again rooted in deep observation, curiosity, and inquiry. The book details several urban walks and recounts clue after clue each city provided about that past of that place. In chapter three, entitled “Clues,” Jacobs walks his reader through the exercise of looking at: buildings (style, purpose, size, materials and workmanship, design quality, and maintenance and condition), land and landscape, the use of buildings and land, what he calls

“special purpose buildings,” commercial areas (individual buildings, commercial streets, commercial centers, highway strips, and downtowns), the public environment (street names, street widths, sidewalks, curbs, street trees and maintenance), street patterns and layouts

(regular and irregular patterns, scale and size of blocks, and “breaks, seams, and cut-throughs”), building arrangement, topography, and location within the urban environment.76 It also explores public spaces and the interstitial webs of streets and blocks that hold cities together.

The most detailed and comprehensive guide to using the built world to inform historical inquiry is Thomas Carter and Elizabeth Collins Cromley’s Invitation to Vernacular Architecture: A

Guide to the Study of Ordinary Buildings and Landscapes. Setting out to provide a guidebook for studying buildings, Carter and Cromley “demystify field work,” and set out a detailed method for exploring ordinary buildings from the techniques of creating measured drawings to the

75 Schelreth, “Above-Ground Archaeology,” 56-77. 76 Ibid., 31-79.

35 analysis of architectural data.77 Their focus is on the study of vernacular or common architecture as a way to tell a wider range of histories and to liberate the field from the study of high style and great citizens. Carter and Cromley clearly situate their work within the larger field of “artifact driven” material culture.”78 Invitation to Vernacular Architecture can be overwhelming in its specificity and level of detail. It is a book to read on multiple levels as the reader gains confidence, knowledge, and experience. It is definitely not a beginner’s guide, but rather a guide historians might grow into over time.

The State of “the Field” of Built Environment-based Inquiry

Following the cultural turn of the 1970s, historians began to look at cities in new ways, not only as a vehicle for histories of white men in business, government, and leadership, but also as the home of the poor, women, People of Color, and other groups previously underrepresented. Some of this work resulted in publications about the built environment. For example, Gwendolyn Wright’s Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America,

Jessica Foy and Thomas Schlereth’s American Home Life 1880-1930: A Social History of Spaces and Services, Dolores Hayden’s The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities and Elizabeth Collins Cromley’s Alone Together:

A History of New York’s Early Apartments all used a wide lens on the built environment to turn the spotlight on women, families, and apartment dwellers in a general way.79 Yet, these works

77 Carter and Cromley, Forward and xxv. 78 Ibid., xiii-xvi. 79 Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1981); Jessica Foy and Thomas J. Schlereth, eds., American Home Life 1880-1930: A Social History of Spaces and Services (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1992); Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods and Cities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981);

36 were all published between 1981 and 1992, the apex of this historiographical phase. As social history slowed and turned toward both identity-based history and in a microhistorical direction, the built environment became less prominent as either a subject or method for social history.

Though many good architecture-based studies are still published, they tend to be more local in nature.80

Around the same time, America’s bicentennial generated interest in local and place- based history, bringing historical practice to a broader range of practitioners and resulting in a series of guides to local history research. A subset of these guides helped users research historic buildings. Notable among these was the American Association for State and Local History’s

Nearby History series, edited by David Kyvig, which featured titles on researching schools, houses, places of worship, and “public places,” and began publication in the mid-1980s.81 These guides are practical in nature though they do try to present a theoretical framework for the practices of local history. The goal of the series and of other local history scholarship was to give non-academics the research and analytic skills necessary to make meaning of the world around them. This democratization of historical practice promised to map, “previously uncharted intersections between the present and past.”82 In describing this historiographical

Elizabeth Collins Cromley, Alone Together: A History of New York’s Early Apartments. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). 80 A great example of this trend is Barbara S. Christen’s excellent article “Patronage, Process, and Civic Identity: The Development of Cincinnati’s Union Central Life Insurance Company Building,” which has a tight focus on one building. Published in Ohio Valley History summer 2009. 81 Titles in this series are: Ronald E. Butchart. Local Schools: Exploring their History (1986), Gerald A. Danzer. Public Places: Exploring their History (1987), Barabra J. Howe, Dolores A. Fleming, Emory L Kemp, and Ruth Ann Overbeck. Houses and Homes: Exploring their History (1995), K. Austin Kerr and Amos J. Loweday. Local Businesses: Exploring their History (1990), David E. Kyvig and Myron A. Marty, Nearby History: Exploring the Past Around You (1982), and James P. Wind. Places of Worship: Exploring their History (1995). 82 Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen. The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) 1.

37 moment, Thomas Schlereth wrote that many of the practitioners of this new local built environment research was being conducted by historians outside the academy who had broadly named their field, “Above Ground Archeology.”83 While this term is no longer in use, what he means is precisely the work of this dissertation and the work I want to encourage other historians to explore. He described the work of these “archeologists” in this way:

Intent upon learning from the abundant evidence that lies all about us, we seek to discover, identify, classify, decipher, and interpret the surviving artifactual record of the American past that exists largely outside the typical historical museum, historical archive, or historical society. In this context the rural agrarian countryside, the suburban tract development, or the central city core can be examined as a mammoth artifact collection, an open-air museum wherein local and community history can be discovered in a personal and novel way.84 My work stands on the shoulders of these “archeologists” and it is their approach

(though not their name) to the past I seek to revive and reinvigorate. More detailed an specific historiography will appear in each of the chapters to follow.

It is worth mentioning that since the cultural turn, there have been many names for using the built environment as a source for historical inquiry. From Schledreth’s

“Above Ground Archaeology” to Carter and Cromley’s “Vernacular Architecture Studies” to what Dolores Hayden called in 1995, “the growing interdisciplinary field of the history of urban space,” no name has stuck in a meaningful way and no significant organized field has emerged.85 Historians, preservationists and architectural historians have strained to define the field and to find a moniker to accurately describe their practice.

Probably the most successful has been the study vernacular architecture as embodied in

83 Schlereth, “Above-Ground Archaeology.” 84 Ibid., 53. 85 Hayden, The Power of Place, xii.

38 the 800-plus member Vernacular Architecture Forum which hosts an annual conference and publishes a quarterly journal, Buildings and Landscapes.

Part of the difficulty in defining and naming the field of built environment-based inquiry is that the work is interdisciplinary and happens at the confluence of several established fields, especially historic preservation, architectural history, material culture and history. Each of these fields have their own established norms and standards not shared across disciplines. Preservationists tend to be constrained within a regulatory framework which hamstrings their ability to find and celebrate significance and stories outside those valued and measured by established legal precedent. Architectural historians treat buildings as objects to be explored and celebrated as a piece of art more than as a cultural artifact with stories to tell. This approach leads to a decontextualization in which buildings are separated from their surrounds and the stories embedded in them are separated from their larger context. Historians excel at this contextualization, or the

“so what?” in which they use buildings and cities as vehicles for larger local or national stories. Buildings, sites, and landscapes are an exceptional vehicle for this contextualization, yet historians generally lack the skills and confidence they need to make meaning of the built world as they would an archival source. Historians of material cultural come closest to the practice of built environment-based inquiry embracing the physicality of objects and the relevance to a wide audience. What material culture lacks is the broad accessibility of the built world and the spatiality which enhances sensory connections to the past. This dissertation asks historians to lean into an exploration of the built environment to allow them to discover and share stories which are accessible,

39 relevant, and important to a broad audience and to democratize and diversify the stories they tell by looking beyond the archive. As preservationist Ned Kaufman writes, “Dig down into the past of most neighborhoods and you’ll find a multi-layered story of immigration, settlement, social and geographic mobility and ethnic succession— processes which are central to much larger American stories of migration, ethnic aspiration, and sometimes discrimination.”86

Contributions to the Field

While there is a body of scholarship about the built environment, there is less about how and why historians might use it as a source for historical inquiry. My contribution here specifically targets academic historians. I offer a method through which academic historians might engage a wide audience outside the academy by using familiar accessible sources to tell a broad range of stories. In each case I have revealed a new history by focusing first on the built environment. In some cases, I have used that initial spark to lead me into the archive, in others I have remained more closely tied to the physical and material. My message to scholars is this: what you do will be stronger and richer and relevant to more people if can think about physical place as a starting point or path to integrate people’s lived experience in the built world into the way you develop and explore the questions that guide your work.

My second contribution, which sits largely in the conclusion of this work, is rooted in the belief that historical practice desperately needs to expand beyond the academy. Similarly, referring to historic preservation practice, Bluestone writes, “preservation needs to be

86 Kaufman, 242.

40 about…the role of heritage in cultivating a capacity for critical thinking about society and politics, about seeing the past in ways that can inform acts of citizenship devoted to shaping the future.”87 If we believe that an understanding of the past helps us make better decisions for our future, then it is important that all citizens have a meaningful understanding of what has come before this moment. Yet, so many of the ways we communicate about the past, both inside and outside of the academy, are in conflict with this goal. From high school textbooks to academic conferences, many historians seem committed to making history as uninteresting or exclusive as possible. Buildings help to make the past more relevant and engaging and show us how we might use an understanding of the past as a tool for shaping the future. Annabel Jane Wharton closed Architectural Agents with this very idea. She wrote, “by taking seriously the effects of history on a building and a building’s contribution to the construction of the past, we will better understand our own roles in conditioning the present and our own responsibilities to fashioning the future.”88 Even more specifically, Hayden sees understanding the history of the built environment as a “basis for making political and spatial choices about the future.”89

While buildings do have stories to tell, Bluestone reminds us, “preserved buildings and landscapes actually rarely have the ability to narrate their own stories.; they often reply on some manner of historic interpretation derived from people, things, and historical narratives that stand very much outside the preserved place itself.”90 Dolores Hayden presents models of

“new kinds of professional roles and public processes [that] may broaden the practice of public

87 Bluestone, “Conservation’s Curatorial Conundrum,” 237. 88 Wharton, 219. 89 Hayden, The Power of Place, 43. 90 Bluestone, Buildings, Landscapes, and Memories, 17.

41 history [and] architectural preservation.”91 If nothing else, my work offers a model for peeling back the layers of time and adding much needed nuance to our understandings of the past to achieve what The National Trust for Historic Preservation calls the, “promise of creating an inspired, informed and thinking citizenry.”92

Dissertation Structure

Each of the chapters to follow tells an historical story rooted in the built environment of

Cincinnati, Ohio. Cincinnati’s story is representative of a typical nineteenth and twentieth- century American city. On the eve of the Civil War in 1860, Cincinnati was the sixth most populous city in the nation, complete with the industry, transportation networks, housing, and social structures necessary to support her people.93 After the war, as the nation’s energy and industry moved west, Cincinnati struggled to retain prominence in the post-war economic landscape.94 It suffered the urban ills of most nineteenth century cities and was repeatedly reinvented by those who sought solutions to the problems of urban crowding, pollution, changes to transportation and industry, shifting populations, waves of immigration, and a range of economic stresses. Today, as new urbanism and a quest for walkability are helping

Americans rediscover nineteenth century cities, Cincinnati is suddenly one of the nation’s new hotspots. As a place striving to finally get the attention its boosters have always thought she deserved, Cincinnati’s economic development machine is chasing after some histories and

91 Hayden, The Power of Place, xiii. 92 As quoted in Mayes, 41. 93 Zane Miller, Boss Cox’s Cincinnati: Urban Politics in the Progressive Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968) 3- 8. 94 Eric Caprioni, “Cincinnati Leaps Ahead on List of Nation’s Best Places to Live,” Cincinnati Business Courier (March 8, 2019) https://www.bizjournals.com/cincinnati/news/2019/03/08/cincinnati-leaps-ahead-on-list-of-nation-s- best.html

42 silencing others.95 This is unsurprising as those in power simply chose to reflect their own values and histories rather than seeking out the full range of histories to enrich and invigorate

Cincinnati’s local and national story. As early as 1991, a review of urban development and the arts in the journal Urban Affairs Quarterly found growth to be the “fundamental basis of urban politics” and that, “there is a local inner circle of businessmen who provide structural bridges among large corporations, arts organizations, and the leading groups devoted to urban growth policies…the arts are, at least in some cities, governed at the top by powerful people (primarily men) who appear to be active participants in the local growth machine.”96 Cincinnati is, as it has been through most of its existence, a city in which a small group of powerful local elites chart the city’s course for development, growth, arts, recreation, and culture.97 There is little incentive for this group to move outside of their own familiar understanding of the city and its past. This dissertation seeks to both surface new and unknown Cincinnati stories, and to think more critically about whose stories are being told, how, and by whom. Each chapter uses the

95 For example, the so-called “rebirth” of Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood has featured an amplification of German heritage, especially around the history of beer and brewing. This new heritage includes tours of old brewery buildings and lagering cellars, reuse of historic brewery structures as chic bars, restaurants, and microbreweries, the annual Bockfest parade and festival, and signage and murals throughout the neighborhood focusing on the history of brewing. At the same time, the long Appalachian and African American history of the neighborhood is almost entirely missing from the heritage-based development in the neighborhood. For example, on the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber of Commerce’s website, the “History and Culture” page contains only this text: “The Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky region is steeped in a rich history and legacy. Experience our German heritage, marvel at the Art Deco architecture throughout the area, and delve below city streets to relive the history of our unique river region. Take a guided tour or explore on your own and learn about Cincinnati’s brewing heritage, the region’s strong role in baseball history, or taste samples from popular restaurants in revitalized neighborhoods.” While both “German heritage” and “brewing heritage” are included, there is no mention of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, one of Cincinnati’s most significant historical institutions. (“Things to Do: History and Culture.” Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber of Commerce. https://cincinnatiusa.com/things-to- do/history-culture) 96 J. Allen Whitt & J.C. Lammers, “The Art of Growth: Ties Between Development Organizations and the Performing Arts,” Urban Affairs Quarterly 26, n. 23 (March, 1991) 388. 97 Alice Skirtz, Econocide: Elimination of the Urban Poor (Washington, DC: National Association of Social Workers Press, 2012).

43 built environment to uncover a story, explore the existing relevant scholarship and discuss how that story has been or can be communicated to the public.

Chapter one explores the story of the Covington-Cincinnati Bridge and its site.98 In this chapter inquiry began with a simple question based on observation of the built world. Why was the bridge built in this inconvenient site? The exploration of this question uncovered a story about the history of technology and economics which, though not hidden, had not been sufficiently explored. This work was shared with the public in the most scholarly way of any of the chapters, by publication in a local history journal.

The second chapter explores a now-obsolete piece of the built environment: urban privies. Privies were not only a place to relieve oneself, but also a place for residents to find privacy in the dense and crowded city. Among those who used privies for privacy were low- income women, many of whom were employed as live-in domestic servants. In their role as domestics, these women sometimes faced an unwanted pregnancy which, if discovered, would lead to a loss of employment. Women in this desperate situation sometimes chose to use urban privies as a site of concealment for abortion or infanticide. The findings of this chapter were shared in several short-format public talks, including an AHA lightning round talk and a Three

Minute Thesis presentation.

The third chapter uses forgotten remnants in the urban environment to uncover the evolution of public elementary school buildings in Cincinnati from 1829 to World War II. This story is told in two ways. First, the story of one school site acts as a document of the arc of

98 This bridge is known today as the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge.

44 urban change, and second the sites of the entire system of school buildings are used to illuminate broad trends of urban population growth, annexation, and politics. This work on schools was made public in a traditional panel exhibition mounted in two locations in 2016-

2017 and included several public talks and tours.

The fourth chapter examines a professional-class apartment building in one of

Cincinnati’s streetcar suburbs, Clifton. From 1919 to 1936, the Delmoor Flats was home to local poet and playwright Mary MacMillan who lived there with her lesbian partner Loueen Pattee until Pattee’s untimely death in 1921. Analysis of the domestic space shared by MacMillan and

Pattee connects their productivity as professionals to significant shifts in women’s domestic roles. By choosing not to marry men and to live in a modern apartment, these women freed themselves from the domesticity which held many women of their time captive. The work in this chapter was shared in several ways, including popular public talks, and a popular publication.

The final chapter uses a religious building in Cincinnati’s West End to explore the idea of the layering of stories over time. The building today known as Revelation Baptist Church was originally built as a synagogue, then served as a German Lutheran church, and has been home to a Black Baptist congregation since 1927. Over time, each congregation has left its imprint on the building, shaping it to their needs and responding to the changing urban environment around it. The West End is the site of the construction of a new professional stadium for Futball

Club Cincinnati which has now demolished the 155-year-old building. A plan for the historic designation of the building was put forth by a Cincinnati city councilmember, but preservation

45 was unsuccessful as a means of commemorating and acknowledging the history of this important site.

The dissertation concludes with an in-depth discussion of the ways the stories within this paper have been shared with the non-academic public. Each chapter’s story took a unique path to engage the public in thought-provoking dialogue and critical thinking aimed toward developing the tools and know-how of enlightened citizenship. Some of these public engagement efforts were very successful, some less so. In each case, there is a great deal for historians to learn about engaging and educating a public audience. While I imagine some historians believe this is “not our job.” I believe it is our job as teachers and scholars who are engaged in making the world a better place through our labors. As Bluestone notes, “the reason thinking critically about the relationship between the past, the present, and the future, is worth encouraging in heritage and design is this is the best way to activate citizenship by increasing the rigor with which people think about and engage their society, economy, and culture.”99 And so I push readers to go outside, walk around your city. Ask questions as you go. See what you can find, what you can learn, and what you can teach.

For now, let’s go look around Cincinnati together and see what we can find.

99 Bluestone, “Conservation’s Curatorial Conundrum,” 244.

Overview of Cincinnati

Because each of the chapters to follow is rooted in Cincinnati, I offer a brief description of the city’s physical growth and change here as it relates to chapters that follow so that they might be understood in their larger context.

Cincinnati was founded on the Ohio River where a ring of high hills forms bowl-shaped basin of about six square miles.100 From the city’s founding in 1788 until the construction of a series of hill-scaling funiculars (inclines) beginning in the 1870s, Cincinnati’s residents were largely trapped within the three neighborhoods of the basin.101 These were downtown, Over- the-Rhine, and the West End. The downtown, fronting the Ohio River, remains roughly eight blocks wide and eleven blocks deep with a northern boundary created by the Miami and Erie

Canal which opened in 1828 and was replaced in 1928 by an eight-lane Central Parkway.102

Behind the canal is Over-the-Rhine, which retains the most nineteenth-century fabric and character of the three. In 1983 the district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places,

“in recognition of both its exceptional nineteenth-century architecture and its association with the successive waves of German immigration to America in the nineteenth century.”103 The historic district's “collection of commercial, residential, religious and civic architecture is one of

America’s largest and most cohesive surviving examples of an urban, nineteenth century community.”104 The West End is as large as the downtown and Over-the-Rhine together, lying

100 Miller, Boss Cox’s Cincinnati, 3. 101 Cincinnati: A Guide to the Queen City and Its Neighbors (The WPA Guide to Cincinnati) (Cincinnati, OH: The Cincinnati Historical Society, 1943) 69. 102 Ibid, 207. 103 Over-the-Rhine: A Description and History: Historic Conservation Guidelines (Cincinnati,OH: City of Cincinnati, Historic Conservation Office, 1995) 8. 104 Ibid.

47 between their western boundaries, the canal and Central Avenue to the east, and the Mill

Creek to the west. Beginning in the 1820s, hundreds of thousands of residents flooded into these three neighborhoods, making them some of the densest in the nation.105

Though in the nineteenth-century the architecture of these three neighborhoods would have been fairly similar--characterized by brick and frame dwellings, some single family homes and others multi-family tenements, some with storefronts at the ground floor—today only

Over-the-Rhine retains its nineteenth century character. The downtown has been repeatedly remade to suit the demands of modern business and the West End has fallen victim to numerous urban renewal schemes beginning in the 1930s and culminating with the demolition of over 4000 buildings in the early 1960s.106 As a result, Over-the-Rhine is the most intact historic neighborhood of the three.

After the first incline opened in 1872, connecting to a series of streetcar lines in the

1880s, working class Cincinnatians were able to escape the dense crowding of the basin neighborhoods and move out to nearby hilltop suburbs.107 Throughout the late nineteenth century and through the first decade of the twentieth, the city annexed streetcar connected land in an ever-widening circle form the downtown basin, concluding in 1914 with the annexation of the Kennedy Heights neighborhood which roughly gave Cincinnati its current size and shape.108

105 Robert W. DeForest and Lawrence Veiller, eds., The Tenement House Problem: Including the Report of the New York State Tenement Commission of 1900 v.I (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1908) 144. 106 Konermann. 107 Miller, Boss Cox’s Cincinnati, 3-5. 108 Cincinnati: A Guide to the Queen City and Its Neighbors, 88.

With this basic outline of Cincinnati’s development in mind, let’s go explore some stories in Cincinnati’s past and the physical traces they have left behind within today’s built world.

Chapter 1 The Man Who Moved The Bridge: Cincinnati’s Roebling Suspension Bridge and Its Inconvenient Site A work of such magnitude and appearance, as to be without rival on either side of the Atlantic, if located in the line of either of those streets, would have converted them into the finest and most magnificent avenues on the continent.1 

The Covington and Cincinnati Bridge under construction in 1865. Note the untamed water’s edge and the dense commercial structures extending nearly to the water. Detail from a larger panoramic view. (“View of Cincinnati, Ohio 1866” United States Library of Congress, Panoramic Photographs Collection) With the recent redesign of Cincinnati’s waterfront and the creation of Smale

Waterfront Park, Cincinnatians are now more closely connected to the water’s edge and the

John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge than they have been in decades.2 As the bridge has been

1 John A. Roebling, “Report of John A. Roebling, Civil Engineer to the President and Board of Directors of the Covington and Cincinnati Bridge Company: April 1st, 1867,” Annual Report of the President and Board of Directors to the Stockholders of the Covington and Cincinnati Bridge Company for the Year Ending Feb. 28th, 1867 (Trenton, New Jersey: Murphy & Bechtel, Steam Book and Job Printer, 1867), 16-17. 2 Note that the bridge was originally named the Covington-Cincinnati Bridge. The name was changed in 1983 to honor John Roebling. This chapter will generally refer to the bridge by its original name. (Ralph G. Wolff. “A Quick

50 knit back into the city’s pedestrian experience, visitors are reminded of its inconvenient location. To access the bridge requires a series of turns off the main north-south streets and then another series of turns to get back onto them on the other side. The bridge’s engineer, the world-famous John A. Roebling, described this less-than-ideal location in his 1867 final report to the bridge company. He wrote, “as it is, both approaches are abruptly terminated by cross streets; all the immense traffic has to turn sharp corners, and nobody can discover the hidden entrance until it is reached, or perhaps passed.”3 Visitors today look at the bridge as a monument to the engineering genius of John Roebling, but what is harder to see is that it also stands as a testament to the power of the transportation system it replaced. The bridge stands where it does because of the Cincinnati & Covington Ferry Company and its owner, Cincinnati land owner and financier Samuel Wiggins. This chapter explores the question, how did the

Covington-Cincinnati Bridge come to be in such an inconvenient location and what does that tell us about urban change over time?

I began my inquiry into the bridge after living in New York City for thirteen years, during which I took countless walks over the gargantuan yet graceful Brooklyn Bridge. I wanted to understand Cincinnati’s Roebling Bridge’s role in the creation of its larger, grander, and more famous cousin, but when I began to really focus on the bridge I was repeatedly struck by how hard it is to access and all the awkward ways it has been worked into the urban fabric of both

Cincinnati and Covington, Kentucky. I knew that John Roebling was a masterful engineer and designer, so I could only assume that something significant about the city must have changed

“History of the Roebling Suspension Bridge,” Covington-Cincinnati Suspension Bridge Committee. (2004, updated 2019) https://roeblingbridge.org/Bridge-History/Bridge-History. 3 John A. Roebling, “Report of John A. Roebling,” 16-17.

51 between the bridge’s completion in 1867 and today. What I found was that the Ohio River once formed a significant barrier dividing Ohio and Kentucky, overcome only by ferries. The bridge promised ease of movement between the two states, but threatened the well-established ferry business. Now, after 150 years of crossing the river on bridges, it is hard to imagine the time when the river was a significant divide and when running a boat back and forth was a significant income generating business proposition. Yet, it was this business and its owner, Samuel

Wiggins, which dictated the Roebling Bridge’s inconvenient site. Wiggins’ ability to manipulate the site of the bridge and forever alter Cincinnati’s urban form to accommodate the bridge’s location is a testimony to a technology and business model all but forgotten in the story of the city we know today

Samuel Wiggins had a great deal to lose if a bridge usurped his ferry business. In just one week of April 1856, 29,511 foot passengers, 230 omnibuses, and 3,268 other vehicles crossed the river on just one of several ferries during just the daylight hours.4 With fares set by

Cincinnati City Council ranging from three cents per pedestrian to thirty cents per four-horse wagon, the ferry was a very profitable investment. In just this one week, pedestrian fares alone would have brought in $885.33, or about $26,705 in 2020 dollars.5 It is no wonder that the owner of this ferry would be reluctant to see his monopoly broken by a bridge. Wiggins and his partner, John Garniss, fought the bridge at every step and when its construction became

4 “Covington News,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (March 6, 1859) 3. 5 Ibid; William G. Williams, comp. Laws and General Ordinances of the City of Cincinnati…Published by the Order of City Council, May 1853 (Cincinnati, OH: Press of the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, 1853) 100-101. More specifically the ferry count published in The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer found passage by 29,511 foot passengers; horses, 369; cattle, 382; drays, 1566; buggies, 627; other one-horse vehicles, 450; carriages drawn by two horses, 74; omnibuses, 230; other two-horse vehicles, 341; three-horse vehicles, 32; and four-horse vehicles, 178.

52 inevitable, made sure Roebling’s Covington-Cincinnati Bridge, would sit in an annoyingly inconvenient location.

Centering the bridge’s placement generates new understandings of the history of

Cincinnati and the urban Midwest. Most work on the Covington-Cincinnati Bridge focuses on the great men associated with its construction -- specifically father and son, John and

Washington Roebling who engineered and built the bridge, and Amos Shinkle, who led the bridge company to triumph -- or on its engineering wonder. Asking why it was sited between streets rather than on them gives primacy to space and place. Historians Dolores Hayden and

John Stilgoe each note that this approach to historical inquiry has been underutilized both as an entry point for scholars and as a vehicle to connect everyday citizens to the past. Hayden pushes historians to help their fellow citizens, “find their own social history preserved in the public landscapes of their own neighborhoods and cities” and notes that “social historians often have not had much visual training and are not always well equipped to evaluate…visual evidence.”6 John Stilgoe explains: “Unlike so many historians entranced by great political, economic, and social movements, I emphasize that the built environment is a sort of palimpsest, a document in which one layer of writing has been scraped off and another one applied.”7 A focus on the built environment helps to reveal Samuel Wiggin’s impact on the urban landscape.

6 Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995) 47. 7 John R. Stilgoe, Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places. (New York: Walker and Company, 1998) 6.

The presence of the bridge provides important clues to the past. A commonplace structure now, except in its beauty, the bridge was a quantum leap forward for transportation in the region. The bridge’s location reveals the dramatic transition it embodies and illuminates what has been lost. Missing from the Cincinnati’s waterfront today are the working boats. The lively ferry trade, the mighty steamships, and the little skiffs are all gone. So too is the vital and boisterous urban waterfront densely packed with the businesses to support river trade. These boats and their people did not just use the waterfront for recreation on sunny days or for a night of holiday fireworks. They were out in all weather, night and day, helping the city function.

Though much of early to mid-nineteenth century Cincinnati has been lost, the bridge and several other physical clues can help us reconstruct pieces of this lost time in conjunction with other research tools. In many ways, the best book about the Covington-Cincinnati Bridge is

Harry R. Stevens’ The Ohio Bridge, published in 1939 under the auspices of the bridge company.8 Stevens had full access to the company’s records before the bridge was sold to the state of Kentucky, so his account includes details unknown in any other source. Sadly, what The

Ohio Bridge does not include is citations, making it difficult for historians wishing to follow up on Stevens’ work. While some of the company records he drew on have been located at the

Kentucky Department of Library and Archives in Frankfurt, much of the company’s records are simply lost.

8 Harry R. Stevens, The Ohio Bridge (Cincinnati, OH: The Ruter Press, 1939).

Most authors, including David McCullough, include the Covington-Cincinnati Bridge only as a prelude to the Roeblings’ more famous work in Brooklyn. Biographies of the Roeblings, especially those by Hamilton Schuyler and D.B. Steinman, include the Ohio River bridge as a small part of the Roebling’s larger story.9 One wonderful recent publication is a posthumously published biography of John Roebling written by his son Washington. Published in 2009 under the title Washington Roebling’s Father: A memoir of John Roebling, this work was found long- buried in the Roeblings’ archival material and gives voice to Washington’s role in his father’s work.10 The memoir became the foundation for Emily Wagner’s recent work, Chief Engineer:

Washington Roebling The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge which moves credit for the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge to Washington Roebling from his more famous father John, who died of tetanus during the Brooklyn Bridge’s design phase.11

Other than works relating the Covington-Cincinnati Bridge to its famous engineer and its more famous East River sibling, only Harry Steven’s book and Joseph Stern’s 1965 “The

Suspension Bridge: They Said It Couldn’t Be Built,” connect the bridge’s site to obstructionist ferry owners.12 The only published mention of the largely unknown Samuel Wiggins is in John H.

9 David McCullough, The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973); Hamilton, Schuyler, The Roeblings: A Century of Engineers, Bridge-builders and Industrialists: The Story of Three Generations of an Illustrious Family 1831-1931 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1931); D.B. Steinman, The Builders of the Bridge: The Story of John Roebling and His Son (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1945); Readers looking for specific details about the bridge’s construction chronology or builders might be interested in Don Heinrich Tolzmann, John A. Robeling and His Suspension Bridge on the Ohio River (Milford, OH: Little Miami Publishing Co., 2007) or Don Heinrich Tolzmann, The Roebling Suspension Bridge: A Guide to Historic Sites, People, and Places (Cincinnati, OH: Don Heinrich Tolzman, 2017). 10 Donald Sayenga, ed., Washington Roebling’s Father: A Memoir of John A. Roebling (Reston, VA: ASCE Press, 2009). 11 Erica Wagner, Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling: The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017). 12 Joseph S. Stern Jr., “The Suspension Bridge: They Said it Couldn’t Be Built,” Bulletin of the Cincinnati Historical Society 23, no. 4 (October 1965) 211-228.

White’s 2006 “Let Us Cross Over the River: Cincinnati’s Ferryboats,” which describes Wiggins as a wealthy banker and ferryman, but connects him to the bridge only by saying that the opening of the bridge rendered his ferry redundant and led to its closure.13 Though the bridge did put the ferry out of business, an exploration of the bridge’s placement within the urban context clearly shows Wiggins’s significant impact in the building of the bridge and the dramatic change in the city’s relationship to the river—something we would not have seen had we not begun with the physical bridge.

Detail of The Queen City in 1869 by George E. Stevens showing the bridge’s location between Vine and Walnut and Scott and Greenup Streets and the ferry’s location connecting Scott and Vine Streets. (Archives and Rare Books Library, Cincinnati Historical Maps Collection, University of Cincinnati) When officials from the City of Covington, Kentucky, laid out its street grid in 1815, they plotted the streets to align directly to Cincinnati’s, across the river.14 Yet, rather than making

13 John H. White, “Let Us Cross the River: Cincinnati’s Ferryboats,” Timeline 23, no. 1 (January-March 2006) 44-57. 14 Stevens.

56 use of this advantageous alignment, John Roebling offset the bridge between Vine and Walnut

Streets in Cincinnati and Scott and Greenup Streets in Covington. He had imagined the vista created by the joining of two grand streets through the arches of the bridge as one to which

“no avenue in any of the magnificent capitals of Europe could now compare.”15 The actual location would “remain a standing reproach to those short-sighted property holders who have fought us during the last twenty years.”16 The property holders he referred to were the owners of the Cincinnati & Covington Ferry Company. Thus, it was Roebling who first saw the bridge and its placement as a physical reminder of the clash between new and old transportation technologies, between progress and stasis, and between the public good and the ferry company’s profits. Today the bridge stands, if not as a reproach then as a testament to those who fought against it. The strongest of these opponents was Samuel Wiggins.

Though Wiggins was one of Cincinnati’s most powerful men in the mid-nineteenth century, few people remember him today. Some might remember his name attached to the

Wiggins Block at the southeast corner of Fifth and Vine Streets, built by his heirs in 1880.17 This upscale office block stood overlooking Fountain Square until its demolition to make way for the new Westin Hotel in 1977.18 Some may remember the much-loved Wiggins Restaurant the building housed.19 A few might know that one of the earthen Civil War defenses overlooking the Licking River in Campbell County, Kentucky, was named Wiggins Battery after Samuel

15 Roebling, “Report of John A. Roebling,” 17. 16 Ibid. 17 “Another New Block,” The Cincinnati Enquirer (January 29, 1879) 8. 18 “Little to Do But Get Married,” Cincinnati Enquirer (January 21, 2007) 54. 19 The Wiggins Restaurant was not connected to the Wiggins family, but took its name from the name of the building.

Wiggins.20 No one would think of his name in conjunction with the John A. Roebling Bridge, but it is actually the site of his most lasting impact on his adopted home.

Samuel Wiggins was one of Cincinnati’s wealthiest citizens. In 1880, sixteen years after his death, the New York Times valued his estate at over $2 million (or more than $50 million today). 21 He was litigious and exploitative in his business dealings, always looking for ways to maximize and safeguard his investments.22 His long history of cunning business dealings prepared him well for a showdown against the desires of the Covington and Cincinnati Bridge

Company.

Wiggins was born in 1786 in Newburgh, New York, to Stephen Wiggins Jr. and Phoebe

Berrien of Yonkers. Wiggins’s father “died a comparatively young man, leaving a large fortune.”23 It was this fortune passed down to Samuel that allowed him to begin investing in the ferry business, first in Saint Louis. Wiggins first traveled to Saint Louis in 1818, the same year that his cousin Samuel Berrien, wrote to New York from Saint Louis, “The people of the

Atlantic states have no conception of the extreme fertility of the land West of the Mts. and the facility of amassing immense wealth with moderate means.”24

20 Chester Geaslen, Our Moment of Glory in the Civil War: When Cincinnati was Defended from the Hills of Northern Kentucky (Newport, KY: Otto Printing Company, 1972) 43. 21 “Cincinnati’s Rich Men: Some of its Citizens Who Are Credited with the Possession of Millions,” The New York Times, (December 10, 1880) 3. 22 The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer includes many notices of Wiggins suing and being sued on all sorts of land use matters. See “Superior Court,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (July 28, 1863) 2; “Law Report,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (December 20, 1861)2. 23 The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record v. LV (New York: New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, 1924) 264; William Pope Anderson, Anderson Family Records (Cincinnati, OH: W.F. Schaefer & Co., 1936) 156. 24 “Letter from Samuel G Berrien to I.M. Francis, New York, March 25, 1818,” Illinois State Museum. http://www.museum.state.il.us/RiverWeb/landings/Ambot/Archives/Berrian/index.html.

Before Wiggins’ arrival in Illinoistown, now East Saint Louis, Illinois, ferries there were skiffs or keel boats, dangerous and difficult to steer. In November of 1816 five people died in a ferry accident, motivating the Illinois State Legislature to look for someone to run a safer ferry.25 Upon his arrival from New York, Wiggins, “a man of some financial means recently arrived from New York,” bought out the owners of the existing ferry right in 1818.26 On March

2, 1819, the State of Illinois passed “An Act to Authorize Samuel Wiggins to Establish a Ferry

Upon the Waters of the Mississippi” obligating him to operate only boats, “propelled by steam, horses, oxen, or other four footed animal.”27 In exchange, Illinois granted Wiggins a perpetual, exclusive ferry right between Illinoistown and St. Louis. He began providing service in 1820.28

Samuel Wiggins (William Pope Anderson, Anderson Family Records, 156)

25 John Thomas Scharf, History of St. Louis City and County from the Earliest Period to the Present Day Including Biographical Sketches of Representative Men vol. II (Philadelphia, PA: Louis H. Everts and Company, 1883) 1070 26 John W. Bond, The East St. Louis Waterfront: Historical Background (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, Division of History, Office of Archeology and Historic Preservation, 1969) 11. 27 Charles Gilman, Reports and Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of the State of Illinois Volume II, Volume VII with William Underwood’s Notes (St. Louis, MO: W.J. Gilbert, 1869) 197, 209-210; History of St. Clair County, Illinois with Illustrations Descriptive of its Scenery and Biological Sketches of Some of its Most Prominent Men and Pioneers (Philadelphia: Brink, McDonough and Company, 1881) 301. 28 Scharf, 1070; Gilman, 215.

With a monopoly over the ferry, Wiggins worked to achieve vertical integration by controlling every aspect of frontier life and travel, just as he would later seek to control all aspects of Cincinnati’s waterfront. In 1821 the legislature of Illinois passed an act allowing

Wiggins to set up a toll road in Illinoistown, to feed directly to his ferry landing.29 This allowed him to charge both for the ferry and the road to get to it. He quickly amassed a great deal of property in Illinoistown and nearby Bloody Island.30 His businesses flourished in Saint Louis, and by 1828 he had four ferries, three horse-powered and one steam-propelled, which he operated himself at least some of the time.31 Besides managing the ferry, Wiggins also founded the town of Washington, Illinois, “consisting of a hotel and three or four houses,” where he ran a tavern and housed his ferry workers.32 Early Saint Louis historian, J. Thomas Scharf remembered him as “a thrifty and progressive citizen.”33 While some lauded Wiggins and his ferries, saying “the great public ability of this mode of conveying persons & property across the Mississippi needs no comment, but gives the enterprising owner of them, a high claim to the patronage of his fellow-citizens.”34 As time wore on, some were less complimentary. By the 1830s, one State

29 S.H. Church, ed., Corporate History of the Pennsylvania Lines West of Pittsburgh Comprising Charters, Mortgages, Decrees, Deeds, Leases, Agreements, Ordinances, and Other Papers with Descriptive Text, volume X (Pittsburgh, PA: Pennsylvania Railroad, 1905) 652. 30 Bloody Island was an oversized sandbar named for its role as the local dueling site (including one duel involving Abraham Lincoln). In 1821 Bloody Island was described as, “opposite the upper part of the town and above the ferry…an island about one mile and a half in length, containing upwards of 1000 acres: it belongs to Mr. Samuel Wiggins.” (John A. Paxton, The St. Louis Directory and Register (St. Louis, IL: John A. Paxton, 1821) No page numbers.) 31 Bond, 12. 32 Walter Barlow Stevens, St. Louis, The Fourth City: 1864-1909, volume 1. (St. Louis, MO: The S.J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1909) 347. 33 Scharf, 1070; Samuel Wiggins was appointed the first Postmaster of the town of Wiggins Ferry by President John Quincy Adams on August 7, 1826. Though the town name was Washington, the Federal Post Office was named Wiggins Ferry. The former town of Washington has since been consumed by the Mississippi River (Bond, 16; A.W. Moore, “Illinois Town—Early History,” Reports of the Federal Writers Project, 1937). 34 Paxton.

Legislator referred to the Wiggins Ferry as “an unavoidable monopoly…merciless in its extortionate charges.”35

Perhaps sensing the changing tide, on August 1, 1831, Wiggins sold his ferry, along with

“eight or nine hundred acres,” to a group of investors, including his brother William.36 After selling for “a large sum of money,” Samuel Wiggins sought new business ventures.37 He began investing in Cincinnati’s banks, ferries, and real estate, purchased land in Springfield, Illinois, and made a huge loan to the state of Illinois.38 In 1831, as a result of changing monetary policy, the State Bank of Illinois lost its charter. To shut the bank down and repay the school fund it had borrowed from, the state needed an infusion of cash to buy out the bank’s circulating specie. In September 1831, just one month after Wiggins sold his St. Louis ferry right, the State

Legislature authorized the governor to borrow $100,000 (about $2.9 million today’s) at six percent interest to be repaid in nineteen years.39 Described as the “capitalist of Cincinnati and

St. Louis,” Samuel Wiggins promptly stepped forward to make the loan.40 He made the loan even more profitable “by furnishing some of it in depreciated State Bank notes that the state accepted at full face value and that the state had to repay to Wiggins in specie equivalent of the

35 John Francis Snyder, Adam W. Snyder and His Period in Illinois History 1817-1842 (Virginia, IL: E. Needham Bookseller and Stationer, 1906) 107. 36 Scharf, 1070. 37 Gilman, 215-217. 38 A land purchase by Wiggins is known to Lincoln scholars as the first known visit Mary Todd Lincoln made to Springfield. In May of 1835 she witnessed a land sale from her brother-in-law, Ninian Wirt Edwards to Samuel Wiggins (Thomas F. Schwartz, “Mary Todd’s 1835 Visit to Springfield, Illinois,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 26, no. 1 (2005) 42.) 39 George William Dowrie, “The Development of Banking in Illinois 1817-1863” Masters Thesis, University of Illinois, 1913, 50. 40 Richard Lawrence Miller, Lincoln and His World: Prairie Politician 1834-1842 (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2008) 2.

61 face value.”41 The Wiggins loan was referred to as a millstone around the necks of the people of

Illinois; “public reaction [to the Wiggins Loan] was fierce… ’ The Wiggins loan was long a by- word in the mouths of the people. Many affected to believe that Wiggins had purchased the whole State, that the inhabitants for generations to come had been made over to him like cattle.’”42 In 1837 State Representative Abraham Lincoln delivered a banking speech to the

Illinois Legislature in which he generally spoke against capitalists and specifically referred to the

Wiggins loan as a bad deal.43 This would not be the last time that Samuel Wiggins would put his own profit above the public good.

While all this excitement was going on in Illinois, Wiggins was also settling into a new life in Cincinnati. In the 1830s, Cincinnati was, with Pittsburgh, one of the two most important manufacturing centers in the west. In 1839, eight years after Wiggins’s arrival, writer James Hall reported that from the workshops of these two cities supplied “the vast regions which include a dozen states, are supplied with wagons carts, plows, harness, and all farming implements -- with chairs and cabinetwork of every description -- with tinware -- with printing presses and type -- with saddlery, shoes, and hats -- with a large amount of books-and with a variety of other articles.”44 Hall further observed that Saint Louis had “no manufactures worthy of being mentioned in comparison with those of Pittsburgh and Cincinnati.”45 The differences between

41 Miller, 13-14. 42 Ibid., 14 (quoting Illinois Governor Thomas Ford) 43 Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln volume I (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953) 69; Note that the Second Bank of Illinois had taken over repayment of the loan. They would later be relieved of this responsibility by the legislature which would finally pay off the loan to Wiggins (Reports Made to the Seventeenth General Assembly of the State of Illinois Convened January 6, 1851 (Springfield, IL: Lanphier & Walker Printers, 1851) No page numbers.) 44 James Hall, Statistics of the West at the Close of the Year 1836 (Cincinnati, OH: J.A. James and Company, 1837) 266. 45 Ibid., 267.

Cincinnati and Saint Louis would have been striking. The 1830 federal census recorded

Cincinnati’s population at 24,831, making it the eighth largest city in the country, with Saint

Louis at just 4,977, the fifty-seventh in the nation.46 In 1831, in addition to the lure of commerce, Cincinnati’s larger size and broader range of cultural institutions would have made it an appealing place to settle with his wife and raise his five children.47

Wiggins arrived in Cincinnati for good in 1831 and immediately transacted real estate deals to secure an exclusive ferry right to the Ohio River. By October 1831 Wiggins and his partner, John Garniss of New York, owned the entire Cincinnati riverfront from Broadway to

Western Row and two ferry rights.48 There are at least 154 identified land sales (to say nothing of leases) involving Samuel Wiggins between the years of 1831 and 1864 on record at the

Hamilton County Recorder’s office.49

Just days after he sold his St. Louis ferry right, in August of 1831, Wiggins paid $19,500 for a Cincinnati ferry right and landing.50 The Cincinnati City Council regulated ferry rates and schedules, balancing the public necessity of providing a ferry with the reality that no one would

46 Ibid., 269-270; Bureau of the Census, “Population of 90 Urban Places: 1830,” https://www.census.us.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/tab06.txt. 47 It seems that Wiggins may have lived apart from his wife and children during the twelve years he worked on the Illinoistown Ferry (see U.S. Federal Census, St. Louis, MO, 1820); Only four of Wiggins’s eight children survived to adulthood. 48 Records of the Hamilton Country Recorder, Cincinnati, OH; Prior to coming to Cincinnati, John Garniss ran a ferry at Weehawken, NJ and submitted a petition to the Common Council of New York on January 17, 1825 requesting the right to “establish... a ferry therefrom by Steam and Team boats to the City of New York.” See Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, 1784-1831 volume XIV: August 2, 1825-November 7, 1825 (New York: The City of New York, 1917) 260. 49 Records of the Hamilton County Recorder. 50 “Elenor S. Williams Deed to Wiggins and Garniss” (Cincinnati, OH: Records of the Hamilton County Recorder, Book 39, Page 491, August 24, 1831); “Joel Williams Deed to Wiggins and Garniss” (Cincinnati, OH: Records of the Hamilton County Recorder, Book 28, Page 287, August 31, 1831.

63 operate one unless it was profitable.51 In 1838, Cincinnati City Council negotiated a deal with

Wiggins and Garniss in which they agreed to move the ferry from the crowded Public Landing to land they owned at the foot of Walnut Street in exchange for exclusive rights to “the revenues arising from the termination of Walnut street and Vine street,” a provision which would later make its way into the bridge company’s charter.52 Though subject to city regulation, running a ferry was as lucrative a business for Samuel Wiggins in Cincinnati as it had been in Saint Louis.

In 1858, one citizen wrote into a local paper alleging that the ferry owners made $100,000 a year.53 The ferry owners promptly defended themselves in the Enquirer, claiming income of just

$39,600 and expenses including “the present boats cost about $35,000, and the three ‘floats,’ say about $2,000, plus the value of the ferry right.”54 Whatever the specific numbers, this was big business and Samuel Wiggins was, as the Enquirer reported in 1850, “receiving large profits from the ferry, and determined to stop the building of the bridge if possible.”55 There is no doubt that Wiggins would have been right at home in mid-century Cincinnati, a place described by historian Walter Styx Glazer as possessing, “an acquisitive impulse, which seemed to infuse the entire population with a desire for economic gain.”56

51 William Disney, comp. Laws and General Ordinances of the City of Cincinnati Containing the Laws of the State Relating to the Government of the City: All the General Ordinances of the City In Force September 15, 1865 with Annotations and Court Decisions and an Appendix Containing Several Amendatory Ordinances Passed in Oct. and Nov., 1865 (Cincinnati, OH: Robert Clark & Co., 1866), 463-466. 52 Ibid., 467. 53 “Covington Items,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (February 12, 1858) 3. 54 Ibid. 55 “Saturday, March 9, 1850: House of Representatives” Ohio State Journal, March 12, 1850. 56 Walter Styx Glazer, Cincinnati in 1841: The Social and Functional Organization of an Urban Community During the Pre-Civil War Period (Columbus, OH: The Ohio University Press, 1999) 85.

Ferry at the foot of Vine Street in 1865, one year after Wiggins’ death. Detail of a larger panoramic image. (“View of Cincinnati, Ohio 1866” United States Library of Congress, Panoramic Photographs Collection) Beyond the ferry business, Samuel Wiggins controlled an immense amount of land in

Cincinnati and was involved in a constant shell game of buying and selling his lots, providing mortgages for new buyers on which he would be paid interest, and leasing out buildings on his land. His real estate holdings included a row of brick buildings along Water Street, Wiggins and

Garniss Row, which he built in 1836.57 When they burned in February 1854, the tenants were

“poor Irish families,” most likely waterfront laborers.58 He also owned a property on the southeast corner of Plum and Water Streets, described as uninsured “frame barracks,” which

57 “Advertisements,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (June 16, 1841) 3; Greve, Volume I, 548; As noted in the introduction, the better-known Wiggins Block, built after Wiggins’ death, stood on the south side of Fountain Square for many years and housed a range of professional offices-- including 46 lawyers’ offices in the 1882 Business Directory. This later structure was built by Wiggins’ estate rather than by Wiggins himself (Cincinnati Illustrated Business Directory, 1882 Containing a Classified List of All Trades, Professions and Pursuits in the City of Cincinnati Alphabetically Arranged (Cincinnati, OH: Spencer & Craig Printing Works, 1882) 53-60.) 58 “Disastrous Fire,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (February, 14, 1854) 3.

65 fire destroyed in November 1862.59 The location of these buildings near the busy waterfront made them less than ideal lodging, but for many poor families, the Irish among them, there were few choices. As the city’s population boomed through the 1830s and 1840s, Cincinnati’s housing market was unable to keep up, leading to extreme housing shortages and a persistence of substandard lodgings like those offered by Wiggins.

City directories described Wiggins as a “banker” rather than ferry owner. With steady income from the ferry, he helped to establish the Franklin Bank in 1834.60 He also served as a director of the Lafayette Bank, and he was a member of the finance committee of the Jefferson

Life Insurance Company of Cincinnati.61 Due, in part, to Wiggins’s commitment to business and his extreme wealth, these were some of the most secure financial institutions in town. Though committed to his business interests, Wiggins did find time to serve on the vestry of St. Paul’s

Episcopal Church and a few other civic boards, including Spring Grove Cemetery.62 His family was also involved in charitable works, and his wife, Cornelia Bartow Wiggins, was remembered, together with her sister, as “in person and character, and in benevolent work…the most lovely I ever knew.”63 Through his business, religious, familial, and civic engagements, Wiggins was intimately connected to many of Cincinnati’s wealthy elites. At the same time, he continued to pursue business interests elsewhere.

59 “Fires,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (November 8, 1862) 3. 60 Needs a note. White, 48-49. 61 “Jefferson Life Insurance Company of Cincinnati,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (March 21, 1854) 4. 62 Greve, Centennial History of Cincinnati, 1:741–42, 919; Although the vestry records of St. Paul’s Church show that he served several terms, they also show that he rarely, if ever, showed up for meetings. 63 Cornelia Bartow Williams, comp., Ancestry of Lawrence Williams (Chicago: Privately printed, 1915), 205–6.

Even after moving to Cincinnati, Wiggins invested heavily in the Second State Bank of

Illinois. These investments illustrate the sometimes unscrupulous nature of Wiggins’s business dealings. When the bank’s stock was oversubscribed, according to historian Richard Miller, “a handful of Cincinnati capitalists wound up dominating the bank. They included Samuel Wiggins of Wiggins loan infamy.”64 When a committee investigated wrongdoing by the Second Bank of

Illinois in 1839, it found that “the bank loaned Cincinnati resident Samuel Wiggins, so ubiquitous in Illinois finance, $108,000. As collateral, he pledged capital stock he owned in the bank, but which he hadn’t yet paid for.”65 Wiggins then used the loan money to pay his bank debt. The committee further noted, “No net financial gain came to the bank, but the transaction allowed it to claim its working capital had been increased by Wiggins—allowing further issuance of bank notes which, however, were ultimately based on his promises rather than on specie.”66

Another example of Wiggins’s dubious business practices was his 1859 suit against his

Cincinnati ferry partner John Good, who had joined him in operating the Cincinnati ferry when

John Garniss returned to the east. Good owned a portion of the ferry right, but he did not own the waterfront real estate. When he refused to help pay for the resurfacing of the ferry landing owned by Wiggins, Wiggins sued Good for the money. In the process, he also gave notice to the

City of Cincinnati that he would forfeit his ferry right (thus rendering Good’s investment in said ferry right worthless), and blocked the ferry landing with barges so that Good would be unable to land his ferries. The barge maneuver led to a contempt of court charge, but Wiggins feigned

64 Miller, 63. 65 Ibid., 356-357. 66 Ibid.

67 innocence and got off. The paper reported that Mr. Wiggins’s intention in this action was to

“make it a new ferry company, to eschew the Garniss ferry right, and thereby oust Mr. Good.

He has for some time had two new boats lying in dock for this purpose.” 67 It’s no wonder that with this type of aggressive business acumen, Wiggins was willing to fight the Covington and

Cincinnati Bridge Company at every turn.

The Covington and Cincinnati Bridge Company was originally created by a group of wealthy businessmen from the Kentucky side of the river. After an initial nudge from

Lexingtonians looking to establish a route to market from their landlocked hamlet, a group of

Covington’s business leaders coalesced to seek charters for a bridge company in Kentucky and

Ohio. The Kentucky State legislature granted the company a charter on February 5, 1846.68 This charter named nine Kentuckians and six Ohioans officers of the bridge company, but it took these men four more years to secure a charter in Ohio.69 Samuel Wiggins and other Ohio property owners obstructed their progress at every opportunity.

67 “The Landing Contracted For,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (April 10, 1859) 3; “To the City Council of the City of Cincinnati,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (January 4, 1862) 2; Reprint of Ohio Cases, 318-320; “Law Report,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (February 16, 1862) 3; “Law Report: Superior Court – General Term,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (May 2, 1862) 1; “Meeting at Metropolitan Hall,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (February 11, 1862) 2. Wiggins ended up selling these new boats to the Federal government for use at gun boats during the Civil War. See “Covington News,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (February 22, 1863) 3. 68 Stevens, 33. 69 The initial committee of Northern Kentucky businessmen chosen to meet with legislators in Kentucky and Ohio were Covington councilmen John Finley and Charles Withers, Henry Brown, editor of the Licking Valley Register, lawyers John W. Menzies, and Herman J. Groesbeck. Ten other men were assigned to collect signatures on petitions; These men were foundry owner James Goodloe, bank president George Carlisle, E. Foote, merchant Robert Buchanan, Thomas Minor, and William Johnson of Ohio and magistrate James Arnold, lawyer John Finley, John Casey, councilman Charles Withers, lawyer Herman Groesbeck, tobacco merchant Frederick Gedge, iron manufacturer John McNickle, grocer George Southgate, and lawyer Mortimer Benton of Covington.

In Ohio, a bill to charter the Covington and Cincinnati Bridge Company first passed the

House 30 to 27 on February 26th, 1846, but was held up in the Senate.70 State Senator Alfred

Kelley of Cleveland recommended postponing the bill for a year. He reported that, “the completion of such a work as the one proposed, will, to some extent at least, have the effect to make Cincinnati, Covington, and Newport, for most business purpose, one city” and that some of the “wealth and population Cincinnati…will be transferred to the opposite side of the river.”71 Kelley worried that Cincinnati real estate would become less valuable as businesses and residents could easily relocate to less expensive property across the river. As an additional strike against the charter, on February 27th the Senate was presented with “a remonstrance of

47 ship builders and other citizens of Cincinnati, against granting an act of incorporation to construct a bridge over the Ohio River” which focused on worries that a bridge would impact navigability.72

As a part of its campaign for a charter from the state of Ohio, the bridge company invited John A. Roebling to submit a proposal in late 1846.73 Roebling devoted several pages of his report to debunking the concern that a bridge would negatively affect river navigation.74

70 Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Ohio Being the Frist Session of the Forty Fourth General Assembly Held in the City of Columbus Commencing on December 1, 1845 (Columbus, OH: C. Scott and Company Printers, 1846) 689-690. 71 “Bridge Across the Ohio,” Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (February 24, 1846) 2. 72 Journal of the Senate of the State of Ohio Being the Frist Session of the Forty Fourth General Assembly Held in the City of Columbus Commencing on December 1, 1845 (Columbus, OH: C. Scott and Company Printers, 1846) 701. 73 John A. Roebling, Report and Plan for a Wire Suspension Bridge Proposed to Be Erected Over the Ohio River at Cincinnati (Cincinnati, OH: J.A. and U.P James, 1846) 6-10; German-American engineer and inventor, John A. Roebling is best known as the designer of the Brooklyn Bridge, however, shortly before his untimely death in 1869, he identified himself as a civil engineer of roads, canals and bridges including twelve suspension bridges. See Donald Sayenga, ed., Washington Roebling’s Father: A Memoir of John A. Roebling (Reston, VA: ASCE Press, 2009) 241-242. 74 Ibid.

Roebling’s initial design spanned from Main Street in Cincinnati to Garrard Street in Covington indicating that his first instinct was to directly link two existing thoroughfares, but he was careful to note that the company had not yet chosen a final site for the bridge. He wrote, “it may be observed here, that a bridge is perfectly practicable at any point in the city. The general wants of the city will have to be duly considered in the choice of a site.”75 He added, “As the charter granted by the legislature of Kentucky leaves the location of the bridge entirely at the option of the Company, it is very important that the same liberal provision should be inserted in the charter to be obtained from the legislature of Ohio.”76 We know that Samuel Wiggins’s partner John Garniss traveled to Columbus to lobby against the bill, and it is likely that Wiggins accompanied him. When the bill was finally postponed, John Garniss’ son-in-law, Salmon P.

Chase, wrote in his journal on March 3, 1846, “dined at Mr. Garniss’s who just returned from

Columbus rejoicing in defeat of Bridge Bill.”77

The bridge bill was reintroduced the following year, but it failed in the Senate by a vote of 25 to 8 on January 26th, 1847.78 Cincinnati’s Wharf Master, Captain. Joseph Pierce, published an eighteen-page rebuttal to Roebling’s plan, specifically regarding navigation and river travel.79

Pierce worried that if sited on Main Street, the clearance for steamboats on the Public Landing, which ran from Main to Sycamore Streets, would be compromised.80 This concern at least

75 Ibid., 10. 76 Ibid. 77 Salmon P. Chase and John Niven, ed., The Salmon P. Chase Papers Volume I: Journals, 1829-1872 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1993) 180. 78 “The Legislative Proceedings,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (December 28, 1846) 2; “The Bridge,” Licking Valley Register, January 30, 1847. 79 Joseph Pierce, “Remarks Upon Mr. Roebling’s ‘Plan and Report for a Wire Suspension Bridge, Proposed to Be Erected Over the Ohio River, at Cincinnati,” (Unpublished Document in the collection of the Cincinnati Historical Society), No date, No page numbers. 80 Ibid.

70 partially accounts for the bridge’s eventual move west of Walnut Street. Clearly, defeat by such a wide margin so early in the legislative session, which extended through March, shows the bill had little hope of passage. Regardless, it did stir up quite a debate about the Cincinnati and

Covington Ferry Company.

Citizens saw clearly that the ferry was a problem that needed to be rectified. A letter in the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer three weeks before the defeat raged, “The proprietors of the Ferry and a few gentlemen who have large tracts of land in the Mill Creek and Deer Creek bottoms, and along the slopes of the hills adjacent to our city, are most violently opposed to this measure…. Do they really believe it would interfere with free navigation of the Ohio River?

Nothing of all this!”81 They speculated, “The said ferry nets its proprietors, it is said, the snug little sum of twenty thousand dollars per annum,” which would be almost $630,000 in 2020.82

With these reliable profits, it is no wonder Wiggins and Garniss fought the bridge. The Enquirer continued, “They fear that if a bridge were built, the Ferry would be entirely superseded. These gentlemen have accumulated vast fortunes. With the lapse of years and the increase of wealth, their avarice has kept equal pace,” clearly setting the interests of the ferry company against those of the people.83 The story went on, “But shall a monopoly so gross as the Ferry, which seeks the emolument of its proprietors regardless of the comfort and convenience, and the interests, and the wishes, of almost the whole community, be continued and a charter for the

Bridge be withheld.”84 The paper also called out hilltop property owners who were against the

81 “To The Public,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (January 6, 1847) 2. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid.

71 bridge because it would allow residents to settle conveniently in Covington rather than in the areas of their investments. The paper urged Wiggins, Garniss, and other landowners: “Your private pecuniary interests must yield, in this instance, to the great public interest and convenience,” but Wiggins and Garniss were not yet ready to yield.85

Though the bridge bill was again defeated, concern over the state of ferry service and the exclusive right held by Wiggins and Garniss led the state Senate on December 29, 1847, to direct Attorney General Henry Stanberry to investigate ferry rates and regulation, and to determine whether additional ferries could be licensed to cross the Ohio.86 Stanberry wrote to

Wiggins and Garniss through their lawyer Salmon Chase requesting “all the material facts connected with the steam ferry running between Cincinnati and Covington.”87 Wiggins and

Garniss returned a brief business statement, and though Stanberry found that the state did have the right to regulate ferry tolls and that it could charter additional ferries, no action was taken. 88 It seems Stanberry’s half-hearted investigation was a concession to placate those who had decried the ferry monopoly in support of the bridge, rather than a vehicle for actual change.

Finally, in January 15, 1849, the bridge company enlisted engineer Charles Ellet, designer of the new suspension bridge over the Ohio River at Wheeling, West Virginia, to help its cause. In his testimony to the legislature, which included “maps and profiles,” he specifically

85 Ibid. 86 Documents Including Messages and Other Communications Made to the Forty-Fifth General Assembly of the State of Ohio Ordered to be Printed in a Separate Volume by Act Passed December 16, 1836, Vol. XI-Part I (Columbus, OH: C. Scott’s Steam Press, 1847) 525. 87 Henry Stanberry, “Letter to Wiggins and Garniss,” (Library of Congress, Salmon P. Chase Papers, 1755-1898, Box 7, Reel 5) 88 “To The Public,” December, 29, 1846; Documents Including Messages, 525.

72 argued against Wiggins’s monopoly.89 He wrote, “the plan here proposed, will distribute valuable benefits to society, while it rears itself in the way of no existing right:--for the protection of a present and lucrative ferry monopoly, of which the proceeds are not based on the advance of any capital or the assumption of any risk.”90 Wiggins would have disagreed with

Ellet’s assessment, as he had reported to Henry Stanberry $53,703 in capital expenditures and expenses during the first eleven years of ferry operation, but the tide had now turned against the ferry.91

On February 22, the Cincinnati Daily Chronicle listed the city’s ferries individually and used their productivity as evidence of the need for a bridge. “The two central ferries are understood to have tapped gold mines far more productive than the placers of California…no one will contest that a permanent bridge, safely constructed, is infinitely preferable, as a means of crossing a river, to any description of movable watercraft.”92 It’s no wonder the ferry companies were “most hostile to the construction of a bridge;” they had a fortune to lose and an inferior product.93 A March 4 Enquirer editorial in support of the bridge addressed the trouble with the ferries most directly. It wrote, “the present Ferry is too close to a monopoly— and like all monopolies, too tyrannical and grasping in its demands to suit our views or to please

89 From Columbus,” The Cincinnati Daily Chronicle, February 16, 1849; Charles Ellet Jr., Letter on the Proposed Bridge Across the Ohio River at Cincinnati With a Single Span of 1400 Feet and an Elevation of 112 Feet Above Low Water (Columbus, OH: J.H. Riley & Co., Printers, 1849) 16. 90 Charles Ellet Jr., Letter on the Proposed Bridge Across the Ohio River at Cincinnati With a Single Span of 1400 Feet and an Elevation of 112 Feet Above Low Water (Columbus, OH: J.H. Riley & Co., Printers, 1849) 16. 91 Documents Including Messages and Other Communications Made to the Forty-Fifth General Assembly of the State of Ohio Ordered to be Printed in a Separate Volume by Act Passed December 16, 1836, Vol. XI-Part I (Columbus, OH: C. Scott’s Steam Press, 1847) 525. 92 “Cincinnati and Covington Bridge,” The Cincinnati Daily Chronicle, February 22, 1849; “Suspension Bridge,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (March 4, 1849) 1. 93 Ibid.

73 the public…we hope that some action will be taken in the premises which will at least frighten the Ferry proprietors into a more accommodating spirit; or, failing that, will break up the exclusive monopoly they now enjoy.”94

While the ferry’s owners made a profit, those who relied on the ferry for their transportation needs often suffered. Ferry riders were often inconvenienced by irregular service, especially at night, or suspended service due to high water, ice, or fog.95 Yet, no matter how they were inconvenienced, citizens were dependent on the ferries. When the ferry boat suspended service due to ice in the winter of 1860, ten people attempted to cross the river on their own, resulting in at least one death.96 Steam ferries were subject to fire, and other accidents were not uncommon. For example, while the bridge was under construction, a nearly new Newport ferry boat burned to the water, causing its owner, Captain Air, an estimated loss of $10,000.97 Ferries were also dangerous for riders. In 1864 Thomas Godfrey, a member of

Company G, 2d Kentucky, Heavy Artillery, caught his foot between the boat and the float leaving his leg “shockingly mangled.”98 In 1864 Wiggins and Good were sued for negligence when a passenger fell from the ferry float and broke his leg in two places, and the company paid $4000 in damages to another man who was crushed between the boat and the float.99 In

94 “Suspension Bridge,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (March 4, 1849) 1. 95 “Newport News,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (October 2, 1861) 3; “Fatal Accident on the Delaware – Burning of a Ferry-boat – Loss of Life,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (March 20, 1856) 2; “Covington” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (April 1, 1870) 7; “Newport,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (February 4, 1868) 3; “Great Excitement – A Ferry Boat and its Crew in Imminent Peril,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (February 3, 1855) 2 96 “Thrilling Incident at the River – A Skiff Containing Ten Persons Swept Away by Floating Ice – Rescue of Nine of the Party – Probable Melancholy Fate for the Other,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (January 4, 1860) 2. 97 “Fire this Morning-A Newport Ferry Boat Destroyed-Probable Loss Ten Thousand Dollars,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (October 23, 1857) 3. 98 “Covington News: Shocking Accident,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (February 27, 1864) 3. 99 “Law Report,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (March 29, 1864) 2; “Covington: Heavy Damages,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (September 20, 1867) 3.

1842, a carriage was thrown off the Newport ferry, resulting in the death of the fifteen-year-old occupant, and in November 1864 the Cincinnati Enquirer reported both someone falling off the ferry and drowning and someone else having both legs crushed between the ferry and the dock.100 In 1866 one of the ferries operating from Scott Street to Vine exploded in her dock on the Kentucky side, creating a “terrible spectacle,” and in 1866 a steamboat struck Cincinnati, leaving “several presumed drowned.”101 In comparison to the ferries, the bridge promised a safe, reliable, and speedy crossing.

There is no way to know whether the monopolistic overreaching of the ferry’s owners eventually turned the political tide against them, but a pamphlet published in celebration of the bridge’s completion in 1867 noted “much opposition had to be overcome before a charter was obtained from the Legislature of Ohio. Courtesy, flattery, champagne and other ‘delicacies of the season’ were distributed AD LIBITUM [presumably by the bridge company] before the thing was accomplished.”102 The State of Ohio chartered the Covington and Cincinnati Bridge

Company on March 12, 1849. The charter included no mention of the bridge’s future site.103

No one will be surprised to learn that the bridge company’s charter was not the end of

Mr. Samuel Wiggins. According to the Ohio State Journal “the lands upon both sides of the

100 Fatal Accident-Noble Example of Courage in Two Young Men,” The Daily Cincinnati Enquirer (July 5, 1842) 2; “Covington News” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (November 26, 1864) 3. 101 “Explosion of Ferry-boat Covington No. 2: Probable Loss of Life: Terrible Conflagration: Scenes of Excitement in the City: Its Providential Aspects,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (March 14, 1866) 2; “Collison on the Ohio River— The Steamer Missouri Runs Into the Ferry-boat Lady Washington—The Result,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (April 6, 1865) 2. 102 Historical Sketch of the Great Suspension Bridge Connecting Covington and Cincinnati Together With Reliable Details and Full Descriptions of All its Parts Compiled from Official Sources (Cincinnati, OH; T.J. Smith& Co., 1867) 3; “Ohio Legislature,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (March 10, 1849) 3. 103 Ibid.

75 river, where the bridge was to be founded, have been purchased by wealthy individuals, the proprietors of the ferry in the vicinity, for the purpose of preventing the construction of the bridge.”104 Wiggins and Garniss owned the city’s Covington-facing waterfront—and they were not selling it.105 Without the land there could be no bridge.

Perhaps Wiggins’s greatest triumph in the battle for the bridge was the language of the

1850 amendment to the bridge’s charter. A year after receiving the charter, the bridge company returned to the legislature, seeking the power to confiscate land for the bridge.106

Significant restrictions were placed on the company’s freedom to select a site; specifically, the amendment required that the bridge be built between Walnut Street and Western Row (now

Central Avenue) and forbade the use of the street termini.107 By limiting the bridge’s location, the Legislature eliminated the possibility of obstructing the public landing, but it also guaranteed that land for the bridge would have to be bought from Samuel Wiggins, who owned the entire waterfront between these streets. By restricting the bridge from the north-south thoroughfares, the amendment preserved the street termini as landing points for ferries and other watercraft, privileging boats. Wiggins and the bridge company would be forced to agree on price, and Wiggins had no intention of selling his land to the competition without a significant incentive.

104 “Saturday, March 9, 1850: House of Representatives,” Ohio State Journal, March 12, 1850; Deed Records of the Hamilton County Recorder, Series 1, 1831–64. 105 Records of Hamilton County Recorder. 106 “Saturday, March 9, 1850: House of Representatives,” Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Ohio Being the Frist Session of the Forty Eighth General Assembly Held in the City of Columbus Commencing On Monday, December 3, 1849 (Columbus, OH: S. Medary Printer, 1850) 205. 107 Ibid.

Wiggins had put himself in a place to extort a significant payment from the bridge company, because it was its only hope of purchasing the land they needed for the Ohio tower.

The Ohio State Journal wrote, “without the [amended] law, the bridge cannot be built and it will be in the power of individuals to put a stop to the progress of an enterprise of great public importance. The business of ferrying is now nearly a monopoly in the hands of the proprietors of the land.”108 Pushing further, the paper believed the bridge would at least improve ferry service: “The effect [of the ferry monopoly] is that the public are poorly accommodated at high prices. A bridge would force upon the owners of the ferries the necessity of furnishing decent boats, and of reducing prices to a reasonable rate in proportion to the amount of business done.”109 The Covington and Cincinnati Bridge Company’s charter was amended on March 28,

1850 and the bridge’s site was forever contorted as a concession to Samuel Wiggins and his

Cincinnati & Covington Ferry Company. Now all the bridge company had to do was select a site and purchase it from Samuel Wiggins.110

For six years, the bridge company worked to raise the necessary funds to begin work on the bridge, and finally in 1856 it hired an engineer, purchased land, and broke ground. In April

1856, engineer John Roebling wrote, “Any one site, between Covington and Cincinnati is practicable; and that no one point presents very superior advantages over another, as far as the

108 “Saturday, March 9, 1850: House of Representatives,” Ohio State Journal (March 12, 1950). 109 Ibid. 110 “Saturday, March 9, 1850: House of Representatives,” Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Ohio Being the Frist Session of the Forty Eighth General Assembly Held in the City of Columbus Commencing On Monday, December 3, 1849 (Columbus, OH: S. Medary Printer, 1850) 205.

77 structure itself is concerned. The Charter provides that the location shall be below Walnut

Street. How far below, remains for the Board to decide.”111

Though we now think of John Roebling as the mastermind of the Brooklyn Bridge, at the time of his work in Cincinnati, both his acclaim as an engineer and the success of suspension bridge technology were limited. Before the Cincinnati bridge, Roebling had constructed small suspension bridges in Pittsburgh and a high railroad bridge over Niagara Falls that he took over from rival engineer Charles Ellet, who got into a spat with the bridge’s owners.112 The state of suspension bridge technology was similarly nascent. Ellet’s suspension bridge at Wheeling had partially failed two years earlier, and a suspension bridge built over the Licking River between

Newport and Covington, Kentucky, had collapsed in January of the same year after less than a month in service.113 John Roebling came to Cincinnati as the best in a small and uncertain field of suspension bridge engineering to build a bridge larger than any ever before attempted.

Indeed, even John Roebling’s son Washington was overwhelmed by the bridge’s scale. Shortly after his arrival in the Queen City, on March 16, 1865, Washington wrote to his wife, Emily,

“Our bridge here is an immense thing, it far surpasses my expectations, and any idea I had formed of it previously.”114

While it is unknown exactly when and how the final bridge site was selected, John

111 “Covington and Cincinnati Bridge Company: Circular Address of the Board of Directors” (Troy, NY: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Special Collections and University Archives, Roebling Manuscript Collection. John A. Roebling, Bridge Projects, Box 5, Folder 21), 1867. 112 Donald Sayenga (Ed), Washington Roebling’s Father: A Memoir of John Roebling (Reston, VA: ASCE Press, 2009) 243-246; David McCullough, The Great Bridge (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1972) 77, 80-81; 113 Ibid., “Fall of a Suspension Bridge- Fire- Navigation of Ohio,” New York Daily Times (January 18, 1854) 8. 114 Washington A. Roebling, “Letter to Emily Roebling March 16, 1865,” Some Roebling Letters (1821-1927) and Incidental Matters Selected and Arranged by Clarence E Case v II. Rutgers University Special Collections, Transcript Book 36.

Roebling’s notebooks fill in some of the story. A small, leather-bound Roebling sketchbook dated 1856 in Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s collection includes the only known notes

Roebling made about the selection of the bridge’s site.115 An initial map illustrates Roebling’s attempt to understand Cincinnati waterfront’s layout. The simple ink drawing includes the

Ohio River, Rat Row, Water, Front, Second, Race, Vine, and Walnut Streets on the Cincinnati side and Scott and Madison Streets on the Covington side.116 A few pages later, another hand- drawn map shows the bridge’s site as selected. This map shows the blocks between Walnut and

Vine Streets between Rat Row and Front Street in greater detail with measurements and directional information. The map is drawn in ink, but the Cincinnati anchorage footprint is added in pencil.117 Assuming the notebook’s pages were used in order, in the space of a few pages the bridge’s site had been selected.

115 John A. Roebling, “Notes on Foundations, 1856,” (Troy, NY: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Special Collections and University Archives, Roebling Manuscript Collection. John A. Roebling, Bridge Projects, Notebooks, Box 4, Item 92, 1856) 116 Rat Row was two-blocks of low-quality buildings facing the Ohio River. “Rat” most likely referred both to the animal and to “warf rats” known to frequent Cincinnati’s docks. John Roebling wrote in a letter dated July 27, 1863, “I have some trouble here [in Cincinnati] with my laborers who struck this morning for a rise [sic]…I want to get rid of the Cinc Warf rats at any rate, and engage Germans in their places...The Germans about here are mostly loyal [to the union], the Irish alone are disloyal.” 117 The anchorage is the heavy masonry structure into which the bridge’s suspension cables terminate.

John Roebling’s Early Sketch of the Cincinnati Waterfront (John A. Roebling “Notes on Foundations, 1856”)

John Roebling’s Sketch of the Bridge Site (John A. Roebling, “Notes on Foundations, 1856”)

In an accompanying notebook, a note reads simply, “Best location between Walnut and

Vine, through Rat Row, crossing Water Street,” accompanied by a series of measurements.118

118 John A. Roebling, “Cincinnati Bridge, April 1856” (Troy, NY: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Special Collections and University Archives, Roebling Manuscript Collection. John A. Roebling, Bridge Projects, Notebooks, Box 7, Item 128).

Beyond these measurements, it is impossible to know what factors played into Roebling’s choice. Was it topography, or some political or economic necessity? Whatever the reason, he recommended the bridge’s site, and the Covington and Cincinnati Bridge Company set out to purchase it from Wiggins.

In 1847, when the State Legislature was considering the bridge and Attorney General

Henry Stanberry investigated the ferry monopoly, Stanberry requested that Wiggins and

Garniss submit “all the material facts” about their ferry operation.119 Although not fully compliant, the pair provided an estimate of their revenues and expenses to prove they were not making a significant profit from the public good of providing the ferry.120 Under these circumstances, one can assume that the ferry owners would underreport their revenue and exaggerate their costs to minimize their reported profit. Wiggins and Garniss claimed that in eleven years and eight months they had each earned only $1,616 per year.121 They further claimed, “We cannot state with precision, the capital investment,” but went on to value the

“land necessary for ferry purposes” at $10,000 and the steamboat and wharf at $6,000.122

Though the bridge company would not be buying the exact plot of land on which the ferry ran, when it approached Wiggins nine years later to purchase in-lot 459, it was negotiating for a plot of land nearly identical to the one Wiggins had valued at $10,000 in 1847.

119 William Disney, Documents, Messages and Other Communications Made to the Forty-Fifth General Assembly. Ordered Printed in a Separate Volume by an Act Passed Dec. 16, 1836. Vol XI – Part I (Columbus, OH: C Scott’s Steam Press, 1847), 524-528. 120 Ibid. 121 Ibid. 122 Ibid.

A purchase price of $10,000 would have been well within the budget of the bridge company whose charter initially allowed them to sell $300,000 in stock to pay for the bridge.123

$10,000 was not, however, the price the bridge company ultimately paid Wiggins. On Monday,

June 28, 1856, three officers of the bridge company were authorized to offer Samuel Wiggins

$28,000 for in-lot 459, a 60-x-100-foot flood-prone plot of land on the Ohio riverfront.124 When bridge company President Richard Ransom reported back on July 30th, he informed the board that he had called on Mr. Wiggins but “deemed it inexpedient to make the offer from intimations he had received that satisfied him Mr. Wiggins would not accept of it.”125 It had quickly become clear to the emissaries from the bridge company that Wiggins would not accept their offer. Ransom further reported that shortly after this became clear, “the President and the Committee… were discharged from having anything to do with the premises.” 126 Wiggins kicked them out of his office.

Eventually, the two parties agreed to a $50,000 ninety-nine-year lease, for which the bridge company would pay $10,000 up front with additional quarterly payments of $800 and the right to buy out the lease for an additional $40,000.127 In 2020 dollars, this is about $1.5 million, possibly greater than the same plot of land would cost today. Knowing that the bridge would significantly curtail his ferry business, Wiggins extracted from the bridge company one

123 Annual Report of the President and Board of Directors to the Stockholders of the Covington and Cincinnati Bridge Company for the Year Ending Feb. 28th, 1867 (Trenton, New Jersey: Murphy & Bechtel, Steam Book and Job Printer, 1867) 99. 124 Record Book, 1856-1883 (Frankfurt, KY: Kentucky Department of Libraries and Archives, Transportation: District Six History, Book 70). 125 Ibid. 126 Ibid. 127 “99 Year Lease Renewable Forever, South Side of Water Street to Low Water Mark of Ohio River, Cin’ti, O.: 100’X400’: In lot #459: Former Owner Samuel Wiggins” (Frankfurt, KY: Kentucky Department of Libraries and Archives, Transportation: District Six History, Box 1).

82 sixth of its original capitalization for just one lot on one side of the river, and he was not done harassing his competitor.

The execution of this lease between Wiggins and the bridge company illustrates how little goodwill existed between them. An August 1 preliminary agreement stipulated that the company could take possession immediately, but “there being tenants on the premises, which it is agreed not to be necessary to disturb immediately,” Wiggins was to continue to collect rent from his tenants and apply it to the company’s rent payments.128 This agreement also stipulated that no ferry rights accompanied the lease and that the land was to be used to construct a bridge.129 While this sounds perfectly civil, the parties ended up having to settle differences over the lease in court.

The company’s November 1856 board minutes reflect coming trouble, noting, “It appears that some difficulty has arisen between Samuel Wiggins and the Covington and

Cincinnati Bridge Company in reference to ground purchased by the later of the former.”130 The minutes indicate Board members, “greatly desired…that this contract with Mr. Wiggins shall be executed amicably and without litigation.”131 At that same meeting, the board empowered its president Richard Ransom to sue Wiggins if necessary.132

When Samuel Wiggins failed to evict his tenants from the site, the bridge company stopped paying rent. Ever-litigious, Wiggins refused to accept the Company’s $10,000 lump

128 Ibid. 129 Ibid. 130 Record Book, 1856-1883. 131 Ibid. 132 Ibid.

83 payment and took the Company to court.133 It is unclear whether this was Wiggins’s last attempt to thwart the bridge or whether he was just being a cautious businessman. Either way, the court ruled in Wiggins’s favor regarding the unpaid rent (minus the rent collected from the tenants). 134 The company paid, and the bridge finally went up.

While in the end the bridge did get built, it was done no thanks to Wiggins. He threw every obstacle he could in front of it, and in many ways he was the victor. When Cincinnatians think of wealthy antebellum forbearers, they tend to think of Nicholas Longworth, Salmon

Chase, or Judge Jacob Burnet. No one remembers Samuel Wiggins—and yet he had such a significant impact on the physical city, manipulating the placement of one of Cincinnati’s most iconic landmarks.

The Covington-Cincinnati Bridge opened to vehicles on New Year’s Day, 1867. A lavish procession of plumed express coaches and omnibuses paraded through town and then over the bridge. Cincinnati’s proud new landmark “did not sway in the least” as a crowd estimated above

50,000 crossed back and forth on that first day.135 This bridge would be the last John Roebling would live to see, due to his untimely death in 1869 while planning The East River Bridge (today the Brooklyn Bridge).136 Heralded as “a monument of human ingenuity and skill, and the perfection of modern art,” the bridge forever joined Covington and Cincinnati, eliminated the watery divide between them, and created an iconic symbol of the cities’ prosperity and growth,

133 William Disney, Report of Cases Adjudged in the Superior Court of Cincinnati at Special and General Terms from October, 1854 to January, 1858 (Cincinnati, OH: Robert Clarke & Co., 1867) 573-578. 134 Record Book, 1856-1883; It should be noted that the bridge was subject to delays, now typical of Cincinnati’s large transportation projects, resulting from the financial panic of 1857 and the Civil War. 135 “Covington: Opening of the Bridge for Vehicles,” Cincinnati Enquirer (January 2, 1867) 2; “Opening of the Cincinnati and Covington Suspension Bridge to Wagons, Carriages, & c.” Cincinnati Enquirer (January 2, 1867) 2. 136 Wagner, 5-6.

84 dominating the Cincinnati skyline to this day.137 Samuel Wigging did not live to see the bridge, but one hopes that even he would have been awed to stand high over the Ohio River and look out at his adopted home. Roebling wrote in 1867 that the site of the bridge had been,

“confined by adverse legislation, now generally regretted, even by those who classed themselves among our most consistent opponents.”138 Perhaps Samuel Wiggins would have been one of these.

The most detailed remembrance of Samuel Wiggins appeared in a Cincinnati

Commercial obituary. It described him as “distinguished for quick perceptions and superior judgment as to matters of business…largely interested in investments…with marked individuality of character…relying largely on his own judgment and possessed of a comprehensive mind…[who]rarely failed in his business enterprises…”139 The paper noted that

“he, in a great measure, kept his operations within his own control, under his own supervision, and gradually concentrated his means so as to have them more easily controlled…”140 While many may have perceived Wiggins as a unscrupulous financier, this memorial cast his negative traits in a more sympathetic light: “He was necessarily, a man of strong, earnest, convictions with that sort of experience and intuition that enabled him to quickly take men for what they were worth, and to measure events by a standard of cool, dispassionate judgment.”141 As a man of extreme wealth, Wiggins was free to live by his own rules: “With so much individuality

137 Rev. I.W. Riley (Ed), “The Covington and Cincinnati Suspension Bridge,” The Ladies Repository: A Monthly Periodical Devoted to Literature and Religion v. XXVII (1867) 121. 138 Roebling, “Report of John A. Roebling,”16. 139 Charles F. Limberg, History of the Wiggins Family, Mullikin Family, Berrien Family in St. Louis, MO as Compiled by Charles F. Limberg 1975-1978 (Unpublished, Collections of the Cincinnati Historical Society, No Date) 5-6; Note that the obituary excerpt is taken from an unpublished family history, rather than an original publication. 140 Ibid. 141 Ibid.

85 as he possessed, he was, in a great measure, indifferent to the common opinion of men, and pursued, in his relations with them, a course of rare independence.”142 As a result, “those who were but slightly acquainted with him were liable to make an unfair estimate of his true feelings of his impulses to action. Under this peculiar temperament, his kindly disposition of the courtesies of life and the extent of his private charities failed to be generally known.”143 Wiggins died while vacationing in Newport, Rhode Island, “suddenly and from disease of the heart.” The most complementary part of the Cincinnati Enquirer’s death notice was that he possessed

“indefatigable and untiring devotion to business.”144

In the end, the bridge did bring about the end of Wiggins’s ferry. While Samuel Wiggins had to face the obsolescence of a technology to which he had devoted his life, he did so in a manner that put his mark on the work that replaced it. The Covington-Cincinnati Bridge stands today as a landmark of innovation, an icon of civic growth, and a testimony to Wiggins’

Cincinnati ferry--a corporate monopoly so large and politically connected that 150 years later we still feel its impact in all those turns we take to get across the bridge.145

142 Ibid. 143 Ibid. 144 Charles Theodore Greve, Centennial History of Cincinnati and Representative Citizens, Volume II (Chicago, IL: Biographical Publishing Company, 1904) 628; “Death of Samuel Wiggins, Esq.,” The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, August 2, 1864, 3. 145 White, 49.

Chapter 2 “Her Child was Born and Dropped into the Vault:” Urban Privies and Women’s Reproductive Choice in Nineteenth-Century Cincinnati We have…for several years past, called the attention of our readers to one of the greatest crimes of the age—that of infanticide. It exists every-where, in city and country—though more in the city where there are more facilities for its concealment than in country where there are fewer opportunities for disguise.1 

In July of 1877 Agnes Baker, “a fine-looking blond of eighteen,” employed as a domestic for Mr. R.G. Barnes, “destroyed the life” of her full-term baby girl by throwing it into the privy vault.2 After finding a trail of blood leading to the vault, Barnes had lowered a candle and found the baby dead. The coroner investigated and found that “the infant was in full health when born, and that it was smothered to death by the filth and foul air of the vault.”3

Nineteenth-century cities were crowded places where newcomers squeezed in within walking distance of the port, riverfront, railyard, or factory. This crowding was even more acute in Cincinnati as the hills formed a de facto development boundary. Before inclines allowed streetcars to operate beyond the basin to relieve the pressure, more than 200,000 people had crowded into the six square miles of the basin.4 Cincinnati was one of the most densely populated cities in the nation, and had more residents renting more people per dwelling unit than the midwestern average.5 The streets teemed with people going to and from work, school, market, church, entertainments, club meetings, recreational activities, evenings at the saloon,

1 “Child Murder: From the New York Express,” Cincinnati Enquirer (March 28, 1867) 1. 2 “Hiding Her Shame: A Mother But No Wife Smothers Her New-Born Infant in a Vault: Womanlike, She Takes All the Blame on Herself, and Tries to Spare the Name of Her Seducer,” Cincinnati Enquirer (July 16, 1977) 8. 3 Ibid. 4 Zane Miller, Boss Cox’s Cincinnati: Urban Politics in the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968) 3-5. 5 David Stradling, Cincinnati: From River City to Highway Metropolis (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2003) 36.

87 or their family’s midday meal. Horse drawn trucks hauled goods in the same streets where pigs moved toward the slaughterhouse and fine carriages transported the wealthy who had the means to live a little further out of town.6

Most nineteenth-century Cincinnatians lived in tenements where the average apartment was just two rooms, often shared by large families of eight or ten.7 For the thirty or more residents of each tenement building, there were no private rooms. Beds were shared and even the outdoor privy served the entire building.8 As Mike Gold explained in his autobiographical novel about growing up in the tenements of New York’s Lower East Side, nineteenth century cities were loud and busy, and privacy was hard to find. Gold writes,

“Women hung their washlines on the roof. And lovers climbed there, seeking that treasure which will never be found on the East Side: privacy.”9 Unlike other tenement spaces, backyard privies had a door that could be closed to provide brief moments of privacy within the crowded city. This chapter unearths an unexpected and even horrifying use of that little patch of privacy.10

In the context of the bustling nineteenth-century world, it is easy to imagine that this small private space was a place for women to care for their bodies and manage their fertility—

6 Miller, Boss Cox’s Cincinnati, 3-5. 7 Cincinnati Better Housing League, Housing Progress in Cincinnati: Second Report (Cincinnati, OH: Better Housing League, 1921) 14; Cincinnati Better Housing League. A Tenement House Survey in Cincinnati (Cincinnati, OH: The Cincinnati Better Housing League, 1921) 12-13; It is worth noting here that Cincinnati’s three basin neighborhoods were all mixed-income neighborhoods where tenements were interspersed with single-family homes which also would have relied on privies. 8 Day, David, Personal Interview, January 29, 2020; Cincinnati Better Housing League. A Tenement House Survey, 12-13. 9 Michael Gold, Jews Without Money, (New York: PublicAffairs Books, 1930) 127. 10 Young women employed as domestic servants in single family homes also lacked privacy under their employer’s watch, making the privy just as important as a source of privacy for them as it would have been in a crowded tenement.

88 the things taken care of in the bathroom today. What is more difficult to imagine is that it also gave some women—mostly young, single, and poor—an opportunity to manage unwanted pregnancies. Rather than facing the shame and stigma of unwed motherhood and the almost certain loss of their livelihood, in Cincinnati and elsewhere, privies offered desperate women a way to claim reproductive control and take agency over their bodies and their lives.

Over-the-Rhine

Though Over-the-Rhine is celebrated as an intact nineteenth century neighborhood, a

2001 study of the neighborhood revealed that over 50% of the structures that existed in Over- the-Rhine in 1891 are no longer extant.11 Facing this inconsistency between the established narrative about Over-the-Rhine today--that it is an intact illustration of nineteenth century

Cincinnati—and the reality that it has actually been heavily altered, encourages historians and citizens to imagine what has gone missing.

Walking around to the backs of Over-the-Rhine’s tenement buildings quickly reveals an intricate network of alleys, and rear and side courts. The doors to the buildings’ residential units were almost always located in the courtyard, turning the narrow side court into the residents’

“front yard.” Here residents (especially women who were not generally welcome in saloons) socialized and worked. Children played and sometimes even slept here in the hot summer.

11 Brenda C. Scheer and Daniel Ferdelman, “Inner-city Destruction and Survival: The Case of Over the Rhine, Cincinnati” Urban Morphology 5, n. 1 (2001) 20.

These outdoor spaces also provided most families’ with important sanitary services, including water pumps and privies, features now almost completely erased.12

I came to discover the shocking frequency with which nineteenth century women in

Cincinnati disposed of unwanted pregnancies in backyard privies by looking closely at Over-the-

Rhine’s built environment. Rather than focus on what remained of the neighborhood’s nineteenth century character, I focused on the pieces of nineteenth century life that had been eliminated, both from the physical city, and from our understanding of life there. I looked at

Sanborn maps and remaining physical clues to find traces of privies in Cincinnati’s tenement districts. This initial exploration of the built environment led me to search the local paper for information about how privies were constructed, used, cleaned, and regulated. As I searched, I noticed an alarming pattern of articles about privies that involved abandoned babies or fetuses.

While I will use some supporting documents from the Hamilton County Coroner, these newspaper reports are my most significant source of information about women and babies in privies.13

Privies

The word privy describes what we today would call an outhouse. The word outhouse was also used historically, but privy was the more common term. Initially privies in Over-the-

12 Cincinnati Better Housing League Lantern Slide Collection, Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. A point relevant to the discussion of the disposal of fetal and neonatal remains in privies is that, though Cincinnatians may have relieved themselves in the backyard up through the middle of the twentieth century, most of these outdoor toilets were converted to fully plumbed flush toilets by roughly World War I, making them distinctly less useful as repositories where remains might go undetected. 13 Note that the reports of the Hamilton County Coroner are not available before 1886 due to a fire in the courthouse, so most of my cases could not be traced through the coroner.

Rhine were holes twenty feet deep dug into the earth lined with stones or plaster, covered with a wooden box containing a seat and then surrounded by four walls and a roof.14 The hole into which waste deposits fell was called the vault.15 Privies were cleaned by “night soil men” who were paid to dig out the contents and transport them to the city’s sullage boat which then released the waste into the river.16 Later these outdoor toilets were connected to sewer lines through an opening at the bottom of the vault and was then known as a catchbasin toilet.

Eventually outdoor toilets were fully plumbed to allow the type of flushing we know today.17 As plumbed toilets moved indoors and became housed in “water closets,” the term closet or water closet was also occasionally used to refer to outdoor toilets. The use of the term “vault” to refer to the space below the seat continued to refer to anything other than a fully plumbed line leading directly into a sewer.18

Though only one of what was once thousands of outdoor toilet is known to remain in

Over-the-Rhine today, a careful observer can identify their locations from the remnants they left behind, particularly by flashing lines on adjacent buildings. We can then match these scars up with Sanborn fire insurance maps.

14 Maureen Ogle, All the Modern Conveniences: American Household Plumbing, 1840-1890 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) 71. 15 The vault was also sometimes called “the sink,” especially on the east coast. 16 Joan Geismar, “Where Is the Night Soil? Thoughts on an Urban Privy,” Historical Archeology, Vol. 27, No. 2 (1993) 61; Annual Reports of the City Departments of the City of Cincinnati for the Year Ending January 29, 1868 (Cincinnati, OH: Gazette Steam Book Printing and Job Establishment, 1968) 479. 17 Cincinnati Better Housing League, “Report,” 5-8; These outdoor flush toilets were marketed as anti-freezing, but this was a misnomer. 18 Ibid.

Southeast corner of Logan and Findlay Streets showing the ghost of a privy on a remaining wall. (Photograph by the author) By carefully reading the built environment it becomes clear that the mark on this wall is the shadow of a now-demolished privy.

This image from a 1904 Sanborn Map (corrected to 1934) shows a one-story wooden privy behind a

saloon at the southeast corner of Logan and Findlay Streets. (Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, Local History and Genealogy Department) Sanborn maps also provide the dimensions and height of Over-the-Rhine’s privies, almost always one story and ranging from about four feet by four feet for a single-seat privy, to as long as twelve or sixteen feet for a privy that housed multiple compartments.19 Sanborn maps confirm that privies were a ubiquitous part of Over-the-Rhine’s urban landscape, and yet almost none of them survive today.20 The sensory experience of Over-the-Rhine has changed drastically in the last hundred years, as privies were eliminated and alleys stopped smelling of human waste. Using a privy in the backyard shaped the lived experience for Cincinnatians in hundreds of ways we can no longer begin to imagine.

The lantern slide collection of Cincinnati’s Better Housing League (BHL) gives us our best glimpse into the reality of Cincinnati’s privies. The BHL was founded just after World War I to, somewhat paternalistically, help Cincinnati’s tenement dwellers.21 In 1921 it conducted a systematic survey of Cincinnati’s tenements, which found that even then, well after the peak of tenement construction in the late nineteenth century, between 12,000 and 14,000 tenements were still inhabited within Cincinnati’s three basin neighborhoods.22 The BHL estimated that

150,000 residents of the city—about one third of the total population—resided in these units where the average apartment consisted or two rooms and relied on an outdoor toilet.23

19 Cincinnati Ohio Insurance Maps (New York: Sanborn Fire Insurance Company, 1904). 20 Ibid. 21 Cincinnati Better Housing League, Housing Progress in Cincinnati: Second Report (Cincinnati, OH: Better Housing League, 1921) 6-11. 22 Ibid., 11. 23 Ibid.

The BHL investigation of privies found seventy percent of toilets in 5,993 units were located outside. Seven percent of these were still earthen privies in 1921, thirty-seven percent of those were catchbasin toilets, and twenty-six percent were so-called anti-freezing toilets.24

These distinctions relate directly to the subject of abortion and infanticide as only in an earthen privy or catchbasin toilet would the disposal of a fetus or baby have been physically possible.

The BHL report noted the, “discomfort, inconvenience, moral, and physical danger” related to outdoor toilets and stated, “the toilet evil is by far the most extensive and most serious problem in Cincinnati’s tenements.”25 The BHL’s records include numerous photos of privies in the 1920s, All but two images, which show brand-new privies, illustrate the worst conditions inspectors could find rather than average conditions. They feature leaning privy buildings, plumbing leaks, cracked and missing seats, and piles of filthy newspaper (used to wipe), dirt, and feces. One of the worst is pictured here:

24 Cincinnati Better Housing League, Housing Progress in Cincinnati: Second Report, 13. 25 Ibid.

This disgusting image was taken by the Better Housing League in the 1920s to illustrate the problematic conditions of Cincinnati’s privies. By this time most who could afford to had moved up and out of the basin neighborhoods leaving only lower-income people to suffer these sanitary conditions. The BHL estimated that 150,000 residents or about 40% of the city’s population were living in the basin, which was 1/19 of the city’s area (Cincinnati Better Housing League, Housing Progress in Cincinnati, 11) (Cincinnati Better Housing League Lantern Slide Collection, Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County) Though the reports of the BHL were compiled by inspectors and lack the voices of

Cincinnatians who used these privies on a daily basis in 1903 the New York Tenement

Commission published short testimonials in support of New York’s tenement reform movement. It seems likely that the citizens of Cincinnati might have felt the same about privies in their homes as these New Yorkers did, and so these voices help complete our understanding

95 of privy use. One woman reflected that, “four families have to use one toilet, men, women, and children, ’so,’ she says, ‘we use it as little as possible.’ ‘I have the children go to the toilet at school, for I am afraid of sickness. It is so horrid for my daughter, that she waits to use the toilet where she works. She hasn’t been inside of one here for four or five months.’”26 In the same publication a tenement inspector shared his observations of privies. He wrote, “there are rickety, weather beaten, closets that have openings to the yard, are patched with splintered pieces of board, have the seats broken or even removed, and in a few cases the floor unsafe against going down into the sink.”27 In addition to the condition of the buildings, he also took issue with the state of cleanliness he found within the privies. He wrote, “there are many closets that have deposits of offal on the seats or the floor, or both, and outside on the yard floor.”28

Existing Literature

This chapter weaves together several threads of scholarship to connect the physical city to abortion and infanticide among desperate women in nineteenth-century Cincinnati.29

26 Robert Weeks DeForest, The Tenement House Problem Volume 1 (New York: The MacMillian Company, 1903) 385. 27 Ibid., 431. 28 Ibid. 29 The field of urban history provides a wealth of scholarship on the physical city, urban infrastructure, and sanitation. For clues about reading urban environments or thinking about the changing lives of buildings over time, see those listed in the introduction. Two great works on urban systems are David E. Nye’s Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), and, more relevant to this chapter, Martin V. Melosi’s encyclopedic The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Books which help to set the context for nineteenth century Cincinnati include: Walter Styx Glazer’s Cincinnati in 1840: The Social and Functional Organization of an Urban Community During the Pre-Civil War Period (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1999), Steven J. Ross’ Workers on the Edge: Work, Leisure, and Politics in Industrializing Cincinnati 1788-1890. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, and Zane L. Miller’s Boss Cox’s Cincinnati: Urban Politics in the Progressive Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). There is not a great deal of literature specific to privies in the urban environment, though they do fit generally into works on the history of technology in the landscape like Thomas P. Hughes’ Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,

Archaeologists have studied nineteenth century privies and their sometimes unusual contents.

Robert A Genheimer’s “Digging the Necessary: Privy Archeology in the Central Ohio Valley” details the objects discovered in a Cincinnati privy and highlights the secretive nature of these deposits detailing privies as locations for drowning unwanted cats and dogs or stealthfully consuming alcohol or drugs.30 Sharon Ann Burnston’s “Babies in the Well: An Underground

Insight Into Deviant Behavior In Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” and Thomas Crist’s “Babies in the Privy: Prostitution, Infanticide and Abortion in New York City’s Five Points District” both detail archaeological privy excavations in which human fetal remains were found.31 Their work most clearly connects privies to women’s reproductive choices, including infanticide and abortion. Burnston’s work systematically determines that there could be little other reason for the presence of the two sets of remains she uncovered beyond abortion or infanticide. Crist’s piece explores three sets of fetal remains found in an archaeological exploration of the privy shaft formerly situated behind a now demolished row house which had been used as a brothel in the early nineteenth-century. He links the women’s profession to their desperation and the necessity of destroying and concealing unwanted pregnancies.32

2004). There are a few works specific to the history of plumbing and toilets beyond Melosi’s Sanitary City, though most are popular in nature. Maureen Ogle’s All the Modern Conveniences: American Household Plumbing 1840- 1890 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Pres, 1996) was extremely helpful as a scholarly piece specifically focused on the history of toilets. 30 Robert A. Genheimer. “Digging the Necessary: Privy Archeology in the Central Ohio Valley,” Ohio Valley Historical Archeology 18 (2003) 143-151. 31 Thomas A. Crist, “Babies in the Privy: Prostitution, Infanticide, and Abortion in New York City’s Five Points District,” Historical Archaeology v. 39, n. 1 (2005) 19-46; Sharon Ann Burnston, “Babies in the Well: An Underground Insight Into Deviant Behavior In Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 6, no. 2 (April, 1982) 151-186. 32 Ibid.

With the rise of social history and the resulting cultural turn of the 1970s came an outpouring of works on the lives and conditions of domestic servants published in the 1980s and 1990s. While most of these do explore the working and living conditions for domestic servants, very few of them explore the sexual practices or exploitation of domestics.33 It is clear from the dates of these publications in the 1980s that this was a hot topic early in the history of the field of social history.34 In his foundation study of the topic, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America, David W. Katzman brings the voices of domestic servants to life to explore their work, living conditions, and relationships with their employers. In linking changes in domestic service to the development of the industrializing city,

Katzman explores domestic service in its uniquely urban form. Faye Dudden’s Serving Women:

Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America, expands on Katzman’s work with special attention to issues of race, ethnicity, class, and gender.

In 1997 Kenneth Wheeler noted that “few historians have examined American infanticide,” and pointed out that, “the historical forces that affected American infanticide are poorly understood.”35 They remain so today. Though there are several books about infanticide in the nineteenth-century in England, Ireland, Scotland, France, and Canada, no monograph focuses on this practice in the nineteenth-century United States, though articles address

33 Some of the best of these are, Faye E. Dudden, Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America Dudden (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), David M. Katzman Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press 1981), and Daniel E. Sutherland Americans and Their Servants: Domestic Service in the United States 1800-1920 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1981). One more recent title is Alana Erickson Coble, Cleaning Up: The Transformation of Domestic Service in Twentieth Century New York City (New York: Routledge, 2006). 34 Dudden, 1983; Katzman, 1981; Sutherland, 1981. 35 Kenneth H. Wheeler “Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century, Ohio,” Journal of Social History 31 n. 2 (Winter 1997) 407, 414.

98 infanticide in Ohio, Baltimore, Rhode Island, and Chicago.36 Though life in nineteenth-century

Ohio may have been more nuanced than captured in his article, Kenneth Wheeler’s study of infanticide in two nineteenth-century Ohio counties includes a careful analysis of the family and work lives of the women whose cases he explored and concludes that, “infanticide was a thriving social practice well into the late nineteenth-century.”37 Kate Hemphill’s work on

Baltimore centers poverty as the key factor in understanding infanticide and explores a class and race as key factors in mothers’ behavior and punishment.38 Simone Caron’s uses case studies in Providence, Rhode Island to reveal much the same profile of women who commit infanticide (that they are poor, young, and single) as this study has discovered in Cincinnati.

Michelle Oberman’s exploration of infanticide in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century

Chicago links historical practices to contemporary infanticide cases and works to explore the

“structural underpinnings” or this “incomprehensible act.”39 She concludes, “Infanticide is, not a random, unpredictable crime. Instead, it is deeply imbedded in, and responsive to, the societies in which it occurs. The historical homicide cases provide further evidence of the fact

36 Relevant articles are: Simone Caron, “’Killed By Its Mother:’ Infanticide in Providence County, Rhode Island, 1870-1938,” Journal of Social History v. 44 n. 1 (Fall 2010) 213-237; Katie M. Hemphill, “’Driven to the Commission of this Crime:’ Women and Infanticide in Baltimore, 1835-1860,” Journal of the Early Republic v. 32, n. 3 (Fall 2012) 437-461; Kenneth H. Wheeler, “Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century Ohio,” Journal of Social History v. 31 n. 2 (Winter 1997) 407-418. Monographs on infanticide outside the U.S. include: Rachel G. Fuchs, Poor and Pregnant in Paris: Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992); Peter C. Hoffner and N.E.H. Hull, Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and New England, 1558-1805 (New York, New York University Press, 1981); Kristen Johnson Kramar, Unwilling Mothers, Unwanted Babies: Infanticide in Canada (Vancouver, BC, Canada: UBC Press, 2005); Josephine McDonagh, Child Murder in British Culture 1720- 1900 (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2003): Lionel Rose, The Massacre of the Innocents: Infanticide in Britain 1800-1939 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986); and Deborah A. Symonds, Weep Not for Me: Women, Ballads, and Infanticide in Early Modern Scotland (University Park, Pennsylvania, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997). 37 Wheeler, 414. 38 Katie M Hemphill, “’Driven to the Commission of This Crime:” Women and Infanticide in Baltimore, 1835-1860,” Journal of the Early Republic 32, no. 3 (Fall 2013) 437-461. 39 Michelle Oberman, “Understanding Infanticide in Context: Mothers Who Kill, 1870-1930 and Today,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 92, no. 3 (Spring 2002) 735.

99 that the crime of infanticide is committed by mothers who cannot parent their child under the circumstances dictated by their unique position in place and time.”40

Peter C. Hoffner and N.E. H. Hull’s Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and New

England 1558-1805 does address infanticide in the early U.S. as it relates to precedents in

English law. Oberman’s “Mothers Who Kill: Coming to Terms with Modern American

Infanticide” also reviews British law on the subject and offers a very brief history of infanticide in the U.S. as a prologue to her investigation of infanticide today.41 The best treatment of infanticide in the U.S. is to be found in Roger Lane’s works on crime in Philadelphia and in the

U.S. where he places the abortion and infanticide in the context of other crimes, and of the poverty and desperation of nineteenth century American cities, complete with detailed information about the law and punishment.42 Lane’s work will be used extensively throughout this chapter to show that this crime was undertaken by only the most desperate of women, and that because of their already desperate and delicate position, they we usually able to evade prosecution even when caught.

Though abortion is not the focus of this chapter, some of the literature on abortion informed discussions of women’s reproductive choices and punishment. The collection of works about the history of abortion and reproductive rights in the United States is much more fully

40 Ibid., 737. 41 Oberman’s study of infanticide today finds much the same conditions for infanticide as found in this paper in nineteenth century Cincinnati, i.e. the women who commit infanticide are overwhelmingly young and poor and do not have lasting or meaningful relationships with the child’s male progenitor. 42 Roger Lane, Murder in America: A History (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1997) and Roger Lane, Violent Death in the City: Suicide, Accident, Murder in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1979).

100 developed than those on infanticide. In fact, the list of work is virtually endless.43 Many of these works make the point that medical abortion induced by a paid practitioner was often a practice of middle- and upper-class women due to cost, whereas poor women were more likely to terminate after birth which was often their only option given their limited financial and social resources.44

My contribution here is first, to highlight this little-known reality of nineteenth and early-twentieth century urban life. While the connection between shared privies, now absent from the urban landscape, and women’s reproductive choice seems to be a compelling intersection for study, no scholarship has focused on this act in this place. Here I more fully connect women’s lived experience to the built world and to explore the way in which physical space both constrained and directed their course of action. This chapter bridges between archaeological literature which does contain some work on fetal remains in privies and urban history where women’s contributions to American cities are often remembered in light of civic housekeeping and progressive reform. My work proposes that because privies provided a space for women to conceal an abortion or birth, their existence in the built environment gave otherwise powerless, single women the opportunity to exercise agency and control over their

43 Foundational works in this field include Janet Farrell Brodie’s Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), James C. Mohr, Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy, 1800-1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), and Leslie J. Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and the Law in the United States, 1867-1973 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997). 44 Jean H. Baker, Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011); Nicola Beisel and Tamara Kay, “Abortion, Race, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Sociological Review v. 69, n. 4 (August 2004); Cornelia Hughes Dayton, “Taking the Trade: Abortion and Gender Relations in a Eighteenth-Century New England Village,” The William and Mary Quarterly v. 48, n. 1 (January 1991); Judith Walzer Leavitt, Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America 1750-1950 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986); Rickie Solinger, Pregnancy and Power: A History of Reproductive Politics in the United States Revised Edition (New York: New York University Press, 2019).

101 own fertility. This is not to say that privies were the only place urban women might have disposed of unwanted pregnancies. Babies were found in fields, rivers, barns, trunks, and under beds.45 Yet the dark, private, unpleasant space of the privy clearly offered women their best chance to avoid detection. The discovery of this gruesome reality uses a now-vanished feature of urban life to help historians more fully flesh out our understandings of the past.

Who Were These Women?

In her study of nineteenth-century Paris, historian Rachel Fuchs found the women most likely to conceal or destroy a fetus or newborn were, “female, single domestic servants, in their early twenties, abandoned by their lovers, and afraid to dishonor themselves and their hardworking families.”46 Based on reports in the Cincinnati Enquirer, the same basic profile applies to women in Cincinnati.47 Fuchs found that of the Parisian mothers tried for infanticide between 1867 and 1891, ninety percent were single…and two-thirds were employed as domestic servants.”48 In his exploration of infanticide in two nineteenth-century Ohio counties,

Kenneth Wheeler similarly concludes that the, “people most likely to commit infanticide [were] young, single, highly mobile women with few economic resources and little or no attachment to the wider community.”49 In every case of infanticide Wheeler investigated in which the woman was employed, she was employed as a domestic servant.50 Wheeler’s finding echoes the cases covered by the Cincinnati Enquirer about babies in privies (both locally and elsewhere) in which

45 Hamilton County Morgue Records, 1887-1930, University of Cincinnati Archives and Rare Books Library. https://digital.libraries.uc.edu/collections/morgue/. 46 Fuchs, 201. 47 Cincinnati Enquirer 1841-2009, Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. 48 Fuchs, 216. 49 Wheeler, 414. 50 Ibid., 411.

102 of the forty women whose professions were given in the paper, thirty-six were listed as domestics. The other four were an employee in a shoe factory, a former ballet dancer, and two prostitutes.51

Evidence of the high numbers of domestic workers among single pregnant women can also be seen in the published statistics of a home for unwed mothers in New York City where eighty-five of the 158 women taken in in 1907 and 102 of the 168 taken in in 1908 had come from household service.52 As part of a multi-volume study of women and child wage earners conducted by the federal government between 1910 and 1913, a cognitive dissonance was noticed in the general perception among superintendents of homes of unwed mothers who noted that, “the home and domestic service furnish the majority of the inmates” and found this fact, “the more striking since most of the superintendents held strongly to the established opinion that domestic service is the safest occupation for women.” 53 This was due to the misguided belief that an established “home” was a safer setting for single women than wage work or other employment which exposed them to the dangers of the city.

Domestic servants generally lived in the home of their employer and lived constantly under the employer’s eye. Many domestics even shared bedrooms with other servants or

51 This is taken from the 164 stories about babies in privies collected from the Cincinnati Enquirer 1843-1914 using search terms including “baby,” “fetus,” “infanticide,” “privy,” “outhouse,” and “vault.” One of the prostitutes is mentioned only as “a young girl of considerable notoriety” which I assume means that she is working as a prostitute. For non-domestics see: “Esther Moore Before Judge Noyes—Testimony in the Case—Final Discharge of Prisoner,” Cincinnati Enquirer (July 30, 1868) 8; “New Albany: Arrested for Infanticide,” Cincinnati Enquirer (June 20, 7168) 5; “Another Infanticide,” Cincinnati Enquirer (November 30, 1874) 8; “The Hoosier Capital,” Cincinnati Enquirer (February 16, 1888) 5. 52 “Relation Between Occupation and Criminality of Women,” Report on the Condition of Women and Child Wage Earners in the United States, v. XV. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1911) 84-85: The term “household service” here is used to include domestics, “lady’s maids,” and nurses. 53 Ibid., 85.

103 children, or they slept in public areas of the house such as the kitchen.54 Due to the constant supervision, time away from home became especially precious to women in domestic service.

Young women waited for their one evening off per week or the half day of work on Sunday and did their best to develop a social life during these brief respites from work and surveillance. Yet, in some households this socializing was also suspect. Historian Faye Dutton quotes a letter in which an employer stated, “she would not keep a girl who wished to give or go to parties.”55 In

Francis Trollope’s best-selling Domestic Manners of the Americans, she recounted her trials with keeping domestic servants during her stay in Cincinnati in the 1820s. In one case, a servant whose job performance was stellar was caught lying about going to church to gain extra social time. When the lie was discovered, she was dismissed immediately.56

Domestic labor was physically demanding, including long hours and constant physical exertion. The U.S. government report on women and child wage earners included interviews from women who had left domestic service for work in a commercial laundry. A twenty-year- old German-American woman had worked as a domestic for five years beginning at age thirteen said, “lifting tubs and carrying slops, etc., [was] too heavy for her and produced pelvic troubles” and a thirty-two-year-old African American woman said she preferred laundry work to domestic service because it gave her more time to herself and better pay.57 A twenty-two- year-old German woman who worked as a domestic for four years made the point that,

54 Dudden, 196. 55 Ibid.,199. 56 Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (New York: Vintage Books, 1949) 55-57. 57 “Employment of Women in Laundries,” Report on the Conditions of Woman and Child Wage-Earners in the United States v.XII (Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1911) 48, 53; Slops is the dirty wastewater from kitchen work, cleaning, or chamber pots which domestics would have had to empty by hand.

104

“housework is never done.”58 A domestic in Minnesota is quoted in historian David Katzman’s foundational text on domestic labor in the U.S., Seven Days a Week, noting “all hours are working hours.” 59 Another woman was more specific in her description saying, “I used to get up at four o’clock every morning and work until ten p.m. every day in the week. Mondays and

Tuesdays, when the washing and ironing was to be done I used to get up at two o’clock and wash or iron until breakfast time.”60 In 1846 Horace Greeley chimed in on the conditions of domestic labor in the New York Weekly Tribune. He said, when ”nine tenths [of Yankee girls] prefer to encounter the stunning din, the imperfect ventilation, monotonous labor, and excessive hours of a cotton factory in preference to doing housework, be sure the latter is not yet what it should be.”61

In white families girls might be put into service at age twelve, while African American girls might enter into domestic service as early as eight or nine years old.62 After 1900 African

Americans filled a greater percentage of domestic positions in the U.S.63 Recent immigrants shifted away from domestic work toward work in factories while African Americans remained largely constrained to domestic work.64 It is also worth noting that in the Cincinnati Enquirer reports of babies in privies, more African American women accused of infanticide appear to

58 “Employment of Women in Laundries,” 107. 59 Katzman, 31. 60 Ibid. 61 “Remarks,” New York Weekly Tribune (September 16, 1846) 1. 62 “Employment of Women in Laundries,” 44, 49; One African American girl started at age six. 63 Katzman, 93-94; Young Women’s Christian Association of the U.S.A. First Report of the Commission on Household Employment. (New York: National Board of the Young Women’s Christian Association. 1915) 6: Alana Erickson Coble, Cleaning Up: The Transformation of Domestic Service in Twentieth Century New York City (New York: Routledge, 2006) 138, 177 64 Katzman, 93-94.

105 have been prosecuted, while the suspected crimes of white women were often dismissed.65

This possibility is supported by Kate Hemphill’s work on Baltimore which concludes, “many of the women indicted by coroner’s juries and arrested for infanticide were also socially marginalized from middle-class society on the basis of their race and ethnicity. Of the sixteen women who were committed to city jail for murdering infants, ten were listed as “col[ored],” a drastic overrepresentation [of Baltimore’s African American population].”66

Whether a woman entered service as a child, or sometime later in life, many were separated from their families for the first time and found themselves paradoxically both lonely and under constant surveillance.67 Though busy all day and surrounded by others, domestics often felt isolated and lonely, and longed for both privacy and freedom to connect with family and friends. A 1915 YWCA publication quoted a domestic who said, “I don’t think a young woman should be advised to enter domestic service … There is no place where one is more lonely than to be alone with people, and that is what working in a home means to so many.”68

The little free time servants had was at the discretion of their mistress.69 They were generally not allowed to entertain guests, leaving them isolated from their peers and their families.70 Yet at the same time, most domestics shared a room with other servants or children and were

65 “Covington,” Cincinnati Enquirer (April 5, 1870) 7; “Negro Infanticide,” Cincinnati Enquirer (February, 12, 1874) 7; “The Infanticide Case,” Cincinnati Enquirer (December 15, 1876) 2; “Supposed Infanticide: A Nasty Charge Against Three Mulattoes,” Cincinnati Enquirer (December 28, 1876)8; “Cynthiana Kentucky – Arrest of a Suspected Murderer - An Attempt at Infanticide,” Cincinnati Enquirer (August 31, 1878) 1; “Charged with Infanticide,” Cincinnati Enquirer (May 31, 1884) 4; “An Infanticide,” Cincinnati Enquirer (December 3, 1887) 16. 66 Hemphill, 448. 67 Dudden, 197. 68 Young Women’s Christian Association of the U.S.A. 11. 69 Dudden, 197-203. 70 Katzman, 115-116.

106 under their employer’s constant surveillance. 71 Class differences set them apart from those in their new household, and new, sometimes arbitrary, rules and expectations governed their days.72 A summary of the findings of social workers in 1913 found,

The houseworker is cut off from her family; the hours are long and irregular; there is only slight opportunity for recreation, and that unsupervised; holidays are few; the work takes the girl out of the main currents of modern life, and isolates her in a back eddy; she is constantly conscious of a galling lack of freedom, independence, and consideration from others, and of a distinctly lowered social standing; and the danger of moral contamination is even greater than in many other form of work.73 In Cincinnati, where many recent immigrants spoke German, life could be even more isolating if there was a language barrier between servant and employer.74

Despite the perils of life as a domestic, many women found it to be their most appealing employment option. It provided relatively safe living conditions, included meals, and was familiar work.75 For women whose family unit was not available as a means of support, whether due to distance or financial circumstance, domestic service was one of the few ways that unskilled women could support themselves.76 Other options mentioned most frequently in reports about “the servant problem” were factory work or prostitution.77

71 Dudden, 196. 72 Ibid. 73 Robert A. Woods and Albert J. Kennedy, Young Working Girls: A Summary of Evidence from Two Thousand Social Workers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913) 28-29. 74 Dudden, 198. 75 Katzman, 3-5. 76 Dudden, 203. 77 “Relation Between Occupation and Criminality in Women,” 103; Multiple sources cite a connection between domestic labor and prostitution. For example, this U.S. Government report reported that of thirty occasional prostitutes it studied, “more of them at the time of their downfall were engaged in domestic service than in any other form of work.”

107

Though not employed in the sex trade, sex could be a part of what a domestic’s employer expected of her. Katzman found,

the one area of great power of men over servants was in sexual contact. The sexual exploitation of servants by masters—the initiation of boys and young men into sexual relations—was an important theme in Victorian literature [which was presumably a reflection of reality if to a lesser degree]. The success of the master or of other men of the household in using the maid as a sexual object reflected the powerlessness of servant girls.78 He further noted that women, “submitted to private indignities” out of fear of losing their jobs, a situation so common it was the subject of a mid-twentieth century cartoon postcard.79

This postcard from the 1940s makes light of male employers’ power to demand sexual services from domestic servants. (General Comics postcard, 1941) The situation was even worse for domestics of color since domestic service, “compound[ed] white male sexual exploitation because it placed young girls even more directly under white power,” and “southern white men…consider[ed] the colored girl their special prey.”80 The 1911 report on women’s labor found that domestic service put women in a position where it was,

“easy for men to essay advances toward her if they have any desire in that direction.”81 Though

78 Katzman, 216. 79 Ibid., 216. 80 Ibid., 216-217; A Negro Nurse “More Slavery at the South,” The Independent (January 25, 1912) 196. 81 “Relation Between Occupation and Criminality in Women,” 88.

108 the report went on to place much of the blame on the women themselves writing, “the girl does not go wrong because she is a domestic or an unskilled worker, but she is a domestic or an unskilled worker because she is the kind of girl most likely to be tempted and least likely to resist.”82 In 1848 Elizabeth Blackwell reported on her work in the syphilis ward of a Philadelphia almshouse where, “most of the women are unmarried, a large proportion having lived at service and been seduced by their masters.”83 In Cincinnati, Mattie Wilson found herself in the same position. In June of 1890 the Enquirer reported that Wilson has given birth to a baby which she let fall into the privy and that, after first lying about the identity of the father, was found to have fallen victim to her employer Benjamin Dodt, who had “accomplished her ruin” one day while his wife was away.84

David Katzman also points out that the isolation and potential loneliness inherent in domestic service could lead to more, though clearly not fully, consensual sexual relationships.

He writes, “servant women who were lonely and cut off from normal social contacts also needed warmth and passion.”85 Historian Faye Dudden notes that outside their place of employment and, “separated from her family, a domestic was vulnerable to men who practiced seduction under the promise of marriage and then moved on.”86 Given these circumstances it is not difficult to imagine that many young domestic, found themselves enceinte. This left them with a dilemma.

82 “Relation Between Occupation and Criminality of Women,” 93. 83 Dudden, 215. 84 “A Social Scandal: The Town of Harrison Has Food for Gossip: Benjamin Dodt Charged with Ruining Hattie Wilson,” Cincinnati Enquirer (June 11, 1890) 8. 85 Katzman, 216. 86 Dudden, 214.

109

Privacy and Concealment

Because privies were one of the few private spaces in crowded tenement neighborhoods, if someone wanted to conceal something or do something other people would disapprove of, the privy was probably where it happened. Archaeologist Kathleen Wheeler explains,” privies are important features embodying ideas about cleanliness, health, beauty, and privacy (emphasis added).”87 While holding waste deposits was the primary purpose of these privies, they also held secrets.

Privies provide historians with information not otherwise available, which can challenge our assumptions about the past.88 Because privies provided privacy, they became, as archaeologist Robert Genheimer has noted, not just toilets, but also places to throw things away. 89 He wrote, “there is no place more individual or private than a toilet. Privies are special places where the unspeakable occurs and unique discards take place.”90 In particular, privy vaults were used to throw away things intended to be concealed from view – a place where,

“things were intentionally placed to avoid scrutiny.”91 This secretive nature of privies explains some surprising deposits found in recent privy excavations including pornographic pipe tampers in Philadelphia, fifty-seven cat skeletons in one privy in Cincinnati’s West End.92 Though

87 Kathleen Wheeler, “View from the Outhouse: What We Can Learn from the Excavation of Privies,” Historical Archaeology Vol. 43, No. 1 (2002) 1. 88John L, Cotter, Daniel G. Roberts and Michael Parrington. The Buried Past: An Archeological History of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992) 447. 89 Robert Genheimer, Personal Interview, March 7, 2016. 90 Genheimer, “Digging the Necessary,” 145. 91 Ibid. 92 Cotter, 100; Warner and Genheimer, 11-25; Burnston, 151-186; Crist, Thomas A. “Babies in the Privy: Prostitution, Infanticide and Abortion in New York City’s Five Points District,” Historical Archaeology 39, no. 1 (2005) 19-46; A pipe tamper is a tool used to pack tobacco tightly into the bowl of a pipe. They were often ornamented or carved. John L Cotter at al.’s book on historic archaeology in Philadelphia identified historic pipe tampers shaped and ornamented in an erotic or pornographic manner.

110 sometimes challenging to uncover, these previously hidden aspects of eighteenth and nineteenth century American life provide historians with new insights into the behaviors and attitudes of the past. Archeologist Ann Burnston points out that, “successfully concealed abnormal behavior is historically invisible.”93 Historians have no way to know how people behaved in the past unless they left some record behind. If the record was hidden in the privy, it is as if the behaviors never occurred. Ned Kaufman echoes this, writing, “a particular challenge is to reveal historical layers whose traces have been erased over time or were never meant to be visible.”94 He believes that allowing these stories to disappear, “is to erase an important part of the city’s history.”95

One of the most provocative finds in American privy archaeology has been the bones of human infants in privies in New York and Philadelphia. In his 2005 article, “Babies in the Privy:

Prostitution, Infanticide, and Abortion in New York City’s Five Points District,” Thomas Crist connects the remains of two full-term infants and one fetus found in a privy vault in Lower

Manhattan in 1993 to a brothel which was known to operate on the same site in the 1840s.96

Crist’s analysis explores the reasons these babies may have been disposed of and calls their remains, “an extended metaphor for the difficult choices working-class women faced in…urban centers during the middle of the 19th century.”97 Specifically, Crist links infanticide in nineteenth century urban America to industrialization and changes in the status and responsibilities of women. Though Crist links infanticide and neonaticide (killing of an infant in its first twenty-four

93 Burnston, 186. 94 Kaufman, 243. 95 Ibid, 243. 96 Crist, 19. 97 Ibid.

111 hours of life) to the professional challenges of prostitution, he also uses archeological evidence of infanticide to explore the socioeconomic, legal, and healthcare realities of working-class women in nineteenth century New York more broadly.98

As women moved from the family-based life of agrarian and rural America into cities where they had less familial surveillance and less support, single women entered into new sexual relationships, whether by desire or force, some of which undoubtedly resulted in unwanted pregnancies. City life was different from life in small towns. In cities anonymity freed women from confining social restrictions, but also from the safety that such structures provide.

E.B. White captures this phenomenon in the classic Here Is New York where he writes about, “a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors.”99

For many of these women, poverty limited access to birth control or abortion, leaving infanticide as the only option. To escape detection, many women concealed their reproductive choice in the privy.100 A typical example was reported on May 14, 1873, in the Cincinnati

Enquirer. Mrs. Louisa Fix woke up in her home on Wade Street, surprised to find that her servant, Frances Rick, had not yet lit the fires. She found twenty-three year-old Frances naked

98 Crist. 99 White, Here Is New York (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949) 18. 100 Note that adoption as we know it today was generally not an option. The U.S. did not have a well-established tradition of formal adoption among whites, and an informal adoption would have meant revealing the mother’s condition. Roger Lane discusses this as a cause for infanticide in his book on murder in America. He writes, “While black communities, always sympathetic to the plight of single mothers, had a long tradition of informal adoption, white couples well into the twentieth century preferred to ‘foster’ healthy boys already old enough to work. Only in the 1920s and 1930s did the ‘sentimental’ adoption overtake this hard-headed economic approach.” (Lane, Murder in America, 235.)

112 in bed and claiming that “an illness particular to her sex had overtaken her.”101 Fix thought nothing out of the ordinary about this excuse and went about her day, but she soon noticed that the kitchen floor had drops of blood on it. Then she discovered a pool of blood near the privy in the back yard, and even more blood on the privy’s seat. Over lunch that day, a neighbor shared these same findings with Louisa’s husband, August, who was a wholesale liquor dealer on nearby Plum Street. August Fix put a candle into the privy and immediately found the body of a baby. At the resulting coroner’s inquest, the body was found to be full grown, with plenty of hair, and born alive. The report further included the gruesome detail that Frances had severed the baby’s umbilical cord with her fingernails. Louisa Fix reported to the newspaper that Frances had been a good worker and was strong and spry-- cleaning the house just the night before.102 The article’s subtitle called her a, “specimen of almost superhuman endurance and strength,” and noted particularly that she was, “a German girl.”103 The paper reported that she had been in the United States only a year, having come from Prussia and speaking little

English, and that she claimed to have been seduced in a hotel in New York on her way to

Cincinnati.104

Though this case seems extreme and shocking, the Cincinnati Enquirer titled its coverage, “The Century’s Crime,” rather than being the singular crime of the century, it was instead, the century’s crime repeated again and again.105 Desperate women, often poor or

101 “The Century’s Crime: A German Girl Murdered Her Child: Specimen of Almost Superhuman Endurance and Strength,” Daily Cincinnati Enquirer (May 12, 1873) 4. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid. 104 Ibid. 105 Ibid.

113 recently arrived, disposing of unwanted pregnancies in backyard privies was a well-known tale in nineteenth and early-twentieth century Cincinnati and throughout the United States.106

In his investigation of infanticide trials in Philadelphia, Roger Lane found, “the typical means of disposal in the incidents brought to trial was to throw it in the privy, often shared with five or six families and sometimes the site of the unattended birth itself.”107 He called the privy, “the only place in the home or boarding house where [new mothers] might safely be alone” and found that most accused mothers “had dropped it down, into the vault below, immediately on cutting the cord.”108 The Cincinnati data supports this claim and provides abundant examples of both delivery and disposal in the privy.

Between the founding of the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1841 and the start of World War I, I identified 164 articles about infanticide in which the baby or body was delivered in or disposed of in a privy.109 Of these 137 are unique incidents and twenty-seven are follow-up stories.

Because these stories were sensational and would have interested readers, the Enquirer also carried many stories from other midwestern towns and even a few from big cities like New York and Chicago. Eighty-three of the articles, nearly exactly half, cover stories which took place in

Cincinnati and surrounding communities. The remaining half were stories the Enquirer covered from out of town, mostly small towns throughout Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. Though the number of cases reported averages out to almost exactly two per year, their actual distribution

106 “Child Murder,” Cincinnati Enquirer (March 28, 1867) 1. 107 Roger Lane, Violent Death in the City, 98. 108 Lane, Murder in America, 121. 109 Additionally, Roger Lane points out that higher living standards, increases in women’s wages, an increase in hospital births, the increased acceptance of adoption all led to the virtual elimination of infanticide by the 1920s. (Lane, Murder in America. 234.)

114 in time shows that almost all--150 of the reports—occurred prior to the turn of the century in the twenty-seven-year period between 1868 and 1895. Twenty of the reports were published in

1875 and 1876 and thirty-seven of the reports ran between 1878 and 1880. In addition to reports in the paper there were surely numerous additional infanticides which went undiscovered or unreported.

This coverage reveals a stunning spike in reports in the late 1870s which continued, albeit at a slightly slower pace, through the 1880s. This uptick corresponds to the push, beginning in 1859, by the struggling American Medical Association to criminalize abortion, which resulted in criminal abortion statutes in most states by 1870 (though Ohio’s early law was passed in 1834) and the Comstock Laws of 1873 which made it illegal to mail information about birth control, which both served to remove abortion as an option for many women.110

In 1834, early in the national movement to criminalize abortion, Ohio law made it illegal to give a woman any drug or procedure which would result in the death of a quickened fetus.111

The law criminalized the person who provided the abortion or abortive agent and classified the death of the baby or of the mother as a high misdemeanor. Yet, despite its criminal definition, abortion was an almost undetectable “crime” unless the mother died as a result of the procedure or her health deteriorated to the point that a doctor had to be called in to assist in

110 Nathan Stormer, Sign of Pathology: U.S. Medical Rhetoric on Abortion, 1800s-1960s (University Park Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015) 7; The Comstock Laws criminalized sending “obscene” materials though the mail thus drastically reducing access to information about birth control and abortion. 111 Fetal movement, known as quickening, was believed to be the indicator of the beginnings of life in the fetus. Quickening usually occurred between fifteen and twenty weeks gestation, but the first to know whether the fetus had quickened would be the mother who could easily lie about it if charged with a crime (Dayton, “Taking the Trade, 20, 23); “Edward Robbins v. State of Ohio” Supreme Court of Ohio (December, 1857)). 115 saving her life, and even then, convictions for the crime of abortion were hard to secure.112

While wealthy women could pay for abortion to be performed by medical practitioners, lower income women often shared information about abortifacient drugs as part of a network of support and folk knowledge. These drugs could often be acquired from a doctor or pharmacist either by a woman herself or through an intermediary.113 Doctors and other women also advised pregnant women on procedures to puncture the amniotic membrane and endure premature birth.114 Thus, though abortion was often not poor women’s most viable means of fertility control, it was an option for some women, and surely accounted for some of the fetal remains found in urban privies.

Reports in the Enquirer dropped drastically during the early twentieth-century with one report in 1895, one in 1900, two in 1902, one in 1904, and then not another until 1914. This drop aligns with historian Roger Lane’s finding that, “infanticide remained the same dreary problem throughout the nineteenth-century, but during the early twentieth century indictments all but dried up,” attributing the change to the rise in hospital births and the invention of pasteurized cow’s milk, “which made it far easier for desperate young women to leave infants at the poorhouse or foundling home with some real hope they might survive.”115

Before pasteurization, the poor quality of cow’s milk available to nourish abandoned babies

112 Stormer, 3. 113 Lane, Murder in America, 119-120. 114 An early case of such mechanical abortion is the subject of Cornelia Hughes Dayton’s foundational article on early American abortive practices, “Taking the Trade: Abortion and Gender Relations in an Eighteenth-Century New England Village,” which focuses on an abortion in Pomfret, Connecticut in 1742 in which instruments were used to perform an abortion which later resulted in the death of the mother. 115 Lane, Murder in America, 190.

116 gave them almost no chance of survival.116 However these numbers do not align with the records of the Hamilton County Coroner.

Though many dwellings in Cincinnati’s basin neighborhoods used privies or catchbasin toilets through the 1930s, modern plumbing would have eventually reduced the numbers of babies abandoned in privies as only very early term pregnancies would be small enough to pass through modern toilets.117 Thus privies give us a window into women’s reproductive control only at a particular moment in time. Interestingly, the drop in Enquirer reports does not comport with the reports of the Hamilton County Coroner and reveals a pitfall of relying so heavily on newspapers. Of the one hundred and five morgue records of babies listed as specifically found in privy vaults, catchbasins, sewers, and toilets in Hamilton County between

1887 and 1919, sixty-five fall between 1900 and 1919, though only five reports appeared in the newspaper during the same years.118 It seems that rather than the practice ending, the paper stopped covering the cases. Though it is difficult to know why the paper made this editorial choice, presumably there was some reason they felt their readers would no longer be interested. Did their readership’s exodus from the basin into homes with indoor plumbing in neighborhoods where women gave birth in hospitals render the reality of infanticide outside of their understanding? Did a cultural gap open up between the city’s basin dwellers and those in the hilltops that somehow made this crime either too common or too horrible to report?

116 Ibid., 119. 117 In an interview about his childhood home on Mulberry Street in the 1930s, David Day recalled that when you looked down into the privy in the backyard of his home you could see water from the hillside above his house rushing through what was presumably a catchbasin toilet. (Day, Personal Interview). 118 Many of these reports do not reveal the specific location of the corpse, only the address where it was discovered.

117

Perhaps the increase in modern plumbing separated the fetal remains from their mother such that the find no longer led to a juicy news story about a desperate young woman. Or did reform-minded changes in attitudes toward the urban poor discourage the salacious reporting of desperate women and dead babies?

Making Difficult Choices

A story in the Cincinnati Enquirer on May 31, 1878 explained that an African American woman named Mattie Thurman had shown up at a farmer’s house with a baby asking for work as a domestic and was denied due to the presence of the child.119 She then appeared at a neighbor’s asking for work without the child. The article was not clear on what had happened to the baby, but it illustrates that finding live-in domestic work with a child was incredibly difficult. There was little time to look after a child in the demanding life of a domestic servant, and even less time to nurse a suckling baby.120 Women with children frequently had to give them up in order to take domestic work.121 Roger Lane makes this point clearly when he writes,

It was extremely hard for an unskilled woman to make it on her own, utterly impossible while caring for a baby. And to this stark economic fact was added another: there was no way for a poor woman to safely give up an infant. Wet nursing was expensive, and before the invention of pasteurization…cow’s milk was a slow death and the poorhouse was the last stop for almost all “foundlings” admitted to it.122

119 “Harrodsburg Kentucky: Scandal – Infanticide – Political,” Cincinnati Enquirer (May 31, 1878) 1. 120 Dudden, 205. 121 Dudden, 206. 122 Lane, Murder in America, 119: Women who had to work and therefore could not keep their babies had two choices, either foundling hospitals or baby farms, since wet nurses were out of financial reach. A foundling hospital was a home for abandoned babies, usually run by a religious order of nuns. In Cincinnati there were at least two foundling hospitals, the Home for the Friendless and Foundlings on Court Street opened in 1855, and Saint Joseph Infant Asylum, opened by the Sisters of Charity in 1873. A baby farm was a business enterprise where a woman would take other women’s babies into her home for care. In both cases a baby’s chance of survival was extremely low. Before pasteurization there were few options for adequate nutrition, plus babies rarely received any care

118

If a woman’s livelihood depended on her ability to work a job where ten to twelve-hour workdays were the norm, she would be unable to nurse her child and keep her job. Yet, her infant’s only source of nourishment before weaning to solid foods was breast milk so that if she did not nurse the child or pay for a wet nurse, the child would perish. If she quit her job to care for the child, both their lives would be at risk.

Beyond the financial, practical, and emotional hardship of raising a “bastard” child alone, an unmarried pregnant woman bore a significant moral “stain.” Newspaper reports frequently refer to these women as “ruined” and note that they destroyed their babies to “hide their shame.”123 Roger Lane reminds us of a woman’s dilemma by stating the obvious reality that, “pregnancy outside of wedlock was clear evidence of sexual sin, fornication, and perhaps adultery.”124 In nineteenth-century America these circumstances had the potential to end a woman’s chances for honorable marriage and thus financial security.

A few reports in the Enquirer illustrate just how shameful sex outside of marriage was and the measures women might take to avoid the stain on their character that came with sex out of wedlock and illegitimate birth. In one case from DesMoines, Iowa, “two artless and

beyond the occasional feedings. A 1882 article in the Cincinnati Enquirer about baby farming said, “’Tolerate baby farming and you absolve infanticide’ is an old French adage, and it is a saying that is just as applicable and true here in the Queen City of the West as it is in Paris…Who can estimate the number of innocent souls, the fruit of some illicit love and lust, that year by year are ushered into life?...It is well-authenticated that less than 20 percent of the illegitimate children live.” (“Slaughtering Innocents: Baby-Farming and Its Attendant Evils: An ‘Industry’ which Absolves Infanticide and Makes Death As Sure,” Cincinnati Enquirer (August 13, 1882) 4; Fuchs, 219-222; “Maple Knoll Hospital and Home Records 1854-1960,” www.library.cincymuseum.org/archives/mss900- 999/Mss995-register.pdf; “History: Brief History of St. Joseph Home of Cincinnati,” www.stjospehhome.org/history; Rose, 79-84, 93-107; Lane, Violent Death in the City, 96. 123 See for example: “Infanticide: Another Terrible Case of Child Murder,” Cincinnati Enquirer (April 15, 1874) 4; “Hiding Her Shame: A Mother But No Wife Smothers Her Newborn Infant in the Vault: Womanlike She Takes All the Blame on Herself and Tries to Spare the Name of Her Seducer,” Cincinnati Enquirer (July 16, 1877) 8; “A Letter Unsigned Sent to the Police,” Cincinnati Enquirer (September 15, 1892) 4. 124 Lane, Murder in America, 49.

119 respectable” sisters had come into the city from the countryside to work as domestics. One of them was seduced “under promise of marriage,” “surrendered her virtue,” and became pregnant at which point her seducer fled.125 The girl returned home to her mother’s house where she gave birth and where her mother “in order to conceal the evidence of sin, killed the babe, cut it in pieces, threw the pieces into a stove, attempted to burn them and when partially burned threw them into a privy vault.”126 In another case, a baby in Dayton, Ohio, was rescued alive from a privy but the new mother’s own mother “refus[ed] to receive her or her infant on account of the presence of younger children” as if the moral stain would infect the younger siblings.127 Historian Donald Sutherland recounts a story in which a domestic who had been raped by a man in her boarding house was fired and told by her employer, “’such things don’t happen unless the girl is to blame.’”128 Employers looking for domestic servants, both doubted the woman’s ability to do the job while pregnant and would not want a woman of low morals living within their home.129

Rather than face the shame and hardship of unwed pregnancy and motherhood which would be placed on themselves and their child, some women, many of whom worked as domestics, chose to eliminate their pregnancies to give themselves a better life. This could be accomplished in two ways, abortion or infanticide. The former choice was the more complicated because abortion was expensive, dangerous, and involved accomplices.130

125 “Des Moines Deviltry: A Horrible Crime Disclosed—An Infant Cut to Pieces and Burned,” Cincinnati Enquirer (March 27, 1881) 2. 126 Ibid. 127 “Dayton: Shocking Case of Alleged Attempt at Infanticide,” Cincinnati Enquirer (February 2, 1880) 5. 128 Sutherland, 70. 129 Dutton, 205-206. 130 Lane, Murder in American, 121.

120

Infanticide, on the other hand, had no price tag, could be accomplished alone, and risked only the life of the baby. Faced with this dreadful choice in which she might languish as a single mother, face criminal or physical consequences for abortion, or proceed relatively unscathed after committing and concealing infanticide, an unknown number of nineteenth century women, in Cincinnati and elsewhere, chose infanticide.

Evidence collected from the Cincinnati Enquirer paints a clear, though not entirely uniform, picture of the women whose babies were found in Cincinnati’s privies. They are most often single women, working as domestics. Most are young. Many are new immigrants without good English, skills, or familial support. Some are women of color. They make the choice to dispose of their fetus or infant out of desperation. Lane calls infanticide, “almost always an act of desperation, committed by the poorest and most distraught parents.”131 In his study of crime, Lane puts infanticide in a category of its own, writing, “if abortion or a bastardy suit required friends or contacts, abandonment a certain boldness, a nurse some substantial sum of money, murder was surely reserved for the most destitute and frightened of mothers. Virtually all of those indicted were not only unwed, but apparently alone.”132 Cincinnati Enquirer descriptions of women who aborted or abandoned babies in privies often note their young age, unmarried or widowed status, or work as a servant. Some include stories of woe like that of twenty-year-old Helen Artz who was the oldest child of many and was sent out to work as a domestic at age twelve and seduced by a man a promised to marry her.133 Enquirer reports sometimes include descriptive details as a way to establish desperation. For example, one

131 Lane, Murder in America, 23. 132 Lane, Violent Death in the City, 96. 133 “From Marysville: The Trial of Helen Artz for Infanticide,” Cincinnati Enquirer (October 28, 1873) 2.

121 woman’s residence was described as, “a room in the tumble down rookery at the southwest corner of Sixth and Park Streets,” and another noted the sex of a baby found in a privy in

Indiana, “could not be discovered owing to the fact that the body was badly mutilated by rats.”134 Though the desperate conditions described in the paper might have been sensationalized, there is no doubt that women who used urban privies as a site of reproductive agency did so because they had few good options.

How Privies Were Used by Women

So, how did these desperate women make use of urban privies? Babies could be aborted or delivered pre-term into privies or, aborted or still-born pre-term babies could be disposed of in privies after delivery elsewhere.135 Privies were also used as a place to give birth in secret. Whether delivered in the privy or elsewhere, the slop below the seat offered a convenient place to conceal unwanted babies. It was a long way down, very dark, and unlikely that other privy users would spend much time looking around in the filth. Live births found their way into privy vaults in one of three ways. Some babies born in the privy simply may have fallen into the filth accidentally in the process of being born.136 Others were thrown into the privy alive and left to die below, and still others lost their lives somewhere else and were merely disposed of in the privy. Nineteenth century newspapers are full of stories illustrating each of

134 “Another Infanticide,” Cincinnati Enquirer (November 30, 1874) 8; “Madison, Indiana: Infanticide,” Cincinnati Enquirer (May 19, 1881) 2. 135 Hamilton County Coroner’s morgue records from 1887 to 1919 include a wide range of locations where fetal and infant remains were discovered. Privies and sewers are the most common (Hamilton County Morgue Records, University of Cincinnati Archives and Rare Books Library). 136 Though it is impossible to assess how often this actually happened. Any woman who has given birth could imagine this horrible outcome occurring under such circumstances, but also it was the thing that woman could say to escape guilt and prosecution.

122 these possibilities. Exploring these reports gives us an unusual window into the lives of lower and working-class, single, American women, women who are largely lost to history.

Rachel Fuchs notes that instead of abortion, which was available to women with money, infanticide was often poor women’s best option--less understood as murder, but conceived instead as, “a reproductive strategy, a form of birth control especially in times of economic need.”137 For poor women, “infanticide was a back-up measure when contraception and abortion were unavailable or had failed. Infanticide was a desperate strategy among destitute and isolated women.”138 Infanticide, which Lane calls, “abortion ex post facto,” and Burnston refers to as “retroactive birth control,” though still shocking in nineteenth century urban

America, was more common than today, and privies were a known site of disposal.139 In nineteenth-century, “the number of cases is legion in which the infant’s body , dead or alive, had been thrown down the latrines into the open sewers and then found by the cleaners and brought to the police.”140 Fuchs reminds us, “infanticide may have been an act of desperate self-defense in a male-dominated society where many women had low status, low self-esteem, and few options and where they tended to be economically vulnerable. For those who suffocated their infants as soon as they were born it may have been a deliberate form of delayed abortion.”141

137 Fuchs, 201. 138 Ibid., 202. 139 Lane, Murder in America, 121; Crist, 40. Burnston, 181. 140 Fuchs, 204. 141 Fuchs, 217.

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Dropped In?

The simplest stories about babies in privies are those in which the babies fell in, either accidentally or on purpose. A woman faced with a possible infanticide charge would have had significant incentive to lie and say that a baby she had deposited in the vault had merely fallen, so it is difficult to know what really transpired.142 Yet, it is also easy to imagine that a newborn could just fall in.143 Because some new mothers could mistake labor pains for indigestion, they may have gone to the privy to relieve themselves. Or, because squatting is a comfortable and natural position in which to labor and because privies were private, some women may have gone to the privy to labor. In either case, a slippery newborn could have easily fallen into the vault. In Fuchs’ investigation of Parisian infanticide trials, she reported, “women said they mistook the pressure of the descending fetus for an overwhelming need to defecate and went to the toilet and did not know that they were near the time of delivery. They testified, ‘while I was on the seat the infant emerged, fell in the toilet and slid down the sewer; I could not retrieve it.’”144

Similar stories were common in Cincinnati. In February 1874, Ellen Moore of Lockland testified that she had not been expecting to give birth, but she had accidentally delivered into the vault.145 The next month, Minnie Boehm delivered into the privy at the corner of Race and

Elder Streets. The baby was taken out alive, but it died shortly thereafter.146 The jury in her case

142 Fuchs, 209-211. 143 Newspaper reports also include stories of older children who fell into privies. 144 Fuchs, 209. 145 “Negro Infanticide,” Cincinnati Enquirer (February 12, 1873) 7; In a follow up story, the Enquirer reported that though it seemed a clear-cut case of infanticide, a doctor had testified that, “the woman was scarcely accountable owing to her ignorance.” (“Ellen Moore,” Cincinnati Enquirer (March 5, 1874) 8.) 146 “Coroner Maley,” Cincinnati Enquirer (March 6, 1874) 7.

124 found that the, “deceased came to its death from dropping in a privy vault from its mother at the time of its birth, which produced exhaustion and caused its death; and whether the above was the cause of accident or intention on the part of the mother, the jury are unable to determine.”147 In December 1887, the Enquirer included a story about Sarah Page, “a young colored woman,” twenty-four years-old who was being tried on a manslaughter charge for killing her infant.148 She said she had gone to the outhouse when she began to feel sick and that the baby was born there and fell into the vault. She said, “she had not intended that it should go there, but she did not help it,” presumably by calling for aid.149 Reiterating just how desperate many of these women were in choosing behavior, “clearly linked to the overwhelming economic and social pressures exerted on financially distressed women struggling to survive on the periphery of respectable society,” Page told the jury that she was married to a railroad man who did little for her and that she always had to earn her own living.150 She said she had given birth to two infants previously, both of which had died. She said she wanted to go to the penitentiary to be done with the trials of “poverty and privation.”151

Whether or not Moore, Boehm, and Page meant for their babies to land in the vault, many women definitely placed their babies there either alive or dead. In October of 1885, Lizzie

Voll of Newport gave birth to a “ten-pound baby boy” in the privy of Mrs. John Smith at 96

Dayton Street after being “criminally intimate” with Will Kemler.152 The paper reported that,

147 Ibid. 148 “An Infanticide,” Cincinnati Enquirer (December 3, 1887) 16. 149 Ibid. 150 Ibid. 151 “An Infanticide,” 16; Crist, 20. 152 “Dropped in a Vault: An Unnatural Mother’s Attempt at Infanticide,” Cincinnati Enquirer (October 11, 1885) 8; Note that, despite dumping ashes on the baby, upon arrest Voll contended that the baby fell by accident. She was charged with assault with intent to kill and taken to jail where the baby was taken to her once cleaned up. Voll was

125

“the little stranger evidently did not like his reception, as he fell into a vault twenty feet deep and this did not kill him.”153 Voll then dumped a bucket of ashes on top of the baby and left.

The privy’s owner saw the baby moving in the privy and notified the police and fire departments which ripped up the floor of the privy and saved the baby who the paper called,

“the toughest kid in Covington.”154

The frequency of infanticide in nineteenth-century America is impossible to measure.

Roger Lane points out, “the proportion of cases not reported to a reluctant justice system is bigger, by some order of magnitude than that for adult homicide.”155 He calls infanticide, “the biggest wild card” in calculating accurate numbers of urban homicides because, “the killing of newborns was always easy, almost always impossible to detect.”156 Among those accused of infanticide, Lane found several common characteristics including that, “almost all of the accused were single mothers, several had not reported their pregnancy to anyone,” they tried to hide the physical evidence of their pregnancy with, “the billowing clothing of the day.”157 He found that they typically gave birth unattended and that they sometimes even stuffed cloth into the baby’s mouth and throat to keep it from crying out.158

Untold numbers of cases went undiscovered, and of those that were, there is no way to know what percentage reached the justice system or the newspapers. This is to say nothing of

described as. “a small girl, possessed of about half sense, and this is the second bastard child that she is the mother of.” 153 Ibid. 154 Ibid. 155 Lane, Murder in America, 119. 156 Ibid., 309. 157 Ibid., 121. 158 Ibid.

126 the thousands of stillbirths reported each year or cases in which babies died from suffocation

(called overlaying) or other causes impossible to conclusively rule as infanticides.159 A typical case of infanticide, Lane notes, involved a child killed within minutes of its birth, “and the typical means of disposal in the incidents brought to trial [in Philadelphia] was to throw it in the privy.”160

Another typical case was reported in Cincinnati in July of 1868. The Enquirer covered the trial of the “unfortunate woman,” Esther Moore. Moore was about twenty years old, worked in a shoe factory where “her conduct was always good.”161 She did not have a lawyer at her trial, but the paper thought she, “probably got along as well without any” because her mental suffering came through so clearly in her testimony.162 Moore had been living in a boarding house at 327 Broadway where she shared a room with Mary Davis. Davis testified that she had gone out to the privy about four in the morning. As she was going in Moore was coming out and while in the privy Davis heard a baby’s cries from below. Davis went back in and questioned

Moore who said the baby was hers but that she had not thrown it in with her hands. The boarding house owner said he was told by a servant girl that there was a baby in the privy, which he heard crying. He went to the Hammond Street station house for help to get it out which they did, but the baby only lived a few minutes after being extracted from the vault.

Matthew Mulvaney, Moore’s employer, testified that Moore sewed boot-legs for him and that he had suspected her condition and asked her about it. Moore said that she expected the baby

159 Lane, Murder in America, 119; Lane, Violent Death in the City, 97. 160 Lane, Violent Death in the City, 98. 161 “Esther Moore Before Judge Noyes—Testimony in the Case—Final Discharge of Prisoner,” Cincinnati Enquirer (July 30, 1868) 8. 162 Ibid.

127 to come much later and would give birth at the hospital and give the baby up to nuns in

Covington, Kentucky. Moore testified that she had obtained an admission ticket from the hospital and that she had sewed baby clothes. She did not expect the baby to be born and the baby falling into the privy was an accident.163

Whether Moore was telling the truth when claiming the baby fell into the privy by accident is unknown, but such a claim is the norm in all infanticide cases where women needed to avoid the appearance of premeditated murder.164 In Moore’s case, she was unable to claim that the baby was born dead, which was also a common defense, because the baby had been heard crying in the privy despite a fall of up to twenty feet. Because Moore was shown to have made a plan to deliver the baby in a hospital and had sewn clothes for the baby, the jury believed that she had intended to keep the child and that the baby’s fall into the privy was an accident and Moore was found innocent.165

Occasionally baby’s deaths were more violent. A few reports in the Enquirer include babies found with their skulls crushed, and a few detail even more violent deaths.166 In March of 1881, Matilda Stressel, a twenty-four year-old German-speaking domestic servant, gave birth to a baby which she stabbed with a case knife and disposed of in a privy on Vine Street in Over- the-Rhine. The coroner determined that the baby had been born alive and stabbed approximately twenty times “in the head, neck, and breast” before being deposited into the

163 Ibid. 164 Fuchs, 119-121. 165 Ibid. 166 “Horrible Infanticide: An Unmarried Woman Murders Her New Born-Babe: Matilda Stressel Attempt to Hide Her Shame By Stabbing Her Infant to Death with a Case Knife,” Cincinnati Enquirer (March 19, 1881) 4.

128 vault where it was found by a vault cleaner.167 Both Stressel and the infant’s father, Carl Seibel, were arrested in the crime. Stressel was charged with murder, but the paper did not report the outcome.168

Abortion

A final way that fetal remains could wind up in privies is by being deposited there after a medically induced abortion. Although this option was not financially available to most of the low-income women who are the subject of this chapter, one interesting case illustrates how a woman without means procured an abortion. Beginning in May 1878, the Enquirer ran several stories on the case of Hattie Sperling who had sought out an abortion from Madame Sidney

Augustine (aka Frazer or Frazier).169 Sperling’s boyfriend, Mr. Carson, had taken her to

Augustine seeking an abortion. She had gone in alone and negotiated with Augustine while

Carson waited on the street. Augustine told Sperling that if her boyfriend was wealthy the fee would be $50, but when she learned that he was a blacksmith said she would do it for $25.

When Sperling went outside to get the money, she found Mr. Carson gone. When she returned

Augustine said Sperling could work for her for ten weeks to earn the money she needed to end her pregnancy. Thus, Sperling entered into domestic service for Madame Augustine and her pregnancy progressed.170 The paper reported that during this time,

167 “Horrible Infanticide,” 4; A case knife is a sharp dinner knife, so called because it was kept in a knife case. 168 Ibid. 169 “Mme. Sidney Augustine: An Abortion for Twenty-Five Dollars and the Price Worked Out,” Cincinnati Enquirer (May 22. 1873) 8; “The Trial of the Fortune-Teller,” Cincinnati Enquirer (May 27, 1873) 4; “Sidney Augustine Frazer: Her Trial in Police Court Tomorrow,” Cincinnati Enquirer (June 10, 1873) 4; “Augustine, The Fortune-Teller,” Cincinnati Enquirer (July 2, 1873) 4. 170 “Mme. Sidney Augustine: An Abortion for Twenty-Five Dollars and the Price Worked Out.”

129

Hattie often noticed young women in a peculiar attitude. She wondered what it meant. Of course, she had her suspicions, which suspicions were verified. When her ten weeks were up and her money earned, the Madame took her into that back room and directed her to place herself in that same position as that one in which she had seen the other women. The instruments used by the Madame were a steel rod with a bulb and one end, and a long slender syringe, filled with liquid.171 Sperling fell ill from the procedure and Augustine sent her to the hospital. Neighbors reported,

“a black man and woman came out of Madame Augustine’s house holding between them ‘a handsome girl with beautiful light hair, with froth running from her mouth and hanging limp.’”172

Sperling’s removal to the hospital alerted authorities to the activities taking place at

Madame Augustine’s setting off gossip and speculation about the details of her business. The newspaper reported that neighbors frequently observed many women coming and going from the “modest two-story brick” house.173 They said, “these women were mostly young and well- dressed” and that, “hacks would stop at the door at all hours of the night.”174 The baker down the block alleged that Augustine changed servants every few weeks and the paper audaciously reported that Augustine’s fourteen-year-old daughter told the neighbor’s children stories of sick cousins and dead babies in the house.175 A police investigation was begun in May and the newspaper noted that, “it is thought that the privy vault of the house will disclose evidences of traffic carried on by the…abortionist.”176 By June the newspaper reported that Augustine’s house was found to be “a kind of hospital for women under operation, an assignation-house,

171 Ibid. 172 Ibid. 173 Idid. 174 Hacks were horse-drawn carriages for hire equivalent to taxis today. 175 “Sidney Augustine Frazer: Her Trial in Police Court Tomorrow.” 176 “Mme. Sidney Augustine: An Abortion for Twenty-Five Dollars and the Price Worked Out.”

130 and a fortune-teller’s den.”177 An African-American servant became a key witness against

Augustine and showed investigators fetal remains in the coal box which had been incinerated in the kitchen stove. The paper deemed the servant culpable and reported that, “the two women seemed to have been doing heavy business for years back.”178 With regard to the state of abortion in Cincinnati the article says, “although it is believed that the crime of abortion is largely practiced, it is one which in its nature is peculiarly hard to fasten upon the practitioner, and a strong public feeling exists in favor of the punishment of such as are caught at it.”179 After extensive coverage of the trial in the Enquirer, Madame Sidney Augustine Frazer was sentenced to five years hard labor.180

The Augustine case was sensational, but a more common scenario was reported on

August 14, 1890, when Mrs. Phillip Hunsinger of 1031 West Sixth Street was given abortive medicines by Ella Mittenberger of Sedamsville, the wife of a railroad laborer. Mittenberger had gotten abortive agents from a “railroad man” whose name and address were given in the article

(providing other women with a way to find him). She then provided them to Hunsinger. As a result, Hunsinger miscarried a two-month old fetus which her husband threw into the privy vault. Mittenberger was arrested for providing the abortive agent.181

177 “Sidney Augustine Frazer: Her Trial in Police Court Tomorrow.” 178 Ibid. 179 “Sidney Augustine Frazer: Her Trial in Police Court Tomorrow”; Interestingly, his article reports that while under arrest Madame Augustine was in jail enjoying many comforts due to her extreme wealth and her two daughters brought her “delicacies and whatever is needed for her comfort.” The article also reported that the abortionist was a wet nurse, “nursing a child which has been sent to her by some person who had probably not heard of her imprisonment.” 180 “Sent to the Penitentiary: Sentencing of Madame Frazier and Other Prisoners,” Cincinnati Enquirer (July 29, 1978) 4. 181 “It was Infanticide: The Woman in a Dangerous Condition and Her Husband Under Arrest at Her Bedside,” Cincinnati Enquirer (August 14, 1890) 4.

131

While getting drugs to induce abortion from a “railroad man” seems a little shady, there were more legitimate ways to procure abortive agents as in a 1874 report where the mother of a girl who had been raped was accused of giving her daughter “some female pills from a doctor above the canal.”182 “Above the canal” refers to Over-the-Rhine which was the German quarter and relatively far away from the woman’s home in lower Mount Adams, so she was clearly going to some length to seek out abortifacients, but the report in the paper made it sound easy enough for her to find what she needed. In each of these cases, procuring and abortion required money and outside assistance, resources that few poor women had.

Punishment

While abortion was clearly defined as criminal after 1834, there was no specific legal penalty in Ohio for the crime of infanticide. Instead, mothers who killed a live infant would be charged with homicide if their actions were detected.183 Because deep dark privies made the ideal location to escape detection and, as Roger Lane notes, “any woman who took the most elementary precautions would never have to answer for such a crime,” it is impossible to know how frequently women employed this reproductive strategy.184 Fuchs found the first suspicion of infanticide came when a dead baby was discovered by privy cleaners, neighbors, or household members. The body was then turned over to the police for investigation which could produce a criminal charges.185 Yet, because these desperate woman often gave birth alone or

182 “Infanticide: Desertion and Its Shocking Sequel—The Love and Crime of Eliza Buchanan,” Cincinnati Enquirer (July 15, 1874) 4. It is worth noting that this is a story about a woman who claims to have been forcibly raped (as in, “Proctor had accomplished her ruin not under promise of marriage, but by force”) and yet the headline makes it sound like a love story. 183 Lane, Violent Death in the City, 95-98 184 Ibid., 98. 185 Fuchs, 203.

132 when they did have attendants, the attendants tended to be accomplices who would protect the birthing woman, proving that a dead baby had been born alive could be difficult and officials were reluctant to heap additional hardship on a woman already suffering the trials of childbirth and whatever other misfortunes might have led her to make the desperate choice of infanticide.186

As Roger Lane discovered in his investigation of crime in Philadelphia, “the established response to this cruel dilemma was to ignore its results whenever possible and, in particular, to invoke the official sanctions as rarely and quietly as possible.”187 If police wished to pursue the case, dead babies could be examined for signs of violence or foul play, but beyond that, the technique used by nineteenth century physicians to establish live birth was to remove the lungs form the corpse and attempt to float them in water. The belief was that if a dead baby’s lungs floated in water that proved that the baby had drawn breath before death.188 Though this test was widely used and routinely found that dead babies had been born alive, despite maternal protestations to the contrary, convictions in infanticide cases were rare.189 Though the

Cincinnati Enquirer coverage includes many cases of women who spent time in jail and faced trial for homicide, few of these women were convicted of infanticide. Women were sometimes

186 Though I have not investigated this systematically, as noted above, the evidence from Cincinnati suggests that police were more inclined to prosecute African American women. 187 Lane, Violent Death, 90. 188 Caron, 215. 189 “Shocking Case of Infanticide: A Mother Butchers Her Babe and Throws it Into a Vault,” Cincinnati Enquirer (March 31, 1859) 3.

133 found guilty of lesser crimes of concealment or illegal disposal of a body, but even these seem rare for white women.190

The reports of the Hamilton County Coroner available for 1887-1919, contain one- hundred-five cases of fetuses and babies found in privy vaults, sewers, catchbasins, cisterns, and sewers which is twenty-six percent of the total four-hundred-two cases in which the location of the baby’s discovery is known.191 Another seventy-nine were found in the Ohio River or Mill Creek were sewage outflows terminated, so that they could also have originated from the sewage system. Though other locations of discovery include train yards (8), alleys (16), ash barrels (13), and even two at the Jewish Cemetery and one under the bleachers at the ballpark, privies were by far the most common location to dispose of a dead baby within the busy city.

Because privies were available as a tool for concealment, countless women were able to save themselves from the moral, emotional, and physical burden of raising an unwanted child and usually evade legal consequences.

In her forward to Robert Woods and Albert Kennedy’s 1913 Young Working Girls, Hull

House founder Jane Addams wrote, “the modern industrial city is so new that we are as yet ignorant of its ultimate reactions upon human life.”192 She said the report would be a,

“revelation of the impressions and scars which this new type of city makes upon that most highly sensitized material, the body and soul of the young girl at the moment she is most keenly

190 Oberman, “Mothers Who Kill: Coming to Terms with Modern Infanticide,” DePaul Journal of Health Care Law 8, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 1-15. 191 The total number of coroner’s cases from 1887-1919 is five hundred seventy-seven, but of those one hundred seventy-five include no information regarding the site of the infant’s discovery. 192 Woods and Kennedy, xi.

134 conscious of her surroundings.”193 In defending the choice to write about such a humble subject, Addams said, “the young girl is quite as sensitive when she is rudely jostled in noisy tenement houses as when she is sheltered in the silence of woods and county lanes.”194 It is these sensitive women in this new industrial city who were using the meager options available to them to make their own reproductive choices. While not every unwed young woman who wanted to hide an unwanted pregnancy hid it in a backyard privy, the rates at which privies were used for such activities are stunning. The built environment of Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine and the clues preserved within it have allowed me to discover and explore this heartbreaking reality of twentieth century city life, adding nuance to understandings or women’s lives in urban America.

193 Ibid. 194 Ibid.

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Chapter 3 Schools for the City: Cincinnati’s Elementary School Architecture 1829-1945 The Board of Education has believed in beauty as one of the most essential elements in the education of children and for the inspiration and refinement of community…. It has believed that the best investment that could be made of public funds, both for the present and for the future, would be in creating fine and noble architecture, dedicated to the cause of education and for the enjoyment of all people.1 

Columbian School at the corner of Melish (now Martin Luther King) and Harvey Avenues circa 1900. (Cincinnati Museum Center.) Because I grew up in the 1970s, as American cities were shrinking, abandoned and underused monumental historic public school buildings were a part of my childhood landscape.

I was particularly spellbound by the massive and gracious curves of the rounded rooms of

Columbian School at Melish (now Martin Luther King) and Harvey Streets in Cincinnati’s

Avondale neighborhood. The building was massive and stunning, but clearly all-but-abandoned.

1 An Eight Year Building Program for the Schools of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Public Schools, 1924) 1.

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The building stood out as a grand statement in an otherwise declining neighborhood. It was an anomaly that poked at me and sparked my curiosity.

My best friend and I climbed a wall and jumped in a window of Columbian in our senior year of high school. Being in that space was life-changing. I was already deeply moved by the stories embedded in historic buildings, but if I hadn’t been, that experience would have convinced me. I remember the cold halls, the musty smells, the monumental scale, the round rooms, and the details of wainscoting, blackboards, stairways, and doorknobs. I remember it speaking to me. I remember knowing that there were a nearly endless number of stories right there to be told.

Columbian School vacant, as it appeared in the 1980s. (Library of Congress)

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Columbian didn’t make it past the early 1990s and by the time I graduated from college in 1992, the building had been demolished. It became one of many public schools, some grand like Columbian, others more humble, to be razed as the city grew and moved and changed.

The best physical evidence of Cincinnati’s lost school buildings is a series of stone walls left behind. I have been noticing these walls my whole life. Starting with the one at my own elementary school, I noticed a pattern of walls throughout the city. In almost every case the wall that caught my attention had once surrounded a school. Over several years, I have located and explored the forgotten physical remains of more than thirty schools all over the city. Some are hidden in the woods, others are hiding in plain sight within the busy city.

School walls like these at Browne (now McMicken) Street and Vine Street Schools sparked my imagination and allowed me to build connections between the public schools and growth of the city. (Photos by the author) As I have worked to make sense of these physical remnants, what has emerged are both individual stories and patterns. While each school site has its own individual history to tell, clues scattered throughout the city can also be pieced together to reveal a larger picture of urban growth and change. Taken together these sites reveal patterns of school design, location, and use. I have used these city-wide patterns to lead me to a new understanding of Cincinnati’s growth and development. This chapter is split to model both the ways the walls I found can

138 inform historical inquiry. I begin with one school site, a place where the entire arc of American urban history has been inscribed in the physical landscape, and then tell the story again in light of larger city-wide patterns. The site of Over-the-Rhine’s Webster School yields truths about that place as it witnessed immigration, urban expansion, white flight, the urban crisis, and now gentrification, but when viewed as part of the larger pattern of Cincinnati’s schools, it also illustrates a broader theme--schools are city infrastructure.2 Their appearance in the landscape is inextricably linked to the factors controlling distribution of resources in the urban environment including population growth, annexation, and politics.

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This chapter focuses on elementary schools. These are the schools serving individual neighborhoods. Average citizens attended these schools, sent their children to these schools, and walked by these schools as they went about their days. Elementary schools served as community centers, meeting halls, and neighborhood playgrounds before these amenities appeared in other forms.3 In contrast, high school education was, for the nineteenth and part of the twentieth century, reserved for only a small segment of the population and provided in centralized buildings outside a student’s home neighborhood, so the locations of these buildings tell us less about the development of the city.4 This chapter considers the time from

2 Jeffrey M. Vincent. “Public Schools as Urban Infrastructure: Role for Planning Researchers,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 25 (2006) 433. 3 Cincinnati Public Schools. How Your City is Educating All the Children of All the People? (Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Public Schools, 1913) 8-10. 4 Dale Allen Guyre. The Chicago Schoolhouse: High School Architecture and Educational Reform, 1856-2006 (Chicago, IL: Center Books on Chicago and Environs, 2011) xvi-xvii.

139 the creation of Cincinnati’s public school system in 1829 through World War II. After the war, a population boom, suburbanization, the automobile, desegregation, bussing, and modern architecture transformed the story of public school placement, use, and growth. Cincinnati’s public school architecture after World War II tells a fascinating story, but that awaits another scholar.

Studies of American school buildings fall into a few broad categories. There are art historical explorations which study the buildings as art objects removed from their context.

There are studies of the ways that school architecture reflects changes in educational pedagogy, and there are studies of the ways school architecture reflects progressive reform.

Yet, even with these studies, the American schoolhouse remains an understudied historical resource. In the introduction to his recent work on Chicago schoolhouses, historian Dale Allen

Gyure writes, “school buildings are vitally important in American lives yet largely invisible in the landscape of architectural studies.”5 He notes, “scholars have made few attempts to connect educational reform with school architecture,” and that, “architectural historians have also largely ignored school buildings as an area of study.”6 An example of the celebratory art historical approach to schools is Robert Flischel’s An Expression of Community: Cincinnati Public

Schools’ Legacy of Art and Architecture which features appealing glossy photographs of architectural details and the essays; “Ornament and Artistry in Cincinnati Public Schools,” by

Anita Ellis; and “The Architecture of Cincinnati Public Schools before World War II,” by Walter

Langsam which divides Cincinnati public school architecture by style. “Building and Learning,”

5 Guyre, xv. 6 Ibid.

140 by Anne Rieselbach, in New Schools for New York: Plans and Precedents for Small Schools does an excellent job of placing New York City’s historic public architecture in the context of pedagogical change. David A. Gamson’s recent The Importance of Being Urban: Designing the

Progressive School District, 1890-1940, despite its focus on the American West, informs my work with the idea that progressive-era reforms appear clearly in the policies of urban school districts.7 Amy Weisser’s, “’Little Red School House, What Now?’ Two Centuries of American

Public School Architecture” explores, “the relationship between architectural form and reformist educational philosophy,” but is ultimately too brief to be especially useful.8

Most similar to my work is Dale Allen Gyure’s The Chicago Schoolhouse: High School

Architecture and Educational Reform, 1856-2006, which links the design and placement of public high schools to the evolution of Chicago, but does not mention the system’s hundreds of elementary school buildings or the way that they extended the reach of city government into urban neighborhood life.9 His conclusion that, “the value of school buildings is not so much in the architectural details of their creation and construction as in their relationship to the social context from which they arise,” is most closely linked to the work which follows here—although it is important to note that Cincinnati’s public schools are beautiful and the details which make them so were carefully chosen to communicate the, “social context from which they arise.”10 A

7 Robert A. Flischel. An Expression of Community: Cincinnati Public Schools’ Legacy of Art and Architecture (Cincinnati, OH: The Art League Press, 2001); Anne E. Rieselbach “Building and Learning,” New Schools for New York: Plans and Precedents for Small Schools (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992) 152-189; David A. Gamson, The Importance of Being Urban: Designing the Progressive School District, 1890-1940 (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2019). 8 Amy S. Weisser “’Little Red School House, What Now?’ Two Centuries of American Public School Architecture,” Journal of Planning History 5, no. 3 (August 2006) 196-217. 9 Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967) 117-120, 148-149. 10 Gyure, xvi.

141 close study of Rookwood water fountains, or Romanesque ornament, or even humble stone walls, will bring us closer to an understanding of the world in which those details, and the buildings that support them, were created.

In addition to the works mentioned above, some surveys of historic school buildings have been conducted, including Robert Tanzilo’s Historic Milwaukee Public Schoolhouses, though most tend to be more ephemeral like the pamphlet, “Hamilton’s Historic Public Schools

1850-2010” by Richard N. Piland, or focused on the official preservation process like Cincinnati

Preservation Association’s “Cincinnati Public Schools Historic Architecture Inventory

(Excerpts).”11 In 2001 Virginia McCormack published Educational Architecture in Ohio: From

One-Room Schools and Carnegie Libraries to Community Educations Centers. The book is designed as a catalogue of educational buildings in Ohio which, while helpful, does not offer much specificity or historical context.12

There is, of course, a range of works on the history of public education, though many of those are the work of a single author, historian Donald Tyack.13 Similarly, the field of urban

11 Robert Tanzilo, Historic Milwaukee Public Schoolhouses (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2012); Richard N. Piland, Hamilton’s Historic Public Schools 1850-2010 (Fairfield, OH: Richard Piland, 2011); Cincinnati Public Schools Historic Architecture Inventory (Excerpts) (Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Preservation Association, 1996). 12 Virginia E. McCormick, Educational Architecture in Ohio: From One-Room Schools and Carnegie Libraries to Community Education Villages (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2001). 13 Some of David Tyack’s books on the history of public education are: David Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974); David Tyack, Seeking Common Ground: Public Schools in a Diverse Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); David Tyack and Elizabeth Hansot, Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Public Schools (New York: The Russell Sage Foundation, 1990); David Tyack and Elizabeth Hansot. Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 1820-1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1982); David Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); David Tyack, Thomas James, and Aaron Benavot, Law and the Shaping of Public Education 1785-1954 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Tyack also wrote the introduction to Sarah Mondale (Ed), School: The Story of American Public Education (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001).

142 history is broad and includes innumerable books on the development of cities, municipal services, including education, and progressive reforms to those services. Interestingly, few of these works focus on schools as an example of the policies of either political machines or progressive reformers.14 Janet Miller’s doctoral dissertation and “Public Elementary Schools in

Cincinnati 1870-1914”supported my own research findings, and Barry Stewart’s 1954 doctoral dissertation informed by understanding of school annexation in Cincinnati.15 Johann Neem’s article on path dependence in the emergence of early Ohio schools enriched my understanding of the earliest decades of Cincinnati’s public schools, and Jeffrey Vincent’s article on public schools as public infrastructure, while focused on modern schools, helped to shape my understanding of schools as city services.16 Several other works narrowed in on specific aspects of Cincinnati history to inform my understanding of the schools and their context.17

My research is rooted in deep observation and exploration. The sites of demolished and reused historic school buildings are my primary resource. I have used historic maps to help me

14 Some of the most helpful works on urban history have been Zane Miller, Boss Cox’s Cincinnati: Urban Politics in the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968) and Steven J. Ross. Workers on the Edge: Work Leisure and Politics in Industrializing Cincinnati 1788-1890 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) both of which provided background on the development of industrializing Cincinnati. Richard A. Mohl, The New City: Urban America in the Industrial Age (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson Inc., 1985) includes a short but helpful section on the use of public education as a means for urban social control, and Robert H. Wiebe’s classic The Search for Order places public school reforms in the larger context of urban governance and progressivism. 15 Janet A. Miller, Urban Education and the New City, Cincinnati’s Elementary Schools, 1870-1914, PhD Diss. (University of Cincinnati, 1974); Janet Miller, “Public Elementary Schools in Cincinnati 1870-1914,” The Cincinnati Historical Society Bulletin 38 (Summer 1980) 83-95; Stewart Berry. Factors and Problems of Schools Annexation— An Historical Study of Experience in Cincinnati, 1895-1949. PhD Diss. (University of Cincinnati, 1954). 16 Johann N. Neem, “Path Dependence and the Emergence of Common Schools: Ohio to 1853,” Journal of Policy History 28, no. 1 (2016) 48-80; Jeffrey M. Vincent “Public Schools as Urban Infrastructure: Role for Planning Researchers,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 25 (2006) 433-437. 17 Nikki Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati’s Black Community, 1802-1868 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005) provided new details about the Colored Schools of Cincinnati, and Walter Styx Glazer’s Cincinnati in 1840 brought the early city to life in new ways.

143 locate the sites of former schools and I have mapped their locations onto the contemporary city. Beyond that, I have relied heavily on the annual reports of the Cincinnati Public Schools

(also known as the Common Schools of Cincinnati), city directories, and newspaper archives.

Most notably the annual reports of the schools, which were published up until the 1919 school year, provided narrative information about the goals and accomplishments of the schools, statistical data on student enrollment, and detailed lists of school locations. These reports have been an invaluable resource with which to augment and enrich my initial observations.

What has not been thoroughly considered by scholars, and where this chapter can intervene in the literature, is the ways in which public schools--their design, amenities, ornament, and placement in the physical city--can act as a document of the city’s development, growth, and change. This chapter explores the history of Cincinnati’s public school architecture and construction first on one site, then across the broader school system. The chapter concludes that, while under-studied and largely forgotten, Cincinnati’s neighborhood public schools can tell stories in two ways—stories of individual sites, and stories of the patterns those sites make when laid out across the entire city. Public elementary schools were an important hub of community connection and their design and placement in the urban environment cemented citizens’ understandings of their relationship to their city, its government, and its responsibilities to them and their children. School buildings served as a prominent physical reminder of the rights and responsibilities of democratic citizenship.

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One Site: Webster School

When Webster Elementary School opened in 1898, Cincinnati witnessed a fantastic procession of local dignitaries, victorious school administrators, uniformed veterans and bands, and a throng of school children in their Sunday best. The estate of a local brewer had donated

$1,000 for the purchase of a library. A noted local sculptor donated a marble bust of the school's namesake. The city's Turners pushed for the building to include one of the first gymnasiums ever in a public elementary school, and the community donated artworks, maps, and biological specimens to give their children the best that a public education could provide.18

The new school marked the triumph of its German-American neighborhood.

Seventy years later, the school's urban neighbors set the then-dilapidated building on fire.19

Originally emblematic of the optimism of turn-of-the-century urban life, Webster School is now long demolished and completely forgotten. Its vacant site sits at the center of a rapidly gentrifying enclave which entices millennials and empty-nesters back to the city with the allure of a connection to their city's past.20 The story of Webster School’s site teaches us that without physical buildings to document them, stories of the past become significantly harder to remember.

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18 “Liberal Bequest,” Cincinnati Enquirer (October 3, 1897) 24 “Men and Matters,” Cincinnati Enquirer (May 14, 1898) 4. 19 “Vandalism May Close Webster,” Cincinnati Post (January 19, 1971) 1. 20 The version of the neighborhood’s history that is being marketed and appeals to these newcomers is the distant Germanic history. Appalachian and African American history of the neighborhood is largely invisible in the current cultural climate.

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At Webster, we can see the entire history of Over-the-Rhine illustrated in this one physical place. This single lot has been the site of two public school buildings, a parking lot, and a playground which together tell a compelling, if sometimes depressing, story of urban growth and decline. This one school clearly illustrates the entire complicated arc of neighborhood change.

By 1828 the Miami and Erie canal had been built across the northern edge of what was then the settled portion of the Cincinnati.21 The city pushed on beyond this boundary at just the time that Germanic immigration accelerated in the late 1840s.22 The physical separation of the canal and the distinct ethnic characteristics of the German-speaking immigrants who lived above it, earned this neighborhood its name, Over-the-Rhine.23 These German speakers were only five percent of Cincinnati’s population in 1830, but they were 30% of the city’s 161,044 residents in 1860, and by 1880 57% of the city’s 255,139 residents were either Germanic immigrants or of Germanic descent.24

Though Germans lived in other parts of the city, Over-the-Rhine developed as a distinct

German enclave. An 1875 guidebook to the city somewhat patronizingly described Over-the-

Rhine in this way:

[A visitor] has no sooner entered the northern districts… across the canal, than he finds himself in another atmosphere—in a foreign land as it were… There is nothing like it in Europe—no transition so sudden, so pleasant, so easily

21 Cincinnati: A Guide to the Queen City and Its Neighbors (The WPA Guide to Cincinnati) (Cincinnati, OH: The Cincinnati Historical Society, 1943) 58; David Stradling, Cincinnati: From River City to Highway Metropolis (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2003) 21. 22 Stradling, 31-34. 23 Cincinnati: A Guide to the Queen City and Its Neighbors, 209; Don Heinrich Tolzmann, German Cincinnati (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2005) 31-32. 24 Don Heinrich Tolzmann, Survival of An Ethnic Community: The Cincinnati Germans 1918-1932 PhD Diss. (University of Cincinnati, 1983) 44-46.

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effected…. The visitor leaves behind him almost at a single step the rigidity of the American, the everlasting hurry and worry of the insatiate race for wealth… and enters at once into the borders of a people more happy, more readily contented, more easily pleased, far more closely wedded to music and the dance, to song, and life in the open air…The people are German; their faces are German; their manners and customs are German; their very gossip is German. They dance the German waltz as none but Germans can; they cook their food by German recipes and sit long over their foaming beer.25 The site of Webster School is north in Over-the-Rhine, almost to the hills, on Findlay

Street between Vine and Race Streets. The lot was part of a large tract of land subdivided in

1833. It sat beyond the original city limits, but in 1849 the city annexed land almost doubling its original four acres to nearly eight, including this lot.

The first school on this site was built around 1852.26 The eleven-room Thirteenth District

School was, like every other public elementary school at the time, a simple, unadorned three- story building. It was heated by coal burning stoves in each room and had a live-in janitor who woke up early to light them.27 Sixty or more students were crowded into each gender- segregated room and taught by a young woman teacher. As immigration increased in the 1850s and 1860s, the school became crowded.28 The building got seven additional classrooms in 1864 and by 1869 the school was serving 1379 students in 21 rooms with the third largest enrollment

25 D.J. Kenny, Illustrated Cincinnati: A Pictorial Handbook of the Queen City Comprising Its Architecture, Manufacture, Trade; Its Social, Literary, Scientific and Charitable Institutions; Its Churches, Schools, and Colleges; And All Other Principal Points of Interest to the Visitor and Resident Together with An Account of the Most Attractive Suburbs (Cincinnati, OH; Robert Clark & Co, 1875) 129-130. 26 Twenty-Third Annual Report of the Trustees and Visitors of the Common Schools of the City Council of Cincinnati for the Year Ending June 30, 1852 (Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Gazette Company, 1852) 10. 27 Thirtieth Annual Report: Common Schools of Cincinnati for the School Year Ending June 30, 1859 (Cincinnati, OH: B. Frankland Book and Job Printer, 1859) 99-100. 28 Thirtieth Annual Report: Common Schools of Cincinnati, 8, 45; Common Schools of Cincinnati: Thirty-Sixty Annual Report for the Year Ending June 30, 1865 (Cincinnati, OH: Times Steam Book and Job Printing Office, 1865) 5.

147 of the city’s eighteen public elementary schools.29 Despite this extreme crowding, the School

Board would not upgrade this building for twenty-nine years.

From the first this school held courses in both English and German. In 1838 and 1840,

German immigrants prevailed upon the state legislature to pass laws mandating public education in German where parents requested it.30 In June of 1866 the School Board members from the five German wards of the city all resigned in protest over the hiring of a non-German principal for the Thirteenth District School in a vote in which they were overruled by the

“English” members of the Board.31 The paper reported a mass meeting of German Americans held at the Central Turners Hall in which Judge Stallo gave a rousing speech, in German of course. Stallo reportedly said that the non-German principal was, “not only ignorant of German, but showing an aversion to German instruction and even German teachers.”32 The trustees further elaborated on the cause of their resignation saying that Mr. Allen had taken required time away from German instruction and had failed to report to and consult with the district trustees (who were German) as required by law. In their letter they note that the school had between 1,100 and 1,200 pupils, of which only forty to fifty were of non-German-American parentage.33

29 “Last Meeting of Old School Board,” Cincinnati Enquirer (July 7, 1863) 3; Common Schools of Cincinnati: First Part: Annual Report for the School Year Ending June 30, 1869 (Cincinnati, OH: Gazette Company, 1869) 67. 30 Rufus King, Report to the State Commissioner of Schools on the History and Condition of the Public Schools of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, OH: Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio, 1859) 8-9; Common Schools of Cincinnati: First Part: Annual Report for the School Year Ending June 30, 1869, 99-102. 31 “The German vs. American Members of the School Board,” Cincinnati Enquirer (June 5, 1866) 2. 32 Ibid. 33 “The Thirteenth District School,” Cincinnati Enquirer (May 31, 1866) 2.

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The German School Board members eventually triumphed and German principals became the norm in the school. In 1871 the Cincinnati Enquirer reported that of the 1,178 students in the school, only twenty-two did not study German.34 Between 1874 and 1887, half of all the students enrolled in the Cincinnati Public Schools received instruction in English and

German. Almost all the students at Thirteenth District did.

In 1876 when the Cincinnati Enquirer explored conditions in the Thirteenth District

School, they found the students to be, “as cheerful a sight as can be found anywhere,” and noted that over thirty years the school had turned out, “scholars who are now among the most active of our German-American merchants and manufacturers.”35 The building was the sole mark against the school, as the article noted, “many of the rooms are dark and unfit for the uses intended.”36

In 1891 a well-respected German-American educator became principal.37 George Braun was born in 1853, just two years after his parents had arrived in Cincinnati from Bavaria.38 He was raised just blocks from the Thirteenth District School and attended the Sixth District School on Elm Street.39 Shortly before Braun took up his post, the School Board approved plans for a new school based on a scathing 1884 expose that found the building to be poorly lit to the point that it would cause permanent injury to students’ eye sight, crowded to the point that there was no enough air for students to breathe, and that, “several unhealthy conditions

34 Cincinnati Enquirer (May 2, 1871) 4. 35 “Our Common Schools: An Enquirer Reporter Among the Little ones of the Thirteenth District,” Cincinnati Enquirer (November 5, 1876) 1. 36 Ibid. 37 “Professor George Braun,” Cincinnati Enquirer (December 29, 1901) 7. 38 United States Federal Census 1870, Cincinnati, OH: nineteenth ward, 271. 39 Ibid.; “Professor George Braun.”

149 greatly increase the rate of mortality among the children, or plant the seeds of disease in those who may be strong enough to survive the ordeal.”40 The Board went so far as to issue contracts for a new school building, but then tabled the plans leaving this substandard school building again to serve the district for another fourteen years.

Finally, the successful push to update the Thirteenth District School was headed by the district’s German-American School Board trustee, George Bardes. In September of 1895, Bardes convened a meeting of district residents to discuss possible sites for a building to replace the existing Thirteenth District School. Replacement on the existing site was chosen.41 Within two years of this meeting, George Bardes was able to shepherd the construction of the finest elementary school Cincinnati had ever seen—the pride of the city’s German community.

The innovative new building was first revealed in the Cincinnati Enquirer in April 1897. It was expected to cost $65,000 (or almost two million dollars today), be heated by steam, include indoor bathrooms, a gymnasium and library in addition to eighteen huge classrooms, six on each of three floors.42 Yet these advances would not be enough to placate Cincinnati’s proud

German-American community. In a never-before-seen showing of private support for a public school in Cincinnati, Germans rallied together to equip the school with resources beyond measure. The newly-founded Thirteenth District Improvement Association plunged into a frenzy of fundraising to make this a model for all schools. The community’s first triumph was when, in October 1897, it was announced that prominent “millionaire brewer and

40 “Board of Heath: Passing Upon the Condition of School-Houses,” Cincinnati Enquirer (February 1,1884) 8. 41 “Citizens of Thirteenth District Enthusiastic for New Building,” Cincinnati Enquirer (September 20, 1895) 8. 42 “Proposed Thirteenth District Schoolhouse,” Cincinnati Enquirer (April 28, 1897) 5.

150 philanthropist,” Christian Moerlein, who lived and worked within blocks of the school, and whose children were alumni had, at George Bardes’ urging, left $1,000 (about $30,000 in today’s dollars) in his will to provide the new school with the finest school library.43

The cornerstone of the new building was laid two months later, on December 3, 1897, in a ceremony that included American flags flung from the homes and businesses of the district. A parade of students, and the officers of the Grand Lodge of the Masons were escorted to the school by the first regiment band. Students gave vocal performances and the mayor gave a

“masterly” address.44 The children sang the Battle Hymn of the Republic and the head of the

School Board spoke, all in preparation for the grand masonic ceremony. The local paper wrote:

“With uncovered heads the members of the grand masonic fraternity …poured over the cornerstone the oil, wine and corn, symbols of the nation’s mainstays. At the conclusion of the imposing rites, the school children joined in the singing of ‘America.’”45 The superintendent of schools spoke next and the ceremony concluded with the placement of a time capsule in the corner stone. Nine months later and even more grand ceremony would grace this same site.46

In January 1898 the Thirteenth District Improvement Association began selling images of the new building to raise funds.47 In February, they rallied all former students for a reunion event at the nearby Elm Street Clubhouse. This event ended up requiring twenty-eight subcommittees, twelve hundred mailed invitations, two donated buildings, a dancefloor, and

43 “Liberal Bequest,” Cincinnati Enquirer (October 3, 1897) 24. 44 “Laid with Impressive Ceremonies was the Corner Stone of Thirteenth District School,” Cincinnati Enquirer (December 4, 1897) 5. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 “Raising Funds to Defray Costs of Dedicating Thirteenth District School,” Cincinnati Enquirer (January, 15, 1898) 5.

151 gas fixtures hung in the courtyard. One paper estimated over 2,000 in attendance for a colossal spread of delicious food, speeches, performances, an ice cream parlor, and a bazaar of donated items for sale. The teacher’s singing society performed and a “wheel of fortune” encouraged patrons to part with their money.48 The papers declared the event, “a glowing, palpitating, unadulterated success of the first magnitude.”49 In April, students at the school gave a sold-out musical fundraiser at the Odeon Theater.50 In May, Bardes purchased a collection of stuffed birds and animals, Native America “relics,” and primate pottery to be placed in a school museum.51

A week before the formal dedication ceremonies, the Cincinnati Enquirer issued a glowing report on the new school, now renamed after Noah Webster, of spelling fame. They wrote, “From the ashes of the old Thirteenth District School, phoenix-like, a palace has arisen that is a credit to its projectors and a pride to the city as the model schoolhouse.”52 The paper especially praised the gymnasium, the “collection of stuffed birds and animals...distributed over ten cases throughout the halls and vestibules, and several cases of papier-mache figures imported from Germany to be used in object lessons.”53

48 “Novel Reunion,” Cincinnati Enquirer (February 17, 1898) 4; “Ready for the Grand Reunion,” Cincinnati Enquirer (February 19, 1898) 8; “Reunion of Thirteenth District School at Elm Street Club,” Cincinnati Enquirer (February 22, 1898) 7; “Pelton Stopped – Mayor Tafel Allows Fortune Wheel to Run,” Cincinnati Post (February 23, 1898) 3. 49 “Glowing Success was the Reunion,” Cincinnati Enquirer (February 23, 1898) 12. 50 “Pupils of Thirteenth District School to Give Entertainment at Odeon,” Cincinnati Enquirer (April 10, 1898) 24; “Pronounced Success Was Thirteenth District School Entertainment at Odeon,” Cincinnati Enquirer (April 17, 1898) 31. 51 “Men and Matters,” Cincinnati Enquirer (May 14, 1898) 4. 52 “Model Institution of Learning,” Cincinnati Enquirer (September 11, 1898) 2. 53 Ibid.

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On September 16, 1898, the new Webster School was, “bedecked with flags and flowers,” the streets around the school, “crowded with a throng of people.” Beyond the

Moerlein library, a gym up to the standards of the local Turners, the stuffed animals and birds, and the German papier-mache, the school also boasted beautiful paintings in every room and the famous local sculptor Leopold Fettwiess had donated an “artistically perfect” marble bust of the school’s namesake. The school was open for proud inspection by the community which had contributed to its success until the hour appointed for the street parade. The new school’s students were joined by the Woodward Council of the Order of United American Mechanics and the First Regiment Band. The Grand Army of the Republic had presented the flagstaff around which the events were held. Speeches were given by the president of the Board of

Education, the superintendent of schools, the head of the committee on funds and claims,

Chairman of the Building Committee, trustees of the school (including George Bardes), Principal

Braun, and several others. There were prayers and a formal presentation of the keys to the building and the American flag. The children sang patriotic songs and presented gifts to Mr.

Bardes and the Assistant Principal for German.54 The new school was an overwhelming success.

Cincinnati’s German American community had worked together to create and celebrate the finest school in the city. It was a testament to their hard work, their commitment to education, their shared wealth and culture, and a document of their proud rise from foreign newcomers, to well-established citizens. A rise in which education had been key.

54 “Memorable Day for Webster School,” Cincinnati Enquirer (September 17, 1898) 8.

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Webster School was the pride of the German-American community when it opened in 1898. The wall pictured in this photograph remains today in a much-altered urban context. (Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County) Three years later, as part of an investigation of conditions in the public schoolhouses, the building was again heralded by the Cincinnati Post as a model.55 Board Committee of

Hygiene chair Dr. Joseph Marcus had this to say:

Webster School is in every respect an imposing looking building, and has within its walls every modern suggestion that could be embodied in school architecture. It is an up-to-date building, and opens up one surprise close upon the other in new features—all irresistibly pleasing…Every room is large, high and perfectly kept and beautifully adorned with allegorical paintings so interesting to the child mind that one is unconsciously constrained to linger and examine...There is an atmosphere of refinement and studious attention that was most pleasing. 56 and all this was attributed to the leadership of George Braun.

55 “Webster School a Model Building,” Cincinnati Post (April 29, 1901) 3. 56 Ibid.

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Braun served Webster School until his death.57 In 1910 one third of Cincinnati’s population still claimed German as their “mother tongue.”58 And yet, Braun’s death just seven years later marked a symbolic change at Webster School and in Over-the-Rhine. 1917 is the year that the Cincinnati Public Schools discontinued German language education.59 War- induced anti-German hysteria left over five hundred teachers of German unemployed and forced 14,000 elementary students into English-only education against their wishes.60 Street names were changed. Books in German were pulled from the shelves of the public library and the German enclave of Over-the-Rhine began to come apart. Like other urban dwellers, old

German residents moved out of the densely-crowded district and up to streetcar-connected hilltop neighborhoods where they could buy a house with modern heating and an indoor toilet.

The units they left were soon filled by waves of migrants from impoverished regions of the

Appalachian Mountains who were first recruited to fill vacancies in the city’s factories as a result of the war.61 In 1920, prohibition added the final knockout to German American cohesion in Over-the-Rhine, putting brewers, coopers, bottlers, saloon owners, and teamsters all out of work overnight and drastically altering the social and political fabric of the community. By 1929 the Cincinnati Enquirer reported on the “backward children” in need of educational support. It shared the stories of, “a little nine-year-old girl who came to Cincinnati from the backwoods of

Kentucky. She had no schooling at all, so she was entered in the special Webster class” and “a

57 “Dean of Principals Dies,” Cincinnati Enquirer (January 14, 1917) 8. 58 Don Heinrich Tolzmann, Cincinnati After the Great War (Bowie, MD: Clearfield Publishing) 7. 59 Cincinnati Public Schools Eighty-Eighth Annual Report for the Year Ending August 31, 1917 (Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Public Schools, 1918) 109-110. 60 Ibid. 109-110, 344; Cincinnati Public Schools Eighty-Seventh Annual Report for the Year Ending August 31, 1916 (Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Public Schools, 1917) 160. 61 Phillip J. Obermiller, Thomas E. Wagner, and E. Bruce Tucker, eds., Appalachian Odyssey: Historical Perspectives on the Great Migration, (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2000) 5.

155 boy of 13 years [enrolled at Webster, who] was unable to get any education [before moving to

Cincinnati]” due to, “ill health and the distance of his home from the little Tennessee schoolhouse.”62

By 1934, the papers begin carrying occasional stories of vandalism at Webster, as the neighborhood’s population dropped and it transitioned from a mixed-income German enclave to a lower-income neighborhood of Appalachian migrants and other newer immigrants.63 Cars also changed the face of Over-the-Rhine. In 1946 the merchants of nearby Findlay Market request permission for cars to park in the school yard on Sundays.64 Later, auto-centric designs for American cities and for Cincinnati led to drastic changes for Over-the-Rhine and for Webster

School.

Cincinnati’s 1948 Metropolitan Master Plan called for shrinking the residential portion of the West End creating industrial “belts” to separate residential communities from industrial activities.65 This land, adjacent to Over-the-Rhine and home to 70% of the city’s African

American population, consisted of nineteenth century dwellings, businesses, churches, schools, and factories, much like Over-the-Rhine.66 Beginning in 1959, the city’s deep-seated racism led to the elimination of over 4,000 buildings, home to over 25,000 African American residents, for

62 “Commonplace Fades Away: New Vistas are Opened for Backward Children By Unusual Teaching Methods at Webster School,” Cincinnati Enquirer (January 8, 1929) 10. 63 “Vandals Visit Schools,” Cincinnati Enquirer (December 15, 1934) 24; “More Schools Damaged By Vandals,” Cincinnati Enquirer (June 1, 1948) 3. 64 “School Board Member Kicks Over Payment of Janitors for Housing Project Classes,” Cincinnati Enquirer (November 12, 1946) 19. 65 Cincinnati City Planning Commission. The Cincinnati Metropolitan Master Plan 1948 (Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Planning Commission, 1948) 26-32. 66 John Emmeus Davis. Contested Ground: Collective Action and the Urban Neighborhood. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991) 106, 110.

156 the creation of a center for light industry now known as Queensgate.67 In one of Cincinnati’s greatest historical mistakes, the project used funds provided by the federal government for urban renewal and interstate highway construction to physically enforce existing racist beliefs and to drastically reshape Cincinnati’s urban neighborhoods.68 In Over-the-Rhine this meant that an influx of a relatively small number of displaced African Americans set off a significant wave of white flight, flipping Over-the-Rhine from a thriving, dense, white Appalachian neighborhood to an African American community left to make the best of neighborhood divestment and abandonment.69

In 1950 Over-the-Rhine’s population of over 34,000 was 97% white.70 By 1960 Over-the-

Rhine had lost 7000 white residents and gained 3000 African American ones, with a total population drop of 4,000 residents and a switch from 97% to 87% white.71 By 1970 Over-the-

Rhine had just 16,000 total residents and was only 60% white.72 This number shrank to 37% by

1980.73 It was on this contested terrain that the pride of Cincinnati’s nineteenth century

German community became an emblem of the frustrations of twentieth century urban life. It was set aflame and eventually fell to the wrecking ball.

67 Alyssa Konermann, “25,737 People Lived in Kenyon-Barr When the City Razed It to the Ground.” Cincinnati Magazine (February 10, 2017) https://www.cincinnatimagazine.com/citywiseblog/lost-city-kenyon-barr- queensgate/ 68 Anne Delano Steinert, “Finding Kenyon Barr: The Demolition of Cincinnati’s Lower West End,” University of Cincinnati, College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning, Impacting Urban Futures Lecture. October 2018. https://daap.mediaspace.kaltura.com/media/2018+10+23+Anne+Delano+Steinert/1_umy69bjy/36513181 69 Brandon Wiers, “Hamilton County Housing Trends: Are We Getting What We Want?” (Cincinnati, OH: Community Housing Resources Board, 1984) Census Tabulation Tables. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid.

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After several previous incidents of petty vandalism, more aggressive vandals stuck

Webster School in January of 1971. The vandals used glue and paint to splatter desks and wielded hammers to destroy clocks and speakers and set one classroom on fire.74 Even at the time it was clear that the vandalism at Webster, and other Cincinnati schools, was a reaction against change and abandonment in Cincinnati’s urban neighborhoods as they wrestled with the white flight. The paper reported that, “Webster, located in an inner-city area of transition, has caught the brunt of neighborhood complaints about general conditions.”75 After the vandalism, damage from which was estimated at only $20,000, Cincinnati Public Schools gave up on the building, which was serving only 400 children, about 40% of its intended enrollment.76 CPS sold the building to the city $89,000 in 1972, less that it had cost to build and outfit the building and buy the land in 1898.77

After the building’s demolition, the site was used as a parking lot for nearby Findlay

Market. It was later paved and officially named the Webster Findlay lot in 1977.78 Cars graced the site of what had once been the community’s greatest pride until it became, in 1995, Findlay

Playground.79 The old wall from Webster School still stands on the Findlay Street side of the now-closed playground--the only reminder of the site’s monumental past.

From 1995 to 2018 Findlay Playground was a neighborhood park with a ballfield, climber, swings, basketball hoops, grills and picnic facilities, and well-used chess tables. The

74 “Vandals Heavily Damage School,” Cincinnati Post (January 18, 1971) 1. 75 Ibid. 76 “Vandalism May Close Webster,” Cincinnati Post (January 19, 1971) 1. 77 “School Chief Offers List of Principals,” Cincinnati Post (July 22, 1972) 33. 78 “Work Starting on Findlay Mart Lot” Cincinnati Enquirer (December 6, 1977) 31. 79 “Findlay Plan OK’d,” Cincinnati Enquirer (December 14, 1995) B2.

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Vine Street side of the park was home to a sometimes-rowdy group of largely low-income, largely African American, young people who often bled out into the street, in much the way I imagine German American teenagers might have at the time of Webster School. The Findlay

Street side was home to older users, the kinds of folks who spend their day out on a park bench, also largely low-income, and also, largely African American. There were complaints about drug dealing, and there was occasional violence. A young mother was killed by a stray bullet in 2005 and there have been several other shootings.80

Over-the-Rhine has undergone a new wave of change in the last fifteen years. Following racial unrest in the neighborhood in 2001 after the police shooting of an unarmed African

American teen named Timothy Thomas, the city government helped to create a community development corporation to serve Over-the-Rhine called the Cincinnati Center City

Development Corporation, or 3CDC.81 Since 2003, 3CDC and other developers have brought significant reinvestment throughout Over-the-Rhine, changing the neighborhood from a low- income enclave to a hip urban haven for millennials and suburbanites. Findlay Playground caused problems for these newcomers.82

Recent news reports have called the park “a hotbed of crime,” perhaps accelerated as low-income residents have been pushed into this far north corner of the neighborhood by

80 Jane Predergast, “Stray Bullet Robs Boy of Mom,” Cincinnati Enquirer (June 25, 2005) 1. 81 Colin Woodward, “How Cincinnati Salvaged the Nation’s Most Dangerous Neighborhood,” Politco Magazine (June 16, 2016) https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/what-works-cincinnati-ohio-over-the-rhine- crime-neighborhood-turnaround-city-urban-revitalization-213969. 82 Evan Millward, “City to close, renovate Findlay Playground in effort to stop crime,” WCPO (October 29, 2019) https://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/hamilton-county/cincinnati/over-the-rhine/city-to-close-renovate- findlay-playground-in-effort-to-stop-crime#:~:text=in%20the%20area.- ,Findlay%20Playground%20on%20Vine%20Street%20will%20close%20sometime%20in%20the,spring%20or%20su mmer%20of%202019.

159 displacement and gentrification.83 Following a shooting in the park in October 2018, Cincinnati police pressured the park’s operator, the Cincinnati Recreation Commission (CRC), to close the park indefinitely.84 News outlets lauded the park’s closing as a way to “push out the bad guys” and though there was no plan for the park’s renovation, CRC chief Daniel Betts said he’d have the park reopened by “spring or summer 2019.”85 More affluent new residents to Over-the-

Rhine are safer as they sit on their rooftop decks or stroll to the nearby Vietnamese restaurant, but low-income residents are now without a park. While some might view this as contested terrain, it seems clear, that the newcomers have won this turf, and long-time residents have been forced to yield. Today Findlay Playground sits blockaded and vacant surrounded by a wall that once surrounded Webster School, the pride of the German American community.

This site is a stunningly clear document of the rise and fall of urban America from settlement to the success of new immigrants, to suburbanization, urban renewal, economic decline, and now gentrification. There is nothing here to tell the story of Webster School other than the wall.

83 Brad Underwood, “Over-the-Rhine Park That’s a Hotbed for Crime Closing: New Park to Be Built,” WKRC (October 29, 2019) https://local12.com/news/local/over-the-rhine-park-thats-a-hotbed-for-crime-being- demolished-new-park-to-be-built. 84 Ibid. 85 Millward.

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The wall that once surrounded Webster School as it appears today. (Photo by the author)  Many Sites: Patterns of Urban Growth and Change

While the site of Webster school illustrates the rise and fall of urban America with place- based specificity, the wall that once surrounded Webster School is just one of many schools walls (and other physical remnants) throughout the city. In addition to telling singular place- based stories, the sum of these remnants all together also allows us to tell a larger story.

Beginning with these physical remnants, and moving to maps and printed reports, I have pieced together the locations of one hundred six school buildings which, when considered together lay out much of the story of Cincinnati’s population growth, annexation of other municipalities, and political maneuvering.

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Origins of The Common Schools

Through the physical evidence of the city’s earliest schools has been long covered by downtown development, other sources tell the story of the system’s origin. The Cincinnati public school system was founded by an amendment to the City Charter on February 12, 1829, when Cincinnati had 24,831 residents, a number that would nearly double in the following decade.86 The law required the division of the city into ten school districts and gave a two-year window for the Board to find a lot and build a building in each district. These buildings were to be built in brick or stone, with two rooms, one on each of two floors, “of such dimensions and capacity as shall be proper and convenient,” all of the same size and dimensions.87 The law was not immediately carried out as intended, and Cincinnati’s first common schools met in rented rooms, “in basements and other such places as they could.”88 The slow progress and dismal conditions of these early schools created a negative reputation which the schools would have to overcome.89 In order to quash this poor reputation the common schools held public examinations at a central location during the last week of each school year, followed by “a grand procession of all the schools, girls and boys, in full dress with ribbons and banners.”90

Cincinnati in the 1830s was still small enough that all the students from all the schools could easily walk to a central location. The children marched to a church where religious services were held and awards were given out by the mayor. These processions “made a gala day of the

86 Fifteenth Annual Report of the Trustees and Visitors of Common Schools to the City Council of Cincinnati for the Year Ending June 30, 1844 (Cincinnati, OH: Gazette, 1844) 26, 32; Charles Theodore Greve, Centennial History of Cincinnati and Representative Citizens (Chicago: Biographical Publishing Company, 1904) 684 87 Fifteenth Annual Report, 32. 88 King. 4. 89 Ibid, 5. 90 Ibid.

162 city, continued many years, until the growth of the city, and the number of pupils made the processions inconvenient.”91 Board chair Rufus King wrote of these ceremonies, “the great mass of the citizens were surprised and delighted by the respectable array and bearing of the teachers, the readiness and intelligence which the pupils evinced in their examinations, and more than all perhaps the neatness, spirit and order.”92

By 1834, the Board had succeeded in building one two-room, two-story, brick model schoolhouse. The façade featured engaged pilasters and a pediment and was topped by a

“neatly proportioned cupola, in which was the bell that called the pupils and the hour of school.”93

91 Ibid. 92 Ibid. 93 Common Schools of Cincinnati First Part Thirty-Ninth for the School Year Ending June 30th, 1868 (Cincinnati, OH: Times Steam Book and Job Printing Establishment, 1869) 148.

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Each of Cincinnati’s first eleven school buildings followed the model of this first district school. (Charles Cist, Cincinnati in 1841: Its Early Annals and Future Prospects (Cincinnati, OHL Charles Cist, 1841) 108-109) By 1836 eight additional buildings based on the first model had been constructed throughout Cincinnati’s three basin neighborhoods, and by 1847 the district had eleven buildings.94 For a brief moment after the construction of these initial school buildings, it appeared that the Common Schools had accomplished their mission and that the children of the city would be well-served by the newly constructed buildings. In 1837 a letter to the editor of The Western Academician reported, “the public school houses of Cincinnati are proud monuments of the spirit of our citizens.”95 But as the schools became more popular and the

94 Twenty-Seventh Annual Report of the Trustees and Visitors of the Common Schools of Cincinnati for the Year Ending June 30, 1856 (Cincinnati, OH: Gazette Co. Steam Printing House, 1856) 114. 95 Twelfth Annual Report of the Condition of the Common Schools to the City Council of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, OH: Daily Republican Office, 1841) 10

164 population surged, it quickly became clear that the Common Schools would have to keep building schools to make room for all the students in want of schooling, including special facilities for German-speaking students.96 As the first schools grew more crowded a basement room could also be converted to a classroom, but soon enough, the Common Schools of

Cincinnati would embark on a hectic and perpetual building program not to slow for the better part of one hundred years.

To visualize the ways that Cincinnati’s schools followed the patterns of urban growth, I have mapped five phases of public school construction.

This map of Cincinnati’s first eleven school buildings illustrates the confines of the original walking city. The map above shows the locations of Cincinnati’s first eleven purpose-built schools, all completed by 1847. These are the first ten model school houses, plus an additional school

96 John B. Shotwell, A History of the Schools of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, OH: The School Life Company, 1902) 305.

165 building on Clinton Street in the northern portion of the West End. From this map you can see clearly the confines of the early walking city which was constrained by the river to the south,

Mill Creek (now I75 corridor) to the west, Deer Creek (now I71 corridor) to the east, and the city’s northern boundary of Liberty Street to the north. The locations of these school houses reveal a density along the riverfront unfamiliar to modern Cincinnatians, and a line of schools leading up Vine Street, which still forms the spine of the city today.97 While this map illustrates

Cincinnati’s public schools’ placement in 1847, just two years later, with the city’s population soaring, the city would make its first annexation, begin to move beyond this original northern border, and significantly rework the dense urban orientation of its schools.

Population Growth

In 1844 the Board began to fret that “the population of the city is already so numerous and increasing so rapidly, that the present buildings will not be sufficient to properly accommodate but a portion of the children who ought to be taught in them.”98 The report further noted that the schoolhouses, built just ten years prior “were built to meet the educational wants of the city at a time when the population was only a little more than one-half what it is at present.”99

97 Interestingly, when Cincinnati was first laid out, Main Street was expected to be the city’s primary north/south thoroughfare (thus the name Main), but because it was constrained by the Deer Creek bottoms to the east, the city expanded to the west and the city’s center of gravity shifted to Vine Street. This was formally acknowledged by the city in the 1896 address adjustment in which Vine replaced Main as the east/west divide for address numbering. 98 Fifteenth Annual Report of the Trustees and Visitors of Common Schools to the City Council of Cincinnati for the School Year Ending June 30, 1844 (Cincinnati, OH: The Daily Times Office, 1844) 2. 99 Ibid., 3.

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In addition to educating Cincinnati’s white citizens, the city’s Black population was advocating for their fair share of Cincinnati’s school funds. In 1848 a political deal struck between Ohio’s Whig and Democratic parties resulted in the repeal of Ohio’s Black Laws and the establishment of publicly funded schools for African American children. Cincinnatian John

Isom Gaines was elected head of Cincinnati’s new Colored Schools, a segregated institution entirely separate from the Common Schools.100 The new system was barely underway when the city’s treasurer refused to pay the monies from the general school fund the Black board needed to operate.101 Without funds, the Black public schools closed after just three months.102 The

Black schools sued for their share of the public funds and in 1850 won Directors of the Eastern and Western Schools Districts of Cincinnati v. City of Cincinnati in the Ohio State Supreme

Court.103

The 1849-1850 school year also brought the first of many annexations by adding land north of Liberty Street to the city, imposing on the Board, “The duty of establishing new schools, as well as the erection of additional school buildings.”104 At the same time the board was working to juggle “The very great increase of our population, composed as it is of so many different elements, so distinct in language, habits, and education.”105 These challenges caused

100 I use the word “colored” in this chapter only when I refer to the proper name of the institution “The Colored Schools of Cincinnati” or denoting the Board of that institution. This is an outdated term once used to refer to African Americans which I understand would be wholly inappropriate in a modern context, yet I use it here in its historical context. 101 Nikki Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati’s Black Community 1802-1865 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005) 165. 102 Ibid. 103 Taylor, 164-174. 104 Twentieth Annual Report of the Trustees & Visitors of Common Schools to the City Council of Cincinnati for the Year Ending June 30, 1849 (Cincinnati, OH: Wright, Ferris and Co. City Printers, 1850) 5. 105 Ibid., 6; Immigrants to Cincinnati at this time were largely German and Irish and included Protestants, Catholics, and German Jews. Germans were generally more highly educated and skilled than their Irish counterparts.

167 significant changes in the look and design of Cincinnati’s schools as the immediacies of housing school children took precedent over cupolas and columns.

During the late 1850s, the Board of the Common Schools began to build larger buildings,

“different in style and character from any hitherto erected.”106 They were tall and narrow because of their placement on expensive lots of urban property. They were generally three to four stories in height with pitched roofs and featuring triangular pediments on the primary facade. The buildings were brick with simple Classical or Italianate detailing at the doors and roofline. One of the first of these buildings was the Sixth District School on Elm Street at Adams

Street (now Odeon) which opened in 1857.107

The Sixth District School was one of the second wave of buildings built by the Board. While built in

106 Isaac Martin, History of the Schools of Cincinnati and Other Educational Institutions Public and Private (Cincinnati, OH: Board of Education and Superintendent of Schools, 1900) 26. 107 Note that this is not the Sixth District School we know today as the Cincinnati Health Department, but a previous Sixth District building on the same site. The current building was built in 1897.

168 relatively open surroundings, the city would soon crowd around this urban lot just three blocks north of Music Hall. (Common Schools of Cincinnati First Part Thirty-Ninth Annual Report for the School Year Ending June 30, 1868 (Cincinnati, OH: Times Steam Book and Job Printing Establishment, 1868) 164) The Sixth District School was designed by well-known local architects William Walter and James Keys Wilson. The architects added innovative design features including a large assembly space on the building’s fourth floor by using “rising blackboard partitions” to combine all the school rooms on that floor into one large space in view of a stage.108 By creating a public gathering space to accommodate all the children in the school, this building made centralized dissemination of information, values, and behaviors possible. It also made the school building more useful to the surrounding community which could use it as a civic gathering space.

This Sixth District School is one of the earliest buildings from which remnants remain in today’s urban environment. Though a new school was built on this site, the stone piers from the fence pictured above have been preserved in a planting bed on the site today.

108 Common Schools of Cincinnati First Part Thirty-Ninth Annual Report for the School Year Ending June 30, 1868 (Cincinnati, OH: Times Steam Book and Job Printing Establishment, 1868) 162.

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Historic Fence posts from the Sixth District School are visible within a planting bed. (Photo by the author) Cincinnati architect Samuel Hannaford later praised the simplicity of this second wave of school buildings, saying, “The arrangement was very simple and economical of construction, and for an ordinary Public School house cannot be improved upon. Each room has a corner, insuring light and air from two directions, and thorough cross ventilation. In their external appearance these houses were of the classical style, but very simple, without ornamentation, in good proportion, and they had the merit of declaring their purpose –they looked like schoolhouses.”109 Three buildings of more than thirty from this era stand in Cincinnati today, though walls and fences from several others are also extant.110

109 Samuel Hannaford “School Architecture” in Martin, Schools of Cincinnati, 188. 110 The three extant schools are First District in Over-the-Rhine (now housing), Cummins in Walnut Hills (now a Charter School), and McKinley in the West End (now the Irish Heritage Center of Greater Cincinnati).

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Seguin School on Findlay Street in the West End, completed in 1870, is an example of the tall simply ornamented schools typical before the late 1880s (Common Schools of Cincinnati Part First Forty-First Annual Report for the School Year Ending June 30, 1870 (Cincinnati, OH: Wilstach, Baldwin & Co., 1870) By 1859 overcrowding in the schools caused Superintendent I. J. Allen to bemoan the

“positive evil” of the overfull accommodations which necessitated the daily turning away of

“tens and scores of bright-eyed children,” some of whom are “tearfully begging for admission.”111 In the years between 1846 and 1860, the number of school-aged children in the city had risen from 20,732 to 80,151.112 This increase was largely due to the arrival of thousands of immigrants, many from the Germanic states, and migrants from other parts of the U.S., but also resulted from the annexation of several villages surrounding the downtown basin. In order

111 Common Schools of Cincinnati Thirtieth Annual Report for the School Year Ending June 30, 1859 (Cincinnati, OH: B. Frankland Book and Job Printer, 1859) 25-26. 112 Common Schools of Cincinnati Thirty-Third for the School Year Ending June 30, 1862 (Cincinnati, OH: Johnson, Stephens & Morgan, General Steam Printers, 1862) 114; Note that school attendance was not mandatory, so only a small percentage of this number attended school.

171 to relieve crowding in the West End, the new Fifth District School on Third Street between Plum and Elm was occupied by students in January of 1861 to replace the old model schoolhouse on that site.

The Fifth District School replaced one of the original two-story model schoolhouses as the city’s population grew. This building had more than double the space of its predecessor. (Common Schools of Cincinnati First Part Thirty-Ninth Annual Report for the School Year Ending June 30, 1868 (Cincinnati, OH: Times Steam Book and Job Printing Establishment, 1868) 157) While the white schools were busy building new buildings, Cincinnati’s Colored Schools first met in rented back rooms, basements, and attics. African American students faced deplorable conditions in their schools until the schools were able to build their first dedicated

172 buildings.113 In 1855 the board reported, “The rooms now occupied for school purposes, as far as location is concerned, could not possibly be more inconveniently situated. One of our houses in the Western District (occupied by males) is situated in the midst of a people morally depraved.”114 The same year, the female rooms in the Western District on Union Street were described as,

A perfect rat-hole! This house is in a worse condition than any other now occupied; the rats often alarm the girls from their studies, by running around the room; the plastering has been off many portions of the rooms ever since last June…All through the winter the house was, at times from its exposed condition, and its great number of air holes, intensively cold. The rooms are low, long and dark with little or no ventilation.115

And in the Eastern district the privies surrounding the school made studying highly unpleasant.116 In 1857 a room at the corner of Third Street and Western Row was, “situated in the loft of the building and to reach it you have to pass up a dark, dingy, dirty, stairway, encompassed by private families and impure air. The place is better suited for the repository of the dead, than the resting place of the living.”117 Similarly, a room on the north side of Sixth

Street east of Broadway was,

Located in the rear of the house, and as you approach it through a lane, the effluvia which arises is enough to knock a man to pieces, and make him desire a brandy punch. When cloudy you cannot see the in the room to read, and when it rains the filthy water that pours along the door-way is exceedingly disgusting. The rooms on the opposite side are surrounded with degraded dens of infamy,

113 Taylor, 170-171. 114 First Annual Report of the Board of Trustees for the Colored Schools of Cincinnati for the School Year Ending June 30, 1855 (Cincinnati, OH: Moore, Wilstach & Keys Company, 1855) 8. 115 Ibid. 116 Ibid. 117 Eighth Annual Report of the Board of Trustees for the Colored Schools of Cincinnati for the School Year Ending June 30, 1857 (Cincinnati, OH)

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too hideous to mention. And it is impossible for a teacher or a scholar to go outside without coming in contact with the influence.118 After declaring in 1857, “We want two, good, plain, but substantial school-houses—one for the Eastern, and one for the Western District,” finally, in 1858, the Colored Schools contracted with Nicholas Longworth for a lot and the construction of a school building on

Seventh Street between Broadway and Culvert Street.119 Banker and winemaker, Longworth was one of the city’s wealthiest citizens and a quiet patron of Cincinnati’s Black community.120

The three-story building contained four classrooms, two recitation rooms, a meeting hall with a stage, two rooms for the janitor’s residence, halls, stairs, hat rooms, and water closets.121 The building’s architecture was described as, “commendable and present[ing] to the eye an imposing appearance.”122

Shortly after the completion of their first building, the Colored Board built an equivalent school serving the western half of the city. When that building was completed in 1860 the annual report of the Colored Board stated, “A more pleasant location we do not wish, one that not only presents in point of architect beauty to the eye, but so arranges in point of ventilation as we believe will contribute to the general health of all those who may attend the School there.”123

118 Ibid. 119 Ibid 120 Taylor, 45-46. 121 Ninth Annual Report of the Board of Trustees for the Colored Schools of Cincinnati for the School Year Ending June 30, 1858 (Cincinnati, OH: Wrightson and Company Printers, 1858) 3. 122 Tenth Annual Report of the Board of Trustees for the Colored Schools of Cincinnati for the School Year Ending June 30, 1859 (Cincinnati, OH: Wrightson and Company Printers, 1859) 6. 123 Tenth Annual Report of the Board of Trustees for the Colored Schools of Cincinnati for the School Year Ending June 30, 1859 (Cincinnati, OH: Wrightson and Company Printers, 1859)

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These two buildings served the Colored Schools for a time, but as the population of the city grew, particularly after the Civil War, the schools added colony classrooms in other parts of the city.124 Even these additional accommodations did not satisfy the many students who wished to attend Cincinnati’s Colored Schools. By 1871 the rented rooms on Pleasant Street had become unbearable and the School Board reported that,

Pleasant Street Colony School was removed early in the year to the Court Street building, and located in the rooms formerly occupied by the janitor. The removal of this school was a wise movement. A more undesirable location for school purposes could not have been selected than the one abandoned. The neighborhood seems to be one of the most insalubrious in the city. There is no contagion nor pestilence which does not pay its compliments to this quarter. The school-room was a small place neither ventilated nor capable of being ventilated.125 African American Cincinnatians were not the only ones building new schools during this period. Industrialization and the resulting shifts in population influenced the placement of schoolhouses beginning in the 1860s. In 1863, the President of the Board of Common Schools reported “lots and houses in those parts of the city where commerce and manufactures are crowding out the population, will be vacated and sold… which will, in turn, materially aid the building up of Schools in the newly populated areas.”126 As the riverfront and downtown were given over to commerce, schools moved to the basin’s edges and beyond.

124 A colony is a building apart from the main school of that district serving students whose homes are distant from the main building or which the main building is too small to accommodate. Colony buildings were sometimes repurposed houses, but could also be one-story buildings built, though poorly, specifically for this purpose. 125 Colored Schools of Cincinnati Twenty-Second and Twenty-Third 1871 Annual Report of the Board of Directors for the School Years Ending June 30 1871-72 (Cincinnati, OH: Gazette Printing Company, 1872) 17-18; Pleasant Street at the time was anything but Pleasant. It was home to the very poor and notorious as a center of prostitution. 126 Common Schools of Cincinnati Thirty-Fourth Annual Report for the School Year Ending June 30, 1863 (Cincinnati, OH: Times Steam and Book Job Printing Office, 1863) 5.

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As population boomed—from 46,338 on 1840, to 115,435 in 1850, to 161,044 in 1860, and 216,239 in 1870, more than a four-fold increase in just thirty years--the 1867 Board

President’s report emphatically stated, “nothing less than the erection of a new building of the largest size, every year, will, at the present rate of increase, keep pace with the growth of our city; and, it is easy to see, that the day is not far distant when even this will be an inadequate supply.”127 Indeed the Board would struggle to keep up with population growth and redistribution until the present day.

Year Population National Rank Public School Enrollment 1840 46,338 6 5,121 1850 115,435 6 12,240 1860 161,044 7 17,615 1870 216,239 8 23,581 1880 255,139 8 29,482 1890 296,908 9 31,300 This chart documents Cincinnati’s population growth between 1840 and 1890 with the accompanying increase in public school enrollments. (Cincinnati population numbers from Miller, Boss Cox’s Cincinnati, 5. Public School enrollment numbers from Annual Reports of the Common/Public Schools in each year noted) A highly celebrated model of new schoolhouses during this period was the First District

School on Liberty Hill completed in 1868, built with 21 rooms to accommodate an astounding

1,200 students (about 57 students per room). The classrooms on the fourth floor could be combined by opening of partitions for large gatherings or assemblies. At the time of its construction it was “considered by the Board, as the most convenient, and best internally-

127 Miller, Boss Cox’s Cincinnati, 5; Common Schools of Cincinnati Part First Thirty-Eighth Annual Report for the School Year Ending June 30, 1867 (Cincinnati, OH: Gazette Steam Book and Job Printing Establishment, 1868) 9.

176 arranged building yet erected in this city for a public school.”128 This building is the oldest public school building standing in Cincinnati today.

First District School on Liberty Street in the 1930s (Cincinnati Public Schools) Three years later the Colored Schools expanded with the addition of a Walnut Hills

District School erected on Elm (now Alms) Street, which the Board reported, “surpasses in appearance and adaptation any which we have before erected. The rooms are large, well ventilated, and tastily finished. The furniture is of the latest style and best workmanship. The

128 Thirty-Ninth Annual Report, 154; This same year the Board changed its name from the Board of Trustees and Visitors of the Common Schools to the Board of Education

177 surroundings are pleasant, healthy, and attractive.”129 Though smaller, this building looked much like the white schools of the same era.

The new Walnut Hills Colored School opened in 1871 providing a state-of-the-art school for Cincinnati’s African American population.

129 Colored Schools of Cincinnati Twenty-Third and Twenty-Fourth Annual Reports of the Board of Directors for the School Years Ending June 30 1871 – 72 (Cincinnati, OH: Gazette Print Co., 1872) 24-25; Nancy Bertaux and Michael Washington “The ‘Colored Schools’ of Cincinnati and African American Community in Nineteenth Century Cincinnati, 1849-1890,” The Journal of Negro Education 74, n. 1 (2005) 45. Public Schools of Cincinnati Sixty-First Annual Report of the Schools of Cincinnati for the School Year Ending August 31, 1890 (Cincinnati, OH: Press of the Ohio Valley Company, 1891) 71; This building was renamed Douglas School in 1902. Though the Cincinnati Colored School Board was dismantled in 1873 when state law eliminated separate boards, Douglas School remained an African American school up until 1887 when segregated schools were abolished by the passage of the Brown- Arnett Law.

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(Colored Schools of Cincinnati Twenty-First Annual Report of the Board of Directors for the School Year Ending June 30, 1870 (Cincinnati, OH: Gazette Print Company, 1870) 62.) After 1872 Inclines connected the basin to Cincinnati’s hilltop suburbs.130 This shift allowed those who could afford to move out of the basin’s crowded tenements the opportunity to do so and began the process of segregating Cincinnati’s neighborhoods by class.131 Though the six square miles of the basin had been well-connected by a dense web of streetcar lines prior to 1872, the city remained largely a compact, walkable, urban zone. The inclines allowed for decentralization and created the need for new schools as population shifted to hilltop neighborhoods and beyond and new streetcar lines were tied to the city’s five inclines.132 The city’s first incline opened at the top of Main Street in Over-the-Rhine, connecting the neighborhood to Mount Auburn above. Next came the Price Hill Incline which connected the

West End to Price Hill in 1875, followed closely by the Mount Adams Incline in the east, which linked the downtown to Mount Adams in 1876. In the same year, the Elm Street Incline connected the top of Elm Street in Over-the-Rhine to Clifton Heights to the north.133 These four inclines were responsible for much of the spread of Cincinnati’s population. A fifth incline opened in 1894 to connect Brighton to the new University of Cincinnati campus in Burnet

Woods.134

As listed above, Cincinnati’s population exploded to 255,139 residents by 1880. Though the city’s population grew, it is important to note that the city’s physical boundaries were still

130 John H. White Jr. Cincinnati, City of Seven Hills and Five Inclines (Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Railroad Club, 2001) 12. 131 Henry Louis Taylor, Jr. ed., Race and the City: Work Community, and Protest in Cincinnati, 1820-1970 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993) 6-9. 132 Miller, Boss Cox’s Cincinnati, 6-8. 133 White, 115-116. 134 Ibid.

179 somewhat constrained. Between 1849 and 1855 the city annexed land north and east of the existing boundaries making up what we now know as the northern half of Over-the-Rhine,

Mount Auburn, Lower Walnut Hills, and a long snake of land to the east extending along the river nearly as far as Delta Avenue.135 A school wall from the former Fulton School on Eastern

Avenue (now Riverside Drive) stood as evidence of this eastward population drift until it was demolished in the late 2000s for a townhouse development.

The massive stone wall supporting Fulton School in Cincinnati’s East End (punctuated by a series of coal shoots) stood as a document of the city’s eastward expansion for over thirty years after the demolition of the building. (Collection of Cincinnati Public Schools)

135 Miller, 107-110.

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This detail of the 1869 Titus Atlas illustrates the city’s boundaries following its first wave of annexations. (itus Atlas of Hamilton County Ohio From Actual Surveys By R.H. Harrison (Philadelphia, PA: C.O. Titus, 1869) Following this first annexation, the city expanded again in the early 1870s to include

Price Hill, Camp Washington, Walnut Hills, Mt Auburn, Woodburn, and Mt. Lookout and

Columbia, continuing down the Ohio River to the east, adding another seventeen square miles by 1873.136 The booming population and the annexation of new lands forced the expansion of the public schools. The map below shows both the original eleven schools in blue and the newer schools constructed before 1880 in yellow.

136 Miller, 107-110.

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This map includes all schools built before 1880. Blue denotes the first eleven schools, and yellow denotes all other schools up to 1880. Note that schools in neighborhoods north of the city boundaries like Cumminsville, Avondale, Pleasant Ridge, and College Hill were not yet part of Cincinnati Public Schools, but operating as independent village schools which would later join Cincinnati when those villages were annexed. The second map clearly shows the spread of population north of Liberty Street and into

Mount Auburn as well as along the river out to the east and up the Mill Creek valley to Camp

Washington and Cumminsville (now Northside). It is also clear from this map that the city’s growth is largely centered to the east, where development was spread along the Ohio River.

The map also shows surrounding village schools, not yet annexed into the city, which line up along the major arteries in and out of town—from east to west, Montgomery Road, Reading

Road, Vine Street (the Carthage Pike), Hamilton Avenue, Colerain Avenue, and Harrison

Avenue. A closer look at this map shows the disbursement of the population throughout the

182 basin, particularly to the north of the downtown up to the new 1855 northern boundary at

McMillan Street in Corryville.

A closer look at this map of schools built before 1880 shows a significant number of new buildings in the northern half of the basin. The buildings built for the Cincinnati Public Schools before the mid-1880s are different from those that would come after. Like, Sixth District, Fifth District, and the Colored School in

Walnut Hills, they were tall narrow buildings with simple details containing only classrooms, cloakrooms, and an office for the principal. Amenities like lunchrooms, gymnasiums, libraries, health care facilities, bathrooms, kindergartens, and auditoriums were unknown.

Rapid Annexation

In the mid-1880s, the design of Cincinnati’s public schools shifted drastically from the common tall narrow buildings to squat, fortress-like buildings, most of which were designed by architect Henry E. Siter.137 Siter’s school buildings, like Columbian, were generally in the

137 Add biographical info about Siter. Henry E. Siter trained in the offices of several Boston architects before making his way to Cincinnati in September 1884.

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Richardson Romanesque style, featuring heavy masonry, round arched windows, carved stonework, striking pyramidal roofs and large chimneys. These buildings were notable neighborhood landmarks. The monumental quality of these buildings was no accident. It reflected the city government’s efforts to create a civic presence in the now far-flung newly annexed neighborhoods of the city. Fire stations of this era share the monumentality and effusive ornament of these schools.138 As the population became dispersed from the center city, these neighborhood landmarks were the way most citizens interacted with their boss-run city government. Monumental school buildings reminded citizens of the services their votes for the boss’ candidates provided for them, and assured continued support of status quo.139

Fairview School, still standing today, opened in 1887, was one of Siter’s earlier schools for the Board. (Cincinnativiews.net)

138 Cincinnati Fire Museum, A Guide to Cincinnati’s Historic Firehouses (Evansville, IN: M.T. Publishing Company, 1989). 139 “Architect of Many Banks and Schools Was H.E. Siter Who Died Suddenly Yesterday” Cincinnati Enquirer (January 4, 1913) 8.

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The inclines and their streetcar connections, plus neighborhood annexation, led to the need for many new schools. In the Board’s 1885 report, George Emig, Board President, wrote,

“the population of the suburban hills are clamoring for new school-houses; for these localities, which were uninhabited a few years ago, are now the most thickly peopled. Mt. Auburn,

Walnut Hills, Corryville, and Price Hill are all insufficiently provided for.”140 These four neighborhoods, though largely white, had differing populations. Mt. Auburn remained a wealthy enclave, Walnut Hills consisted of a mix of professionals both Black and white,

Corryville was home to the German working class, and Price Hill was home to both upper and middle-class Catholics. Again in 1887, Board President L.L. Sadler reported, “The Board must face the fact that the great removal of population from the lower plane of the city to the hill tops will leave houses comparatively empty that were but lately overflowing with pupils, and will require great outlays for lots and buildings near the new homes.”141 School buildings like those built by architect Henry Siter, were a direct response to this need and have left many remnants in today’s urban landscape.

Today nine of Siter’s schools remain. Six have been reused as housing, one is vacant, one is home to the Cincinnati Health Department, and William Howard Taft has been reused by a charter school. Additionally, the old fence piers of Vine Street School, the retaining wall at the

140 Common Schools of Cincinnati Part First Fifty-Sixth Annual Report for the School Year Ending August 31, 1885 (Cincinnati, OH: Wilstach. Baldwin & Co., 1885) xi. 141 Common Schools of Cincinnati First Part Fifty-Seventh Annual Report for the School Year Ending August 31, 1886 (Cincinnati, OH: Ohio Valley Publishing Company, 1887) viii.

185 site of North Fairmount School, and the walls from Whittier School in Price Hill, Webster, and

Riverside all remain.142

These piers, stairs, wall, and fence are all that remains of Riverside School. (Photo by Jim DaMico)

142 Schools of the Siter era still standing are Chase, Fairview, Windsor, Taft, Benjamin Harrison, Mount Adams, Garfield, Lincoln, and Sixth District.

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This key map from the 1883-1884 Robinson Atlas shows the city’s boundaries before a significant wave of annexations in the 1890s. Note the northward extension of the city up the Mill Creek valley. (Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County). While the white schools were rapidly expanding, the Colored Schools were disbanded during the heart of Reconstruction. In 1873 a state law turned management of the Colored

Schools over to the Common Schools. The schools remained segregated Black schools under white control until 1887 when segregated schools were officially outlawed in Ohio.143 At the urging of the Black community, the formerly Colored Schools were established as branch schools within the larger public school system with African American teachers in charge even after segregated schooling officially ended. Though we today think of segregated schools as inferior, historian Nikki Taylor explains that this was not the case in Cincinnati. She writes, the

143 Taylor, 171.

187 school eclipsed all other black institutions in importance as an agent for racial uplift.”144 She notes that, “The right to govern those schools and elect the trustees was a preparation for participation in the larger body politic. Black public schools also represented a viable opportunity to assert racial equality.”145 After 1887, Black students were officially allowed to attend any school in the district, and the 1890 annual report of the Board patronizingly reported “[African American students] are in the schools in nearly every building in the city, and their presence no longer causes comment. They are kindly treated and are making good progress in their studies.”146

The entry of African American students into the white schools caused additional crowding and extended the use of some of the city’s oldest school buildings, especially those located in Cincinnati’s largest Black enclave, the West End. Between 1886 and 1897, H. E. Siter designed at least fifteen new buildings for the Cincinnati Public Schools, as well as numerous additions to existing buildings. Almost always built in red brick with carved sandstone details, his designs are easy to recognize by their Romanesque styling, squat massing, and soaring pyramidal roofs.147 It is notable that of all the schools designed by H.E. Siter and built by the

Board between 1885 and 1900, not one was located in the West End. When control of schools

144 Ibid., 174. 145 Ibid. 146 Public Schools of Cincinnati Sixtieth Annual Report for the School Year Ending August 31, 1889 (Cincinnati, OH 1890), 61. 147 The Richardson Romanesque style is named after American architect Henry Hobson Richardson, who first used elements of the style in the 1870s. Richardson’s only Cincinnati commission was the prominently placed and much celebrated Chamber of Commerce building at the south west corner of Fourth and Vine Streets. This building would be the last building Richardson personally designed, as he died in 1886 before the building was put out for bids.147 Richardson’s Chamber of Commerce Building opened in 1889 to great acclaim (though it was destroyed by fire in 1911). At the same time, local architect Samuel Hannaford received the commission to build Cincinnati’s City Hall, begun in 1888 and finished in 1893, also designed in the Richardson Romanesque style.

188 for African American residents was taken away from African American citizens, the conditions for the education of Black students ceased to progress and Black Cincinnatians suffered a systematic disadvantage which kept them from keeping pace with their white peers for over thirty years before the era of progressive reforms attempted to right this wrong after 1910.

Though celebrated today, Siter’s schools were not universally beloved in his own time.

Chronicler of Cincinnati history and lore, Charles Goss, provides an alternative perspective on these schools. While today these buildings seem grand, Goss paints them as the stripped-down product of political corruption. He writes, “for a generation before 1906 our school system was systematically starved.”148 Reformer Henry C. Wright explains, “There is… little chance for graft on [Board of Education] contracts, and more especially as a larger part goes for teachers' salaries. Little graft could be secured here with safety. It is natural then that [Boss] Cox should want as little as possible spent on the schools.”149 Goss also directly linked Boss Cox’s influence on the schools to Cincinnati’s decline. He writes,

Thus we see from 1880 to 1906 a rapid deterioration and starvation in our schools. During the same period, as our schools declined and Cincinnati fell back step by step in standing among cities, the Cox political organization grew more powerful. In 1870 Cincinnati was the eighth city in size in the country. To-day it is the thirteenth, with Newark, NJ, threatening to pass us inside two years.150 Siter’s schools were also subject to stylistic scrutiny. Strikingly modern in their own time, not everyone found these school buildings the correct response to the changing needs of urban

148 Charles Frederic Goss, Cincinnati, the Queen City, 1788-1912 v.I (Cincinnati, OH: S.J. Clark Publishing Company, 1912) 349. 149 Henry C. Wright, Bossism in Cincinnati (Cincinnati, OH: X, 1905) 77. Despite Wright’s assertion that there is little chance for graft o school contracts, a financial scandal regarding board contracts is probably what caused H.E. Siter to leave town in the late 1890s. 150 Goss, 349.

189 schools. Local architect Samuel Hannaford designed Cincinnati’s City Hall in the Romanesque style, but he felt it was inappropriate for school buildings.151 In an essay published in 1900 he called Siter’s Romanesque schools “rather monotonous,” and characterized the ornament as,

“crowded to the utmost with heavy interlacing foliage –nearly always lacking in refinement and often semi-barbarous.”152 And of the Romanesque style in particular he wrote, “there is not one so ill-adapted to the demands of school architecture… and it is only by doing violence to the very instincts of the style that it can in any way be reconciled or adapted to school-house purposes.”153 While most of Siters schools did look alike, creating a visual marker of municipal government in the urban environment, so did the class of schools that proceeded them, several of which were built by Hannaford. Hannaford’s specific criticisms point to an unease with the shift from clean, simple school facades vaguely linked to colonial motifs to the busy ornament of Romanesque schools. The Romanesque Revival style is often called the first distinctly

American architectural style, one which harnessed the energy of its age, making it likely that here Hannaford is merely reacting against a modernizing architectural trend.154

Boss Politics As a city controlled by Boss politics for the last twenty years of the nineteenth century— one of the most prolific eras of public school construction— and referred to as, “one of the worst boss-ridden cities of the country,” there is no way to avoid the fact that Cincinnati’s schools were bound up in bossism and political corruption.155 In 1912 Goss, characterized the

151 Samuel Hannaford “School Architecture” in Martin, Schools of Cincinnati, 189. 152 Ibid. 153 Ibid. 154 John C. Poppeliers and S. Allen Chambers Jr. What Style Is It: A Guide to American Architecture (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003) 78. 155 Ralph Caldwell quoted in Goss v. 1, 346.

190 situation this way: “the last two decades of our municipal life have suffered enormously through the rise and development of a political system in which the power of the people has been seized and wielded by a ‘so-called’ ‘Gang.’”156 He went on to detail the impacts of this corrupt system. He writes, “the decade from 1870 to 1880 was marked by the manifestation of many of the noblest characteristics of good citizenship; but that the city turned a sharp corner in the ‘Eighties.’ Public benefaction ceased; the arts languished; corruption set in and there was a recrudescence of the worst evils of the whole past.”157 While it is difficult to see the impacts of this corruption system-wide, the Thirteenth District School again illustrates the way political maneuvering could influence school construction.

In reports in both 1876 and 1884, Thirteenth District was found to be in horrible condition and woefully overcrowded. If the building was so dreadful, why wasn’t it replaced? In part it remained in service because the Board was too busy building new schools to serve new outlying communities, often where those in power were relocating from the basin.158 However, after 1885, the reason this school was not replaced was politics.

Cincinnati’s Thirteenth School District was within the stronghold of political operative

George Moerlein. Moerlein, son of brewer Christian Moerlein, is generally considered the first man to buy a Cincinnati election.159 Moerlein’s Elm Street Club, whose clubhouse was next door to the Christian Moerlein Brewery (where the big fundraiser for Webster School had been held) was a stronghold of German Republican political organizing. Cox’s Blaine Club played a rival

156 Goss, 264. 157 Ibid., 265. 158 Prior to 1885, the Board’s solution to crowded schools was generally to relieve the pressure by building another school nearby, rather than to replace an existing school which caused displacement issues for enrolled students. 159 This was in the 1880 nomination of William Boettger for City Treasurer (Wright, 12)

191 role.160 Henry Wright’s 1905 expose of Goerge Cox’s Boss control of Cincinnati asserts that in

1880 Moerlein controlled the votes of four wards of the city, while Cox controlled only one, yet within a few years Cox had wrestled control and Moerlein was the enemy.161 In Boss Cox’s

Cincinnati, historian Zane Miller writes, “after the overthrow of Moerlein, a host of ward and factional leaders…flocked to Cox.”162 Under Boss Cox’s system of political rewards, political appointments to paid positions like School Board were rewards for loyalty (and a source of income to pad Cox’s pockets).163

In 1884, the member of the school board representing the Thirteenth District was

George Kreh, a close associate of Moerlein, thus not someone George Cox would want to reward for loyalty.164 Moerlein passed away suddenly in 1891, and Blaine Club member, George

Bardes was moved into the School Board seat for the Thirteenth District. Plans were quickly underway for a new Thirteenth District School.165 According to reformer Henry Wright, School

Board appointments were a place where Boss Cox could test the loyalty of his followers. He writes, “He [Cox] had always used the Board of Education as a testing or trying-out ground. If men were found subservient here, they were suitable timber to use elsewhere, and were safe to promote.”166

160 Miller, 80. 161 Wright, Bossism in Cincinnati, 24, 31. 162 Miller, 84. 163 Cox took two to three percent of his appointee’s pay right out of their paychecks. (Wright, 66-67) 164 When Moerlein died suddenly at thirty-nine years old, Kreh gave the principal remembrance at the Elm Street Club (“Sad Regrets: George Moerlein’s Funeral, Cincinnati Enquirer (September 2, 1891) 4) 165 “GEORGE HOBSON: Once More the Blaine Club's House Committee Chairman,” Cincinnati Enquirer (December 21, 1895) 16. 166 Wright, 116.

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Significant annexations occurred in the 1880s and 1890s, bringing the city closer to its current size by just after the turn of the century.167 It was during this period that Cincinnati’s

Republican machine worked to control the politics of the growing city. The machine maintained support and sought to bring order to the now sprawling city by providing civic services like schools, police, and fire in city neighborhoods. The buildings built during this era were designed to draw attention to the success of machine governance.

Winners and Losers

As new communities joined Cincinnati, the public schools took over existing school buildings and instruction. In this transition there were both winners and losers. Some annexed communities came with school lands, but the Board often found these properties inferior. After the city’s first annexation which extended the city’s boundaries north of Liberty Street, the

Board reported to City Council that, “the only buildings now occupied for the schools…are a brick house upon Buckeye Street (now West Clifton)…a wooden tenement upon Piatt Street, west of the Miami Canal, and another near Elm street and north of Liberty, all of which are crowded to excess.”168 When Clifton, Avondale, Linwood, Riverside, and Westwood became part of the city in 1896, the Board complained in its annual report, “annexation has laid a heavy burden of debt upon the Board, besides increasing indebtedness beyond benefits. The Board, as you know, had no voice in settling the terms of annexation….It simply had to submit and

167 The last large annexation would be Mount Washington, College Hill, Saylor Park, English Woods, Madisonville Carthage, and Mount Airy in 1911, and then Pleasant Ridge, Hartwell, and Fernbank in 1911 and Kennedy Heights in 1914; Cincinnati: A Guide to the Queen City and Its Neighbors (The WPA Guide to Cincinnati) (Cincinnati, OH: The Cincinnati Historical Society, 1943) 88. 168 Twenty-First Annual Report of the Trustees and Visitors of Common Schools to the City Council of Cincinnati for the School Year Ending June 30, 1850 (Cincinnati: OH, Wright, Ferris &Co., 1851 6; The Buckeye Street site referred to here is still in use as the site of a public school. It now holds Rothenberg Academy.

193 accept the trust with its burdens.”169 Most village school buildings were smaller than those in the city and lacked modern amenities including plumbing and central heat. For example, while most schools within the district had installed indoor plumbing by 1904, the Pleasant Ridge village school still relied on old outdoor privies. These privies were the site of the infamous

Pleasant Ridge privy disaster in which a privy collapse catapulted thirty-one girls into the privy vault, resulting in nine deaths.170 Pleasant Ridge would not be annexed into the city until

1911.171 In cases where the existing school in an annexed community was substandard, the

Board made plans for its replacement. The small village school in Hyde Park was replaced within five years of annexation. Clifton waited ten years for a new building, but was rewarded for the wait with a progressive modern school.

The public schools inherited buildings like these village schools in (left to right) Pleasant Ridge, Avondale, and Hyde Park when the city annexed new communities. (“Hamilton County Schools” Old Ohio Schools, http://www.oldohioschools.com/hamilton_county.htm) The map below illustrates school buildings built between 1880 and 1900 when the city’s boundaries extended to the line of what today is very roughly Westwood Northern

169 Sixty-Seventh Annual Report of the Public Schools of Cincinnati for the School Year Ending August 31, 1896 (Cincinnati, OH: The Ohio Valley Company, 1896) vii-viii. 170 Richard O. Jones, “The Cincinnati Privy Disaster of 1904,” Belt Magazine (November 4, 2014) https://beltmag.com/cincinnati-privy-disaster-1904/ 171 Cincinnati: A Guide to the Queen City and Its Neighbors (The WPA Guide to Cincinnati) (Cincinnati, OH: The Cincinnati Historical Society, 1943) 88.

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Boulevand/Martin Luther King Jr. Drive/Madison Road with a northward extension up the Mill

Creek valley to include Cumminsville (now Northside).

This map shows only the school buildings built during the 1880s and 1890s. Most of the buildings built during this period replaced outdated existing buildings, often on the same site as was the case with Webster School, Sixth District, both in Over-the-Rhine,

Taft in Mount Auburn, and Lincoln in the East End on Delta Avenue.172 Yet many new sites, especially on the city’s once impassable hillsides, were also utilized for construction of new schools including Fairview, Harrison, Mount Adams, and North Fairmount.173 This map also

172 All of these but Webster are still standing. 173 All of these but North Fairmount are still standing.

195 includes a spine of new buildings extending up the Mill Creek valley into the newly annexed lands there.

Some communities joined with the city of Cincinnati by choice. Becoming part of the city would ease small communities’ tax burden as the services offered by the city, including schools

(especially high schools), sewerage, police and fire protection, and water, were beyond what a small village could afford. Others were brought into the city against their will and suffered a reduction in services as a result of the merger. This forced annexation was made possible by the

1893 Lillard Law designed by Boss Cox and his contemporaries to bring neighboring villages under city control to expand the city’s tax base.174 The law changed the voting for annexation to include not only the village to be annexed which previously had to approve the merger, but also the citizens of the community into which the village would be merged. Now the citizens of

Cincinnati’s votes for annexation would drown out the resounding no’s of the villages.175 As

Zane Miller recounts, “the outraged villagers never had a chance.”176 In the 1896 vote to add the five villages named above, the final vote was 49,467 in favor and only 4,467 against.177

In the 1896 merger Clifton saw its school tax rate increased from three mills to the city’s four and one-tenth mills, but every other community included in the merger had their tax rate reduced. Avondale saw its school tax fall from five mills, Westwood’s from eight mills,

Linwood’s from nine mills, and the big loser with regard to school expenditures was Riverside whose school tax rate had been eleven mills before the merger.178 While annexation meant

174 Miller, 107. 175 Ibid., 107-108. 176 Ibid., 108 177 Ibid. 178 Sixty-Seventh Annual Report, viii

196 lower tax bills for citizens of these newly annexed communities, it also meant fewer services at the elementary school level. Knowing that they were soon to become just one neighborhood among many in the busy city, rather than the center of their own government, many communities built expensive new school buildings just prior to annexation as a way to use up village funds and assure that taxes paid before annexation went to benefit the community directly. This was the case in Riverside which opened its ornate new elementary school in 1895, one year before annexation.179 This strategy was used again in Kennedy Heights, the city’s last neighborhood to be annexed, which finally replaced its old village school in 1913, as annexation to the city was under negotiation.180

Riverside School in Riverside opened in 1895, just one year before that community was annexed into the

179 Miller, 107-108; “School Building Construction: Program 1828-1933” in Plats of Existing Schools Sites and Recommended New Sites for Expansions (Cincinnati, OH: Planning Commission, City of Cincinnati, 1935). 180 “School Building Construction Program.”

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city of Cincinnati. (Cincinnati Museum Center) Progressive Modern Schools

When Henry Siter left Cincinnati to return to Boston in 1899, he turned over his post as architect for the schools to Edward H. Dornette.181 As Charles Goss recounts, “In 1906 a new era dawned upon school matters in Cincinnati. A few strong men, not animated by political party purposes…were placed upon our school board.”182 It was during Dornette’s tenure, at the heart of the progressive era, that the city’s school buildings came to include the full range of features we expect in schools today. In fact, the transition from Siter’s designs to Dornette’s marks the transition to modern school buildings in Cincinnati. Historian David A. Gamson has noted,

The urban school system was once considered to be among the great democratic creations of the twentieth century. From the 1890s until the Second World War, the most prominent educational leaders and policy makers depicted urban schools as the cutting [edge] of school improvement and as laboratories of progressive educational innovation, much in the same way municipal reformers of the era portrayed cities as experimental stations for novel forms of governance.183 While today urban school systems may be seen as problems, Gamson reminds us that progressives once viewed city schools as, “beacons of change and exemplars of coordinated, efficient, and democratic reform.”184

181 “Ideas Gained on Eastern Trip Will Be Introduced in the Public School System of This City Educators Return.” Cincinnati Enquirer (January 22, 1906) 10. 182 Charles Frederick Goss, Cincinnati the Queen City 1788-1912 v. 1, (Chicago: S.J. Clark Publishing Company, 1912) 349. 183 Gamson, 1. 184 Ibid.

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Many of Dornette’s schools were built in neighborhoods newly annexed to the city, such as Avondale and Clifton, both annexed in 1896, to replace existing buildings. With the shifting population of the city, the Board found some downtown schools with empty rooms while schools on the hilltops were still full to overflowing. The 1905 annual report of the Board included a detailed description of what a modern school building included. Most notable are, kindergartens, fire-proof construction, auditoriums, manual training rooms, libraries, playrooms, shower baths, steam heat, air washers, private and well-ventilated toilet rooms, and metal stairs.185 The chart below, originally published by the Board in 1913, illustrates the significant shift in school construction after the turn of the century. The new buildings and upgrades to existing buildings of this era were designed to provide students with clean and safe environments conducive to active learning designed to guide children toward active citizenship.

New construction attempted to meet a broad range of needs from health and exercise to vocational training. Health and dental clinics were added to the school system, and special schools were created to serve special populations including those with impaired sight or hearing, and those with physical, emotional, or learning disabilities. This was also the period in which the city’s African American students finally got new school facilities.

Number of buildings with… 1904 1913

Electric lighting 0 56

Indoor flush toilets 12 52

Steam heating and fan ventilation 3 46

185 Seventy-Sixty Annual Report of the Public Schools of Cincinnati for the School Year Ending August 31, 1905 (Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Board of Education, 1905) 27-29.

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Vacuum cleaning 0 15

Slate blackboards 13 57

Auditorium 10 32

Gymnasium 5 31

Swimming-pool 2 7

Roof playground 0 3

Manual Training shop 0 42

Domestic Science kitchen 0 42

Kindergarten 0 49

(Cincinnati Public Schools. How Your City is Educating All the Children of All the People? (Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Public Schools, 1913) This broadening of services provided by the public schools coincides with urban progressive reforms designed to help alleviate the negative consequences of urban life. Schools provided showers because students had no way of bathing in their tenement homes. Schools provided medical and dental care in some of the poorest urban neighborhoods. Kindergartens helped put the smallest children in a safe educational environment free from the dangers of the streets, and allowed mothers of young children to seek employment, and school libraries and museums provided educational resources not available in students’ homes. Open air schools for anemic children were held on the rooftops of several buildings in the basin186 Students were provided with school-issue coats, hats, and mittens and their weight was logged and published as evidence of the success of the program in beefing up sick children.

186 Eighty-Second Annual Report of the Public Schools of Cincinnati for the School Year Ending August 31, 1911 (Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Board of Education, 1911) 62-64, 145.

200

Open air school at Guillford School on East Fourth Street. (Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County)

In addition to the practical concerns addressed during this period, a 1915 special edition of The American Architect typical of the progressive era urged architects to add beauty to school designs and counseled architects and educators to remember the connection between beautiful, well-built school buildings and high-quality education.187 The article insisted that “the intimate and close association of the student with structures and surroundings planned in good taste must inevitably produce an effect upon the young mind, and thus become a part of the education sought in schools.”188

The buildings constructed during this period were so successful that eleven of the thirty- six buildings constructed between 1900 and 1933 are still in use as schools by CPS, now almost one hundred years later, and only fourteen of the thirty-six have been razed. Of that number,

187 “The Value of Good Architecture as an Architectural Factor” The American Architect (September 15, 1915) 177. 188 Ibid.

201 seven were razed by CPS for the construction of new buildings on the same site.189 Though

Dornette’s Avondale School (later Ach Junior High) is one of those that has been razed, the

Lincoln statue which sat in front of it, and the previous building on the same site, remains to remind of us the lost centrality of this once busy urban corner. This single remnant, like the wall around Webster School, could open up the exploration of so many stories.

The Lincoln monument is now all that remains of Avondale Elementary at Reading Road and Forest Avenue. The now-demolished building was built in 1907 during an era of progressive reform which resulted in large centralized buildings with a wide ray of amenities. (Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County). While most of the Black branch schools disappeared, Douglass School remained an all

African American school in Walnut Hills until so popular that a new building was constructed for the school in 1911.190 While segregated schools are clearly rooted in racism, in the case of

189 Those still in use are: Hyde Park, Clifton, Westwood, Rothenberg, Kilgour, Hartwell, Cheviot, College Hill, Saylor Park, Oyler, and Mount Washington. 190 Eight-Second Annual Report of the Public Schools of Cincinnati for the School Year Ending August 31, 1911 (Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Board of Education) 5.

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Douglas School, Black parents requested the school remain segregated so that their children would be educated by Black teachers and administrators.191

The new Douglas School was built in 1910 and included spaces for vocational training designed to channel Black students into domestic labor or the manual trades. (Cincinnati Museum Center) Douglas School trained many of Cincinnati’s most well-known African American educators, including the first African American woman to receive a PhD from the University of

Cincinnati, Jennie Davis Porter.192 Douglas, and later Porter’s Stowe School, was especially important for Cincinnati’s African American professional community because African American teachers were not allowed to teach white students, so African American teachers could only

191 Tina L. Ligon, Pioneering the Change to be Better: Jennie Davis Porter and Cincinnati’s All-Black Harriet Beecher Stowe School, PhD Diss. (Morgan State University, 2014) 71-75; Taylor, 173-174. 192 David Sandor, “’Black is as Good a Color as White:’” The Harriet Beecher Stowe School and the Debate Over Separate Schools in Cincinnati,” Ohio Valley History (Summer 2009) 36.

203 find employment in these segregated schools, and these were the only places where African

American students could be taught and led by accomplished experts from their own community.193

After suffering for many years in the worst schools in the system, the African American students of Cincinnati’s largely African American West End finally received a new school in

1914.194 Previously, West End students attended three of the old district school buildings,

Sherman, Jackson, and Twelfth District Schools, until a new school for African American youth was founded at the urging of Dr. Jennie Davis Porter.195 Porter’s Harriet Beecher Stowe School opened in the former Hughes High School at Fifth and Mound Streets in 1914, but conditions in that building were so bad the school moved after one year to the old Fifth District School on

Third Street between Plum and Elm, and finally into a new state-of-the-art facility on West

Seventh Street in 1923.196

193 Ibid., 29-30. 194 Ibid., 40. 195 Eighty-First Annual Report of the Public Schools of Cincinnati for the School Year Ending August 31, 1910 (Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Board of Education, 1910) 33; Ligon, 76-78; Porter wrote her 1923 dissertation on “The Problem of Negro Education in Northern and Boarder Cities.” 196 Ligon., 99.

204

Harriet Beecher Stowe School was a triumph of Black educator Jennie Davis Porter. It was the first new school to be built in the lower portion of the West End since before the Civil War. (Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County) In 1935 the Board again responded to the challenges of the city’s shifting population including an exodus from basin neighborhoods accelerated by private automobiles. A 1935 report by the federal government asserted that, “Mobility of the pupil population presents a serious problem for the large city in supplying adequate facilities for the elementary pupils.

Dying communities, new subdivisions, and the influx of industry in new areas, all tend to complicate the problem.”197

The modern schools built after the turn of the century largely replaced existing outdated buildings with updated consolidated buildings large enough to accommodate population shifts.

Of the twenty-two buildings built during this period, only six did not replace an existing school building—almost always on the same site. The few new sites were those to the city’s edges. As

197 Survey Report of the Cincinnati Public Schools by the United States Office of Education at the Request of the Cincinnati Board of Education and the Cincinnati Bureau of Government Research (Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Bureau of Government Research, 1935). 361-398.

205 the city’s population tapered off, new expectations drove school design. These new schools had a much larger physical footprint than those they replaced and higher standards for outdoor play space pulled them back from the sidewalk, often encompassing the better part of an entire block.198 Most of these schools were built in the first part of the period, as there were no new schools built between 1916 and 1922 due to World War I.199

The Board rebounded from its wartime frugality, building thirteen elementary schools between the 1922 and 1933.200 The 1924 An Eight Year Building Program for the Schools of

Cincinnati set out priorities for future school construction and committed to the construction of noble and inspiring schools.201 The Depression and World War II again halted school construction between 1933 and 1949. The 1935 Survey Report on the Cincinnati Public Schools by the United States Office of Education found “a decreasing rate of growth in Cincinnati is positively assured,” and challenged Cincinnatians to courageously face living in an “age of transition” and a “period of accelerated change.”202

198 Ibid., “Comparison of Building Plan by Instructional Percent.” 199 Ibid., “School Building Program: Construction 1858-1933.” 200 Ibid. 201 An eight year building program for the schools of Cincinnati : Special Report of the Superintendent of Schools, Unanimously Adopted by the Board of Education on June 9, 1924 (Cincinnati, OH: Board of Education, 1924). 202 Survey Report of the Cincinnati Public Schools by the United States Office of Education, 28.

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This map shows the locations of buildings built between 1920 and World War II. Schools built in the basin and inner suburbs during this period mostly served specialized populations like African American students of students with physical disabilities to extend the reach of the social services provided by the schools. This final map shows schools built between 1920 and World War II. These schools are both new schools in developing neighborhoods like Mount Lookout (Kilgour School), and

Mount Washington, and replacements for existing schools in older neighborhoods like Linwood,

Roosevelt (in Lower Fairmount), and College Hill.



Elementary schools place an indelible mark on the students who attend them. They are the physical places where young children spend the most time outside of their homes. The physical fabric of schools becomes so familiar over the many years spent in them, that even much later, former students can recall the echo in the stair hall, the feel of the banister, or the sweep of the curtain across the stage. Because public school buildings served as neighborhood

207 landmarks and community centers throughout the city, their remnants are scattered all over today’s urban landscape, all but forgotten. Finding and understanding these disparate clues was a scavenger hunt in many ways. Yet, by pulling these clues together I have been able to both tell individual stories, and see the ways in which the design and construction of Cincinnati’s public schools can help us understand the development of the city at large. As I have shown,

Webster School’s site hides stories of immigration, urban expansion, white flight, the urban crisis, and now gentrification. Taken together the varied remnants of historic schools across the city, illustrate the broader theme of public schools as urban infrastructure, appearing in the landscape as population growth, annexation, and politics put pressure on government to provide or expand service.

In 1859 the Ohio State Commissioner of Schools requested a report on the schools in each city. The report for Cincinnati was written by Rufus King, the President of the Trustees and

Visitors of Common Schools. In his report King explained that the Cincinnati public school system was the oldest in the state and “intimately interwoven with the growth and prosperity of the city itself,” a story now etched in stone all across the city.203

203 King, 1.

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Chapter 4 Apartments of Liberation: Suburban Multi-Family Dwellings in Early Twentieth Century Cincinnati What shall I do tomorrow? I must not go to her grave And stand six feet above The lips I crave. What shall I do to-morrow? I cannot stay indoor And see beside the bed The shoes she wore. What shall I do to-morrow? For if I am there or here Her ghost is beside me Year upon year.1  Mary MacMillan published this poem in 1927.2 Her subject was Loueen Pattee who had been her love. No one remembers these women. Though they were travelers, scholars, writers, educators, activists, and artists, today the story of Mary MacMillan and Loueen Pattee has been forgotten – or silenced.

The initial spark for this chapter came from a family letter about my great, great aunt,

Nancy Ely Henshaw.3 The letter said that, although married to a man, Henshaw had had a lesbian partner named “Maidy MacMillan” who lived in an apartment in Clifton, then a streetcar suburb of Cincinnati. I found Mary MacMilan’s real name on the internet where one of her books was available, and dedicated to Henshaw.4 MacMillan's name took me to the 1920

1 Mary MacMillan, “After Reading Thomas Hardy,” Ohio Valley Verse v. III (Cincinnati, Ohio: Ohio Valley Poetry Society, 1927) 75. 2 MacMillian, “After Reading.” 3 Mary MacMillan, Third Book of Short Plays (Cincinnati, OH: Stewart Kidd Company, 1922). 4 Nancy Stanton Ely was Mary MacMillan’s love interest in their youth before Nancy married Albert Henshaw in 1908. A collection of love poems Mary compiled for Nancy during this time is held in Miami University of Ohio’s Walter Havinghurst Special Collections and University Archives. They remained connected after Nancy’s marriage.

209 census where she was listed with a woman, Loueen Pattee, as her “partner,” living at The

Delmoor Flats.5

Partner is not a routine term for the census, so much so that it was later crossed out and replaced with “Bdg” to stand for “boarding.” It is not uncommon for the work of a census taker to be revised by a supervisor, so an errant word crossed out is normal. It is the word itself, and the meaning of the change, that is unusual. Listing two women as partners expresses an equality between them unknown in any other census categorization where a relational hierarchy lays out under the resident listed as “head of household.” In addition to the extraordinary nature of the initial use of the word partner, remaking Loueen Pattee’s relationship to Mary MacMillan from “partner” to “boarding” significantly shifts their connection. Knowing that MacMillan had been Henshaw’s romantic partner at some point, implied that her live-in “partner” was probably also a romantic one, yet denoting them as partners right there in the census seems so brazen. It made it impossible not to wonder about the nature of their bond.

In the chapter that follows I unearth details about (what we today would call) a lesbian couple, their home, and their lives. My work has earned this couple a place in the city’s queer history and has illuminated a story previously hidden from view. The Delmoor Flats, the apartment building where they lived is as much a character in this story as they are, allowing them to create busy, productive, and liberated lives. Some of the prose used here has been

Photos taken by MacMillan in the Library of Congress show Henshaw, and Pattee and other friends on a picnic near the river west of Cincinnati. Immediately following Pattee’s death in 1921, MacMillan and Henshaw traveled in Europe together for almost a year and remained closely connected until MacMillan’s death fifteen years later. 5 We know from the census that this enumerator was a woman named Elizabeth Roberts. (United States Federal Census, Cincinnati, Ohio 1920. Ward 25, Enumeration District 0434), Sheet 8B.

210 previously published in “No One Ever Came for Dean Loueen Pattee” in From the Temple of

Zeus to the Hyperloop: University of Cincinnati Stories edited by Greg Hand.6

The Delmoor is a once-grand apartment building just off Clifton’s Ludlow Avenue retail strip. I grew up mere blocks from the Delmoor. It always stood out to me from other apartments because of the contrast between its grandeur and cramped urban location. As I dug deeper into MacMillan’s life and I saw the other places she had lived—her grandfather’s stately home in Ross (then Venice), Ohio, the Victorian house in downtown Hamilton, Ohio, and her parent’s last home in Cincinnati’s Mount Auburn neighborhood—a question emerged. These houses were all sizable, single family homes on grassy lots containing households, supported by servants. After living this refined and privileged life for nearly fifty years, why would Mary

MacMillan choose to move to the Delmoor Apartment seven was so much more humble than the spaces of her youth. Why, at age 49, would she choose to make this her home?

6 Anne Delano Steinert, “No One Ever Came for Dean Loueen Pattee,” From the Temple of Zeus to the Hyperloop: University of Cincinnati Stories (Cincinnati, OH: University of Cincinnati Press, 2018) 35-42

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Photos of Mary MacMillan and Loueen Pattee (“Art Gravure Section” Cincinnati Enquirer (January 1, 1928) 78; The Cincinnatian (Cincinnati: University of Cincinnati. 1917) 31.) The literature on the development of apartment buildings is clear. The advent of apartment buildings in streetcar suburbs throughout the United States coincided with an influx of women into the professional ranks.7 At just the moment that women’s colleges began educating women for lives as scholars, writers, reporters, and civic leaders, cities began sprouting multi-unit dwellings where professional women could respectably live free from the drudgery of nineteenth-century domestic chores like hauling coal and emptying chamber pots.

For example, early educator, feminist, and the second president of Bryn Mawr College, M.

Carey Thomas, strove to “educate fiercely independent, competitive women who would not succumb to the passivity of being supported by a husband or to the stagnation of housework.”8

7 Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988) 145. 8 Roberta Frankfort, Collegiate Women: Domesticity and Career in Turn-of-the-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 1977) 57.

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But where would such women live? Who would keep their households running? If they were wealthy, they could pay servants as Thomas did.9 Otherwise, they would live in a flat where both the amenities within the building and the services available in the city around them would facilitate professional productivity and escape from domestic labor, though of course, this escape was not available to all women.10 Mary MacMillan and Loueen Pattee had familial wealth and the then unusual gift of an education which allowed them to generate income. Low- income women would never have had the ability to move out of crowded tenements or avoid hauling water and using the privy.

Built environment historian Elizabeth Collins Cromley points out that apartment dwelling women found, “the convenient modernized housekeeping offered by apartments...made them more appealing and also, “because of their location near transportation, apartments also meant easy access to the amusements, conveniences, and diversions of the city.”11 Apartments gave early twentieth century women the freedom to pursue professional, civic, and artistic work. By delving into MacMillan and Pattee’s story in a specific apartment building in a specific city, we can see in fine detail precisely how apartment life allowed specific women to work, create, and love in ways that would not have been available to them one generation earlier. The place-based specificity of this story also connects

9 Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994) 407. 10 Wright, 145; Note that flat is the term used in the nineteenth and early twentieth century to distinguish middle and upper class apartments like the Delmoor from the urban tenements in the older parts of America’s center cities increasingly inhabited by only lower class residents. I will use the words flat and apartment interchangeably throughout this chapter and will use tenement when referring to multi-family buildings inhabited by the lower classes. 11 Elizabeth Collins Cromley, Alone Together: A History of New York’s Early Apartments (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990) 3.

213 the local to the national and illustrates the ways that these seemingly ordinary women were part of a national network of women’s liberation in politics, education, and the arts.

This study begins with brief biographies of Mary MacMillan and Loueen Pattee. It then explores the Delmoor’s physical environment and the ways it facilitated the couple’s liberated lives. The built world and the physical city help to connect the scattered dots of data MacMillan and Pattee left behind. By focusing on physical space inhabited by MacMillan and Pattee, this chapter explores these women’s contributions to the city and sheds light on the relationship between modernity, feminism, and architectural form.

Historiography

This chapter relies on the literature of feminism, sexuality, built space, and the history of cities. Historians Dolores Hayden, Gwendolyn Wright, and Elizabeth Collins Cromley have all explored the impact of apartment living on women’s liberation and productivity. In The Grand

Domestic Revolution, Hayden coined the term “material feminism“ to describe a group of late nineteenth and early twentieth century feminists focused on reform of women’s work in the home and the physical space in which this work was done.12 According to Hayden, material feminists identified “the economic exploitation of women’s domestic labor by men as the most basic cause of women’s inequality.” 13 She writes, “while other feminists campaigned for political or social change with philosophical or moral arguments, the material feminists concentrated on economic and spatial issues as the basis of material life,” and, “the over-

12 Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1981) 1. 13 Ibid.

214 arching theme of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century feminist movement was to overcome the split between domestic life and public life created by industrial capitalism as it affected women.”14 Material feminists spoke and published on the ways that housework and heterosexual marriage trapped women in domestic arrangements which limited their educational and intellectual attainment, artistic and cultural contributions, and professional success.15 Hayden’s work was the first to pull these women’s work together and identify it as a distinct feminist ideology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, an ideology which clearly applies to MacMillan and Pattee.

One of the most important feminist theorists of this time was Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Best known today for her feminist fiction, including “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Herland,

Gilman also published non-fiction works on women’s domestic conditions.16 In Women and

Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social

Evolution, Gilman offered specific solutions to promote women’s self-sufficiency and reforms in marriage, family life, and the home in support of women’s equality.17 The Home: Its Work and

Influence underscored the inequalities of the home and their effects on women’s lives and her

1904 article for Cosmopolitan Magazine, “The Passing of the Home in Great American Cities,” advocated for apartment hotels with communal arrangements for cooking and other domestic

14 Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981) 4. 15 Ibid., 8-17. 16 Charlotte Perkins Gilman.The Yellow Wallpaper (Virago Modern Classics. London, England: Virago Press, 1981; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (London : The Women's Press, 2001, reprint). 17 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics. New York: Dover, 1898 (1997 reprint).

215 tasks.18 A stirring example of her material feminist philosophy can be found in The Home: Its

Work and Influence, where she writes,

Is it now time that the home be freed from these industries so palpably out of place…That our women cease to be an almost universal class of house-servants; plus a small class of parasitic idlers and greedy consumers of wealthy? That the preparation of food be raised from its present condition of inadequacy, injury, and waste to such a professional and scientific position that we may learn to spare from our street corners both the drugstore and the saloon? And that our homes…become enjoyed by men and women alike, both glad and honourable workers in an easy world?19 According to historian William L. O’Neill, Gilman, “Made the finest analysis of the relation between domesticity and women’s rights.”20 She persistently championed the liberation of women through drastic reforms in spatial, marital, and domestic relations. Theories which clearly translated into the lived experiences of Mary MacMillan and Loueen Pattee.

Moving from material feminists to material space, Gwendolyn Wright’s analysis of apartments in Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America clearly asserts that women chose to live in apartments to free themselves from the restrictions imposed by domestic life and that this choice deviated clearly from established norms.21 Wright explains,

“charges that apartment houses could encourage promiscuous sexuality, female rebelliousness, communist sentiments, or warped children reiterated the American myth that the domestic environment could, indeed, influence behavior for good or evil.”22 While living in an apartment

18 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Passing of the Home in Great American Cities,” The Cosmopolitan 38, n.2 (December 1904) 137-147. 19 Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The Home: Its Work and Influence (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1972) 122- 123. 1972 reprint from 1903. 20 William L. O’Neill “Introduction to this Edition,” The Home: Its Work and Influence (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1972) vii. 1972 reprint from 1903. 21 Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream, 138-139. 22 Ibid., 151.

216 did not make MacMillan and Pattee feminists, apartment life did help facilitate their

“rebellious” lives.

In Alone Together: A History of New York’s Early Apartments Elizabeth Collins Cromley sets out to explore the function and meaning behind the development of apartment buildings for New York’s middle class professionals.23 She explains that throughout the 1870s New York

City, “families whose backgrounds and social position would have led them to private houses in an earlier generation now lived in apartments,” a switch which would spread through the nation over the next thirty years.24 This transition was not easy. Cromley explains, “many middle-class families resisted the move to apartments for…reasons of social rank.”25 Yet as apartments came of age after the turn of the century, Cromley finds, “”apartments were no longer seen as dangerously communal places where shared public spaces threatened the sanctity of family life’ instead, communality could be viewed through the lens of modernity.”

Using written reviews, floor plans, and visual images to chart the growth and change of early apartments, Cromley closely connects built space to human needs and lived experience. For example, in linking apartment life to improvements in housekeeping she writes,

Modern readers in houses with running water and electrical equipment may find it difficult to realize the extent of the burdens of housekeeping, but nineteenth century writers recorded how hard housekeeping really was… [Sarah Gilman] Young stated that American women lost “their bloom and youth” before their European counterparts did specifically because American houses were so badly designed and managed…In the years before indoor plumbing and central heating, the housekeeper and her servants carried fuel upstairs to every room that needed heat; lighted and maintained the fires; carried water wherever it was needed, probably from an outdoor source; and heated the water when hot

23 Cromley, 214. 24 Ibid., 107. 25 Ibid., 111.

217

water was required. They used outhouses during the day and emptied chamber pots in the morning.26 It was this modern and convenient apartment living that appealed to MacMillan and

Pattee.

Other relevant secondary literature includes work on late-nineteenth and early- twentieth century college women, feminists and lesbians, and literature on the development of urban America.27 This literature generally explores the idea that the generation of women born just after the Civil War were a unique American generation. The first to have a significant range of educational and professional opportunities available to them, many of these women chose to remain unmarried in order to become educators or contribute to the civic, artistic, and cultural life of the nation. Many of these unmarried women found others like them and lived together in mutually supportive two-woman households, some of which were also romantic partnerships.28

The literature on urban America establishes the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as a time of rapid expansion of American cities due to advancements in transportation

26 Ibid., 116. 27 These works include: Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth- Century America (New York: Columbia University Press) 1991; Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: Quill William Morrow, 1981); Lillian Faderman, To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America—A History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999); Roberta Frankfort Collegiate Women: Domesticity and Career in Turn-of-the- Century America (New York: New York University Press, 1977); Trisha Franzen. Spinsters and Lesbians: Independent Women in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 1996); Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz. Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges from their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984); Leila J. Rupp, Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Barbara Miller Solomon. In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); Marilyn Yalom with Theresa Donovan Brown. The Social Sex: A History of Female Friendship (New York: Harper Perennial, 2015).

28 Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, 190-203.

218 and city services. As cities grew, so did the need for professionals in administrative roles like insurance agents and clerks. Many members of this enlarged managerial class made their home in new streetcar suburbs from which they could easily commute into America’s downtowns.29

Having stumbled upon the stories of Mary MacMillan and Loueen Pattee, I have attempted to reconstruct their lives through spatial analysis of the Delmoor, newspaper accounts, published works, genealogical research, and extensive archival exploration. These sources have allowed me to transfer the general trends found in the secondary literature to a specific couple in a specific place. Though both women left published works behind, there are very few personal writings by MacMillan or Pattee. MacMillan left behind letters to Edna St.

Vincent Millay, and Pattee left a series of letters to childhood friend Lillian C. Weaver held in the archives of Virginia Polytechnic Institute.30

29 Works consulted in the history of urban transportation, suburbs, apartment buildings, and the development of Cincinnati specifically include: Gunther Barth, City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); Jessica Foy and Thomas J. Schlereth, eds., American Home Life 1880-1930: A Social History of Spaces and Services ( Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1992); John Hancock, “The Apartment House in Urban America,” Buildings and Society: Essays on the Social Development of the Built Environment (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1980); Kenneth T Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York, Oxford University Press, 1985); Zane Miller and Patricia M. Melvin, The Urbanization of America: A Brief History, Second Edition (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1987); Zane Miller, Visions of Place: The City, Neighborhoods, Suburbs, and Cincinnati’s Clifton, 1850-2000 (Columbus, OH: Ohio University Press, 2001); David Stradling, Cincinnati: From River City to Highway Metropolis. (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2003); Sam Bass Warner, Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston (1870-1900) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962).

30 When I contacted Virginia Tech about the Lillian Weaver collection they informed me that they had “letters from someone named Lou,” but they had no idea who Lou was. I have since written to the curator to give her details about Loueen Pattee and her relationship to Lillian Weaver. Beyond these first-hand documents, there are slivers of information in a broad range of archives including Wells College, the Oak Park Historical Society, the Webster City (Iowa) Public Library, the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Miami University Archives, University of Cincinnati Archives and Rare Books, Yale University, the American Association of College Women, Hamilton County Probate Court, Circleville Presbyterian Church, and the Butler County Historical Society. Other information was found in historic newspapers including the Cincinnati Enquirer and the Hamilton Journal News and in site visits to the Delmoor.

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Mary MacMillan and Loueen Pattee

On January 10, 1920, census taker Elizabeth Roberts knocked on the door of apartment seven at the Delmoor.31 It was a cold Saturday, so one of the women probably invited the enumerator in to sit. 32 The room was crowded with furniture, moved from MacMillan’s mother’s house, the hardwood floors were protected by wool rugs, and floral paper covered the walls.33 Together they listed MacMillan first as “head of household.” When they got to

Pattee the census-taker might have asked, “how are you related to her?” While we cannot know the origin of their classification as partners, but knowing Loueen Pattee, we can easily imagine that she answered, maybe defiantly, “I am her partner.”

The enumerator wrote “partner.”34 This is an unusual term to find in the census, but partner was what they declared themselves to be sitting there together in the home they had made in a two-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a twenty-year-old building in one of

Cincinnati’s streetcar suburbs. Partner may have been a somewhat outlandish claim in 1920, enough so that it was later replaced in the census record, but it seems to be an accurate description of the lives they lived together as intellectual, financial, and romantic partners.

What was their partnership? Were they lesbians? This question is more complicated than it seems. Though romantic and domestic--what we today would call a lesbian relationship-

31 We know from the census that this enumerator was a woman named Elizabeth Roberts. (United States Federal Census, Cincinnati, Ohio 1920. Ward 25, Enumeration District 0434) Sheet 8B. 32 “Weather Conditions,” Cincinnati Enquirer (January 10, 1920) 7. 33 Photographs, Box 80, Edna St. Vincent Millay papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C., Mary L. MacMillan, Deceased, Final Account, June 9, 1937. Hamilton County Ohio Probate Court. 34 United States Federal Census, 1920; Though the census taker wrote “partner,” it was later crossed out and replaced with “bdg” for boarding.

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-that is not how they would have identified their partnership. The term “lesbian,” was just beginning to emerge, and to be pathologized, during the years they spent together, and so it seems unlikely that they would have embraced it as women already in their mid to late forties at the time they met.35 In her book on single women in America during this time historian

Trisha Franzen explains that at this moment in American history, “the unmarried state was respectable for both working-class and middle-class women.”36 MacMillan and Pattee lived an open partnered life together. They welcomed friends and colleagues into their shared home.37

MacMillan published poems about kissing Pattee, and was remembered by a student at her literary salon as a writer of “Sapphic verse,” but at the same time, MacMillan and Pattee were just the generation historian Lillian Faderman was referring to when she wrote,

It was still possible in the early twentieth century for some women to vow great love for each other, sleep together, see themselves as life mates, perhaps even make love, and yet have no idea that their relationship was what the sexologists were now considering ‘inverted’ and ‘abnormal.’ Such naivete was possible for women who came out of the nineteenth-century tradition of romantic friendship and were steeped in its literature.38 It is only, Faderman argues, “the revised gender and sexuality ideologies of the intervening years [between their lives and ours] [that] produced the equation between ‘real’ womanhood and married, reproducing women.”39

35 Lillian Faderman. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, 45-54. 36 Franzen, 5. 37 Letters and a telegram to Mary MacMillan from Edna St. Vincent Millay, Miami University Archives, Miscellanea Collection, Cabinet 1, Drawer 3, Folders 49-54. 38 Mary MacMillan, “After Reading Thomas Hardy,” Ohio Valley Verse v. 3 (Cincinnati, OH: Ohio Valley Poetry Society) 1927; Walter Ings Farmer, The Safekeepers: A Memoir of the Arts at the End of World War II (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter) 2000, 8; Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, 48. 39 Franzen, 4.

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Beyond these speculations, it is impossible to know how these partners thought of themselves or how those around them perceived their connection. Historian Susan Ferentinos reminds us to be cautious of our desire to apply present understandings and terminology to the past. She writes, “the ways in which people make sense of their sexual desires and act on them are determined in large part by the culture and the time period in which they live...historians…need to be vigilant about…simply applying modern categories to behavior of the past.”40 With this ambiguity in mind, I will refer to them with the term the census used to describe them on that day in January—partners.

Mary MacMillan: Vitally Alert, Intense and Restless

Mary MacMillan (1870-1936) was a poet and playwright with three volumes of short plays and one of poetry published over her lifetime.41 Her work also appeared in anthologies and magazines, and four of her plays were published individually. After her death, MacMillan was remembered as “a brilliant woman and a widely acclaimed major poet of Cincinnati,” and

“vitally alert, intense and restless.”42 A memorial published in the Cincinnati Times Star called her poetry, “strong-voiced and full-bodied, whether it celebrates the loveliness of the Ohio countryside, intones the finality of death or makes a bitter, ironic appraisal of the city as a smirking old roue enamored of fresh young lives.” 43

40 Susan Ferentinos, Interpreting LGBT History at Museums and Historic Sites (Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 2015) 7. 41 Her published works are: Short Plays (Cincinnati, OH: Stewart and Kidd Company, 1913); The Little Golden Fountain (Cincinnati, OH: Stewart and Kidd Company, 1916); More Short Plays (Cincinnati, OH: Stewart and Kidd Company, 1917); A Third Book of Short Plays (Cincinnati, OH: Stewart and Kidd Company, 1922). 42 “In Society,” Cincinnati Enquirer (December 6, 1937) 10.; “Rosemary is for Remembrance,” Hamilton Journal News (July 18, 1936). 43 “Tribute to Mary MacMillan,” Cincinnati Times Star (August 8, 1936) 18.

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Mary MacMillan, called May as a child, was the granddaughter of Cincinnati settler

David Everett Wade and was born and raised at her grandfather’s estate, Elmwood, in rural

Venice (now Ross), Ohio, as the youngest of four children (the elder two from her father’s first marriage).44

Her grandfather Nehemiah Wade’s Elmwood estate was Mary’s childhood home. (Butler County Ohio. L.H. Everts, 1875, 106.) Her father was a Presbyterian minister first in Circleville, Ohio from 1864 to 1881, and then in nearby Hamilton.45 During the years of his pastorate in Circleville, Mary remained with her mother at Elmwood. The whole family then moved briefly to Hamilton, Ohio in 1884 so that

44 Mary had two half-siblings from her father’s first marriage, and her brother Wade two years her senior. 45 James Brown Scouller. A Manual of the United Presbyterian Church of North America 1751-1881 (Harrisburg, PA: Patriot Publishing, 1881); According to the “Roll of Pastors, Associate Pastors and Stated Supplies,” at Central Presbyterian Church of Circleville, Ohio, William MacMillan served as pastor of that congregation from 1864 to 1881. Interestingly, Mary was born in 1870 and grew up at her maternal grandparents’ home, Elmwood, in Venice (now Ross), Ohio. The 1870 census has William listed twice, once on July 10th at a boarding house in Circleville, and again on July 29th at Elmwood with wife Sarah and son Wade (Mary would be born later that year). The Pickaway Quarterly in Fall 1870 contains an article about William MacMillan which included more information about the separation of William and Sarah MacMillan. It reads, “McMillan’s [sic] wife, however, was somewhat resented by the community…the congregation felt that Mrs. McMillan [sic] was snobbish and that she fancied she was too good for Circleville…Mrs. McMillan [sic] didn’t live in Circleville, but only visited her husband several times a year.”(“McMullin and MacMillan,” Pickaway Quarterly v. XI, n. 4, Fall 1870).

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Mary could attend high school there to prepare for college. MacMillan attended two years at

Wells College and one at Bryn Mawr, but did not earn a degree.46 While at Bryn Mawr,

MacMillan would have interacted frequently with one of the era’s most important feminists, M.

Carey Thomas.

M. Carey Thomas was the Dean of Bryn Mawr College and the only full professor of

English when MacMillan attended in 1890-1891 (the college’s fifth year in operation).47

Thomas was known for her hands-on approach to her students’ scholarship and the “sense of intense personal connection…toward her early Bwryn Mawr students.”48 With only one hundred undergraduates and both Thomas and MacMillan living on campus, it is impossible that MacMillan did not know and feel the influence of her dean.49

Thomas believed that marriage and family life interfered with a woman’s ability to support herself and achieve scholarly and professional goals. She was, adamant in her insistence that all women should prepare for self-support and believed that, even if they chose to marry, college women should pay servants rather than do their own household work.50 In fact, at Bryn Mawr Thomas provided full housekeeping for students so that they would be free from domestic tasks and unrestricted in their focus on scholarship.51 Thomas encouraged her students to “avoid strangulating marriages, and, in times of greatest stress, rely on members of

46 Stella Weiler Taylor, “Rosemary. That’s for Remembrance,” Hamilton Journal News (July 18, 1936) 3; Archives of Wells College. 47 Thomas later became Bryn Mawr’s second president. 48 Horowitz, 240. Thomas’ partner Mary Gwinn was in her first year as an Associate Professor in English and the department also included a graduate fellow. 49 Frankfort, 50-52. 50 Frankfort, 34. 51 Horowitz, 240. Obviously, this is an elitist approach as the hired servants would have also been women, albeit of a lower class.

224 her own sex for guidance.”52 She encouraged her students to work to support themselves and reject traditional marriage and domestic roles. According to historian Roberta Frankfort,

Thomas herself was “an isolationist with respect to men, living most of her adult life with close women friends,” though here Frankfort is obfuscating the well-documented fact that Thomas’

“close woman friends” were also her romantic partners.53

In large part, Mary MacMillan and her Bryn Mawr classmates lived true to Thomas’ hopes for them. Of the college’s graduates from 1898 to 1908, ninety percent worked outside the home during their lifetime and only forty-seven percent married, a rate much lower than the general population.54 As Thomas would have hoped, MacMillan and Pattee’s choice not to marry left them free from societal expectations of domesticity and subservience. It allowed them the freedom to craft their own lives outside of constricting social expectations.

While MacMillan was away at school her parents left the Hamilton house and moved into a brand-new home on Bigelow Street in Cincinnati’s Mount Auburn neighborhood. Mary moved into this house with her parents in 1891, what would have been her final year of college.55 Mary’s father died of pancreatic cancer in November of 1892, making it likely that she ended her schooling early to help care for her ailing father.56

52 Frankfort, 54. 53 Frankfort, 33. 54 Ibid., 54. 55 “Don’t Forget Today,” Cincinnati Enquirer (May 8, 1888) 5. 56 “William MacMillan” Death Card, Cincinnati Birth and Death Records 1865-1912, University of Cincinnati Archives and Rare Books Library, November 4, 1892.

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The MacMillans purchased this house and lot on Bigelow Street in Mount Auburn on May 8, 1888. The address was renumbered to 1915 Bigelow in 1896. (Cincinnati Enquirer (May 8, 1888) 3) In each of her households, from Elmwood, to Bryn Mawr, to Bigelow Street, MacMillan lived in households that required help to function. In 1870, the year of MacMillan’s birth, two domestic servants and a live-in farm hand are listed in the census at Elmwood. Later, twenty- seven-year-old Mary Wotin and was twenty-six-year-old Katherine Jacobs are included with the

MacMillans on Bigelow Street in the 1900 and 1910 censuses respectively.57 An Enquirer story in 1918 announced the marriage of nineteen-year-old Margaret Hafford then living as a servant at 1915 Bigelow.58 Furthermore, it is well documented that M. Carey Thomas, first Dean and later President at Bryn Mawr, employed maids so that domestic chores would not distract the scholars from their studies.59 It is worth noting that the servants Thomas employed were also women and that her ideals of material feminism were applied only to women of an elevated

57 United States Federal Census 1900, Hamilton County, Ohio, Enumeration District 232, Sheet 2; United States Federal Census 1910, Hamilton County, Ohio, Enumeration District 1402, Sheet A6201. 58 Cincinnati Enquirer (September 3, 1918) 9. 59 Frankfort, 51;

226 social class. The choice to move to the Delmoor--where, despite the presence of servants’ quarters on the upper floor, residents were doing their own housekeeping by the time

MacMillan moved in--implies that these partners wished to escape from the Victorian dependence on lower class female servants. Historian Sarah Deutsch characterizes their generation of college educated women as “a growing group of middle-class women who saw

“freedom” not as dangerous, but as desirable” and noted that these “college women— supported working-class women’s desire for independence against the claims of middle-class and elite matrons.”60 She writes, “these ‘New Women’ advocated putting housework on an industrial basis, with regular hours, wages, and explicit contracts. These women, like the servants themselves, wanted liberation from the confines of the privatized middle-class home and its supervision.”61

The MacMillan’s home at 1915 Bigelow Street as it appeared in 2003. The building has since been demolished. (Hamilton County Auditor property photograph).

60 Deutsch, Women and the City, 76. 61 Ibid.

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Upon her return to Cincinnati in 1891, MacMillan quickly became involved in local clubs and activities. She was a founding member and early president of the Cincinnati College Club, an educational group founded in 1892 and still active today, designed to give college educated women an outlet for civic and educational endeavors.62 When the Association of Collegiate

Alumnae held its annual meeting in Cincinnati in 1909, MacMillan helped coordinate events for the delegates, including M. Carey Thomas, including a day trip to the women’s colleges in

Oxford, Ohio.63 MacMillan was the press secretary for the Hamilton County Suffrage

Association as Ohio fought for statewide women’s suffrage in 1912-1913.64 In this role, she would have been in attendance when suffrage advocate Charlotte Perkins Gilman came to speak on “Answers to Antis” in Cincinnati in November of 1913.65 With exposure to Gilman as a speaker, with a love of literature, and as an educated woman, it is MacMillan was likely to have known of Gilman’s ideas of material feminism.

Charles Frederick Goss’ four-volume Cincinnati The Queen City: 1788-1912, published in

1912 featured several chapters written by MacMillan, including one on the women of

Cincinnati, one on the city’s benefactors, and one on the city’s architecturally significant residences.66 In the wordy style typical of MacMillan’s youth, she writes, “the history of

62 “College Club of Cincinnati History: The First 50 Years,” http://www.collegeclubofcincinnati.org/history; “Women’s Clubs,” Cincinnati Enquirer (October 15, 1899) 36. 63 “Superiority of College Women Set Forth in Interesting Address By Miss Thomas, President of Bryn Mawr, at Convention of Collegiate Alumnae—Program for the Day,” Cincinnati Enquirer (October 28, 1909) 3. 64 “Statement By Suffragette,” Cincinnati Enquirer (June 26, 1912) 16; “The Suffrage Forum: Should Women Be Given the Ballot?,” Cincinnati Enquirer (June 28, 1912) C8; “The Suffrage Forum: Prominent Suffrage Advocates,” Cincinnati Enquirer (August 11, 1912) D7. 65 “ARGUMENTS: Of Anti-Suffragists Are Answered by Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Editor and Writer,” Cincinnati Enquirer (November 3, 1913) 7. 66 Hamilton Evening Journal (December 20, 1911) 75; Rev. Charles Frederic Goss, Cincinnati The Queen City 1788- 1912 v.II (Chicago: The S.J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1912) 359-465.

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Cincinnati, with, of course, the sporadic exceptions of the very unusual, is exactly the history of her womanhood.”67 The piece on women includes a narrative of early Cincinnati women, especially Frances Trollope, a history of the many organizations and artistic endeavors organized by women, and chatty biographies of many Cincinnati women in the arts. She writes of them, “women who have done creative work in the past have almost invariably h68ad to labor like that of Sisyphos…there has been almost always poverty, illness, and the consuming duties of family and home.”69 She takes the opportunity to flatter some of her own contemporaries including poet Alice Williams Brotherton, painters Dixie Seldon and female partner Emma Mendenhall, and activist Annie Laws, and writes a glowingly crushy biography of pioneering woman pharmacist, Cora Dow.70 In promotion of the arts in Cincinnati, MacMillan was also an early leader in the Cincinnati branch of the MacDowell Society for the promotion of the arts, which still exists today.71

MacMillan’s most significant contribution to Cincinnati’s civic and cultural landscape was her role in founding and leading the Ohio Valley Poetry Society beginning in 1916. She served as the society’s president for more than ten years and was instrumental in the group’s poetry workshop (called the working group), lectures and readings by many of the nation’s most important poets, and publication of three volumes of Ohio Valley Verse.72 Her work with the Ohio Valley Poetry Society dovetailed with her personal interest in modern poetry and

67 “Women of Cincinnati,” McMillan in Charles Frederick Goss, Cincinnati the Queen City 1788-1912 v. 1, (Chicago: S.J. Clark Publishing Company, 1912) 359. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid., 366. 70 Ibid., 359-386. 71 This organization was founded in 1913 and is still celebrating the arts in Cincinnati today. 72 “Random Notes,” Cincinnati Enquirer (May 4, 1913) C2; American Art Annual v. XVII (New York, American Federation of Arts, 1920) 198.

229 involved arranging visits by some of her favorite poets, including Amy Lowell and Edna St.

Vincent Millay, the latter of whom stayed with her at the Delmoor on two visits to Cincinnati in the 1920s.73

According to one biographer, Edna St. Vincent Millay was, “acknowledged as the preeminent woman poet of her time.”74 Millay published her second, and possibly most well- known, collection of poems, A Few Figs from Thistles, in 1920, the year she first spoke to the

Ohio Valley Poetry Society and lodged with MacMillan. Three years later she won the Pulitzer

Prize for her poem, "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver." Her letters (to MacMillan and many others) and poetry leave a clear record of playful sexual freedom and exploration rooted in love for both men and women. Over the course of her life, Millay published fifteen volumes of original poetry, translations, plays, fiction and other works.75 In keeping with what we know about MacMillan’s own poetry, Elissa Zellinger writes, “it is taken for granted today that Edna

St. Vincent Millay's poetry detailed the sexual and social liberation of the modern woman.”76

Zellinger explains that, like McMillan, rather than abandoning traditional forms, “the majority of Millay's poetry evoked them; her work was conservative in the sense that she conserved past traditions.”77 She says that by exercising “a healthy poetic restraint, containing modern emotional unruliness and vulnerability within self-imposed and protective formal limitations”

73 Letters from Edna St. Vincent Millay to Mary MacMillan in Walter Havinghurst Special Collections, Miami University Libraries, Miscellanea Collection 1776-2002, cabinet 1, drawer 3, folder 50. 74 Brandenburg, Sandra. "Edna St. Vincent Millay: Overview." In Gay & Lesbian Biography, Michael J. Tyrkus and Michael Bronski, eds., Detroit, MI: St. James Press, 1997. Gale Literature Resource Center, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1420005612/LitRC?u=ucinc_main&sid=LitRC&xid=89c82d4e. 75 Brandenberg. 76 Elissa Zellinger, “Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Poetess Tradition,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers v. 29, n. 2 (June 2010) 240. 77 Ibid.

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Millay’s work linked “into a poetic tradition that has always expressed emotional insight through conservative poetic conventions.”78 It is no wonder Mary MacMillan felt a special bond to Millay, as her poetry attempted to do much the same thing.

Following Millay’s first visit to Cincinnati in 1920, MacMillan corresponded with Millay, and included some of the photos she’d taken of her. Though the photos that accompanied the letter seem innocent enough, mostly Millay sitting or reclining, often with a cigarette in her hand, the letters spark curiosity about what else might have happened during the visit. The pair clearly made a significant connection. In March 1920 MacMillian wrote to Millay, “My window is you and the curtains are drawn back. I have just been looking at your pictures. You make the spring night move—some wind compounded of shrill and sweet and keen and thrilling. I am glad to have your pictures…There are some I’m not sharing—and will you please not tell anyone about them.”79 In June of that year she finally forwarded some of the photos to Millay with a letter which included the comment, “I am sure Mr. Burleson would like these in his mail.”80

Here she refers to Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson who enforced the 1873 Comstock Law prohibiting the distribution of obscene materials thought the U.S. mail. To this Millay replied in

August, “Were any of the other pictures any good? The ones you daren’t send in the mail? And is it really so dangerous to send them?”81 The letters from MacMillan to Millay are especially playful, even flirtatious, but letters by both women illustrate a warmth and camaraderie that

78 Ibid. 79 Letter from Mary MacMillan to Edna St. Vincent Millay, March 24, 1920. Library of Congress, Edna St. Vincent Millay Papers 1882-1992, MSS32920, Box 80. 80 Letter from Mary MacMillan to Edna St. Vincent Millay, June 29, 1920. Library of Congress, Edna St. Vincent Millay Papers 1882-1992, MSS32920, Box 80. 81 Letter from Edna St. Vincent Millay to Mary MacMillan, postmarked August 11, 1920, Walter Havinghurst Special Collections, Miami University Libraries, Miscellanea Collection 1776-2002, cabinet 1, drawer 3, folder 50.

231 seems to imply recognition as kindred souls in their appreciation of literature, modernity, feminism, and alternative understandings of sexuality and marriage.

In one noteworthy letter, MacMillan writes, “If you were here I should make quite a fool of myself to make you smile and probably do almost anything for the joy of having you kiss me.

That is it I think. One doesn’t so much want to tend you as to anchor you and make you act.

One doesn’t so much want to kiss you as to be kissed by you.”82 This seemingly straightforward declaration of attraction is complicated by the fact that MacMillan had complained just sentences before about how much she missed Loueen Pattee who was attending a conference in London (with M. Carey Thomas).83 One final testament to the playful relationship between the two is a telegram sent from Millay to MacMillan in 1927 as they were making arrangements for Millay’s second reading for the Ohio Valley Poetry Society. The telegram reads simply,

“WANT TO STAY WITH YOU EVEN IF ALL YOU HAVE IS A HAMMOCK.”84

82 Letter from Mary MacMillan to Edna St. Vincent Millay, August 17, 1920. Library of Congress, Edna St. Vincent Millay Papers 1882-1992, MSS32920, Box 80. 83 Ibid. 84 Telegram from Edna St. Vincent Millay to Mary MacMillan, postmarked November 25, 1927, Walter Havinghurst Special Collections, Miami University Libraries, Miscellanea Collection 1776-2002, cabinet 1, drawer 3, folder 54.

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Loueen Pattee: The Charming New Dean

In this photo from Webster City, Iowa, Loueen Pattee is seen standing with Lillian Weaver seated to her left. Pattee’s sister Lenore and cousin are also shown. (Kendall Young Library, Webster City, Iowa, scrapbook collection) Loueen Pattee (1874-1921) was an educator, linguist, and art historian who came to

Cincinnati in 1916 to become the Dean of Women at the University of Cincinnati.85 Pattee

(sometimes known as Lulu or Lou) was born on January 23, 1874, in Buda, Illinois, the middle child of three. Her father was a traveling salesman, so the family moved around at first, but eventually settled in Webster City, Iowa. She was educated in the public schools there and there met life-long friend and colleague Lillian C. Weaver. Pattee lost her father to suicide when she was twelve and her mother died just a few years later, leaving Pattee in the care of her

Webster City relatives.86 Soon after her mother’s death Pattee spent two years at Grinnell

85 “Educator Succumbs to Malady,” Cincinnati Enquirer (March 8, 1921) 8; “In Society,” Cincinnati Enquirer (November 27, 1917) 5. 86 “The Sad Death of Harry Pattee,” Webster City (Iowa) Freeman (May 5, 1896)

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College in Grinnell, Iowa, then called Iowa College.87 After beginning at Grinnell, in 1894 she traveled to Europe to study in Hamburg, Germany.88 She was later awarded an AB from Grinnell based on the submission of her credits from abroad.89 From 1894 to 1907 she bounced between teaching in high schools in Dubuque, Iowa, and Oak Park, Illinois, and studying at

German universities in Heidelberg and Berlin.90 Her loves were foreign languages and art, and at the time of her death she spoke five languages and had sculpture on display in galleries in the United States and Europe.91 She spent five years as the chair of the foreign language department in Oak Park, where she reconnected with old friend Lillian Weaver who taught math and English there.92 Together they made plans to go to Europe in the fall of 1907.

In 1907 Loueen Pattee and Lillian Weaver founded the Munich School for Girls, a boarding school for wealthy American girls, at Friedrichstrasse 9 in Munich.93 More than one newspaper report referred to the school as a place where Americans could leave their daughters while they toured the continent, although Weaver recalled their more ambitious intention had been to send “American girls to college with a richer background.”94 The school welcomed between four and twelve students at a time and combined traditional academic courses with daily outings and an immersion in the arts and culture of Munich. At least two

87 “Loueen Patee’ from ‘A Biographical History of the Class of 1895, Iowa College, Grinnell, Iowa,” scrapbook collection, Webster City Library, Webster City, Iowa. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid.; US Census, 1900, Julien County, Dubuque City, ED 108; “Iowa to Invade Europe,” The Des Moines Register (August 4, 1907) 17. 91 Cincinnati Enquirer (March 5, 1922) 3. 92 “Loueen Pattee’ from ‘A Biographical History of the Class of 1895, Iowa College, Grinnell, Iowa,” scrapbook collection, Webster City Library, Webster City, Iowa. 93 “Munich School for Girls” The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine v. 88 (January 1914) 26. 94 “Loueen Pattee’ from ‘A Biographical History of the Class of 1895, Iowa College, Grinnell, Iowa,” scrapbook collection, Webster City Library, Webster City, Iowa.

234 tales about the Munich School for Girls made it back to the American press. In one tale, a group of four girls, including Chicago meatpacking heiress Ida Swift, had to dig themselves out of a snow drift while hiking in Switzerland.95 Another story described the girls hiking four hours up a

Bavarian peak to a mountaintop watering hole and returning in a giant sled in a half-hour’s time.96 We know from a photograph that the girls engaged with photographer Frank Eugene, who was part of Munich’s Avant Guard art scene. According to the International Center of

Photography, “Frank Eugene was significant in the Pictorialist movement of the early 1900s; his pictures helped fortify the connection between painting and photography that led to the acceptance of photography as a fine art.”97 The Munich School for Girls nurtured the once- sheltered girls’ intellect and sense of independence and it gave Pattee a way to sustain herself within Munich’s flourishing world of arts and culture. She was remembered as a “remarkable teacher” whose, “standards inspired the girls.” Long after Pattee’s death, Lillian Weaver wrote,

“the experiment was so successful that Lou would have been happy to stay there all her life.”98

Sadly, the outbreak of World War I interrupted those plans.

95 “Chicago Girls Shovel to Liberty in Drift,” Wichita Eagle (July 2, 1909) 1; “Students Climb Mountains,” The Daily Republican (Monongahela, Pennsylvania, September 7, 1909) 3. 96 “Chicago Girls Shovel to Liberty in Drift,” Wichita Eagle (July 2, 1909) 1; “Students Climb Mountains.” 97 “Artist: Frank Eugene,” in Ellen Handy, Reflections in a Glass Eye: Works from the International Center of Photography Collection (New York: Bulfinch Press in association with the International Center of Photography, 1999) 215. 98 “’Loueen Pattee’ from ‘A Biographical History of the Class of 1895, Iowa College, Grinnell, Iowa.’”

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The photo of the students at Loueen Pattee’s Munich School for Girls was taken by photographer Frank Eugene and is held in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Frank Eugene. “Misses Weaver & Pattie’s School for Girl’s Munich,” New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1912. Accession number 1972.633.114) When World War I broke out in the summer of 1914, Weaver was in the United States recruiting girls for the school, while Pattee remained in Munich.99 Though they did not expect the war to last long, Pattee cancelled the fall term and opened the school as a center for women and children whose husbands and fathers were away at the front.100 The American community in Munich quickly banded together and opened an American Hospital, where Pattee took on the role of assistant director and secretary.101 In this capacity, she published articles about the hospital’s work in the American Red Cross Magazine and in a local publication called

99 “’Loueen Pattee’ from ‘A Biographical History of the Class of 1895, Iowa College, Grinnell, Iowa.’” 100 “Random Notes,” Cincinnati Enquirer (March 5, 1922) 65. 101 Loueen Pattee, “A Message from Munich,” The American Red Cross Magazine v. 10, n. 10 (October, 1915) 335- 340; William P. Kennedy, “The Nobel Work of a Nobel Woman,” The American Red Cross Magazine 10, n. 2 (February, 1915) 71-75.

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American Notes in Munich.102 Her writing is flowery but factual as she describes the hardships faced by the hospital frankly to solicit American support. She stopped short of describing the horrors she and other nurses witnessed in their work, but wrote, “We have grown familiar with all phases of suffering.”103 There are photos of her at the hospital receiving a much-envied

“giant dray load” of supplies, and posing with foreign dignitaries or other nurses.104 As the war wore on, American support for the Red Cross dried up and German troops began to block delivery of supplies, so by the end of 1915 the American Hospital was forced to close.

Loueen Pattee is pictured here in white with Her Majesty Queen Maria Therese of Bavaria (Loueen Pattee, “The Metamorphosis of Munich: How the Quaint and Interesting Bavarian Capital Became a Center for War Relief Activity,” The American Red Cross Magazine v 10, n 4 (April 1915) 144.) Loueen Pattee left Munich in the spring of 1916. She spent the summer with her brother

Fred outside of Chicago, and in August accepted an appointment as dean of women at the

102 These pieces included reports of visits from numerous German dignitaries including Maria Theresa, Queen Consort of Bavaria Loueen Pattee, “The Metamorphosis of Munich: How the Quaint and Interesting Bavarian Capital Became a Center for War Relief Activity,” The American Red Cross Magazine v 10, n 4 (April 1915) 144; Harvard University holds some copies of American Notes in Munich which was published daily by Munich’s American expatriate community from August 11, 1914 through 1916. 103 Loueen Patteee, “Message from Munich,” 337. 104 Loueen Pattee, “The Metamorphosis of Munich: How the Quaint and Interesting Bavarian Capital Became a Center for War Relief Activity,” The American Red Cross Magazine v 10, n 4 (April 1915) 144.

237

University of Cincinnati, to replace Emilie Watts McVae, who became president of Sweet Briar

College. Loueen Pattee took UC by storm. The University News story introducing her was titled,

“New Dean, Miss Pattee Arrives at Varsity,” an expression of both the quality of her credentials and the first impression she made.105 Her arrival was reported in the national magazine of

Kappa Kappa Gamma, The Key, where the UC correspondent reported, “Women’s convocations are unusually interesting this year, conducted by the charming new Dean of Women, Miss

Loueen Pattee.”106

The role of dean of women was what we know today as student affairs or student life.

The dean oversaw social events, extracurricular activities, student conduct, and disciplinary action. In addition to her responsibilities of dean of women, Pattee taught courses in art history and French. She was a driving force in many campus fundraising and war-relief efforts and helped lead a drive to provide scholarships for five French women to attend UC during the war.107 She was the first dean of women to occupy the new Women’s Building (later renamed

Beecher Hall), where her first-floor office was described as an “attractive sanctum, with its flowering plants, its books and reproduction of many of the masterpieces which the world of art affords.”108 The new Women’s Building, gave campus women spaces equivalent to those the men enjoyed. It included study rooms, a large reception area, domestic science labs, classrooms, offices, and a gymnasium, pool, and women’s lockers.109 Pattee was well known to students for her political views, so much so that a cartoon of her in the 1918 Cincinnatian

105 “New Dean, Miss Pattee arrives at Varsity,” UC News Record (October 4, 1916) 1. 106 “Enjoying New Women’s Building,” The Key v.XXXIII, n4 (December 1916) 412. 107 “Educator Succumbs to Malady.”; “In Society,” Cincinnati Enquirer (November 27, 1917) 5. 108 Journal of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae v. X (September 1916-June 1917) 19. 109 Ibid.

238 yearbook features a “votes for women” pennant held by a well-dressed Dean Pattee standing on a soapbox.110

A caricature of Loueen Pattee in the 1918 University of Cincinnati annual shows her standing on a soapbox holding a “Votes for Women” pennant. (The Cincinnatian, Cincinnati, OH: University of Cincinnati, 1918) Beyond her work at UC, Loueen Pattee was deeply involved in Cincinnati’s civic and cultural life. She served on the board of directors of the Woman’s City Club, and the nominating committee of the Ohio Valley Poetry Society, where she nominated Mary MacMillan as president.111 She was a member of the College Club (founded by MacMillan), L’Alliance

Française, and nationally was a member of the American Association of Collegiate Alumnae, now known as the Association of University Women.112 In 1920, Pattee traveled to London as an alternate delegate to the founding meeting of the International Association of Collegiate

110 The Cincinnatian, Cincinnati, OH: University of Cincinnati, 1918 111 “Ten Directors Named,” Cincinnati Enquirer (April 27, 1919) 23; Cincinnati Enquirer (May 11, 1919) D2; 112 “Educator Succumbs to Malady.”

239

Alumnae where M. Carey Thomas was one of the five members of the American delegation.113

For the Woman’s City Club she acted as a hostess of the Chamber Centennial Festival at the

Cincinnati Zoo in which more than four thousand youth members of the Civic and Vocational

League were invited to explore the zoo and given a pamphlet on the history of Cincinnati, partially written by Mary MacMillan, as a souvenir.114

It must have become obvious soon after Pattee’s arrival in Cincinnati that she and Mary

MacMillan had a great deal in common. Undoubtedly, they would have bumped into each other at suffrage events, the College Club, poetry readings, lectures, and art shows. Though Pattee first lived in rented rooms on Glenmary Avenue, then at the Maplewood Flats on Thrall Street, after the death of MacMillan’s mother in late 1917, she moved in with MacMillan on Bigelow

Street and then into the Delmoor.115

The Delmoor Flats

Twenty years after the construction of the Delmoor, MacMillan and Pattee, consciously chose apartment living. When she passed away in 1917, MacMillan’s mother left four properties to her daughter, including the brick house on Bigelow Street where Mary had lived since 1891.116 Mary MacMillan could have chosen to live in any one of these properties, or to

113 “UK Incoming Passenger Lists, 1878-1960, Plymouth, England, 1920,” 43. Accessed through Ancestry.com 114 “Relics to Be Shown Children at Charter Fete by Members of Woman’s City Club,” Cincinnati Enquirer (May 22, 1919) 16; “When Youngsters Pose in Charter Pageant: ‘To Build for All Time Begin with Schools’: Says Dr. R.J. Condon in Plea for Children,” Cincinnati Enquirer (May 29, 1919) 8. 115 Williams Cincinnati Directory (Cincinnati: Williams and Company, 1918) 1441; University of Cincinnati Handbook, 1916; “University Faculty to Hold Open House for Students,” Cincinnati Enquirer (February 7, 1917) 9. 116 The other three properties were in the upper West End which had once been known as “Wade’s Woods” after MacMillan’s great grandfather, David Everett Wade, who owned over 100 acres near the intersection of Liberty Street and Central Parkway. The properties MacMillan inherited were remnants of the original plot which had been subdivided among Wade’s many heirs over the years.

240 sell them all and buy a large modern home, yet she and Loueen Pattee, chose to move to the

Delmoor. This was a choice to move from a large house to a small apartment, from the urban fringe to a suburban enclave, and from a life of Victorian domesticity to liberation and modernity.

The Delmoor Flats before porches were added. (“Splendid Flat Building Now Being Erected on Telford Avenue, Clifton,” Cincinnati Enquirer, March 12, 1899, 16.) The Delmoor Flats at 3414 Telford Avenue was built in the last decade of the nineteenth century, a time when apartment buildings, then called flats to avoid confusion with lower-class tenement buildings, were brand new. They featured amenities and flourishes designed to make living together with others more palatable to the emerging pool of urban middle-class professionals builders hoped to attract. In the Delmoor these amenities included an ornate lobby with marble

241 wainscoting and an encaustic tile floor, a grand central stair marked by gas-lit ornamental newel posts open to a skylight above, indoor bathrooms with running hot and cold water, tile fireplaces, radiator heat, porches, and gas light fixtures throughout.

The Delmoor’s ornate lobby features a tile floor and skylit sweeping stair.

242

MacMillan and Pattee lived in apartment number seven, shown here at left.

Bathrooms in the Delmoor included marble wainscoting, clawfoot tubs, and radiator heat which remain today in this modern photo of a sample apartment.

243

The Delmoor’s spacious interiors included hardwood floors, pocket doors, tile fireplaces and radiator heat which remain in this modern image. (All photos above from https://www.citycenterproperties.com/apartments/Ohio/Cincinnati/delmoor)

Well-known Cincinnati architect Gustave Drach designed the Delmoor in 1899 as an investment property for a local department store owner, L. D. Seifert. The Delmoor was located directly behind his own home, near a neighborhood business district in Cincinnati’s then emerging streetcar suburb, Clifton. 117 The building contained twelve apartments on three floors, with a dormitory-like suite of servants’ quarters on the squat fourth story.118 The

Delmoor fits squarely within national trends in apartment design and construction. As urban development pressures, desire for investment opportunities, and access to municipal services pushed the wealthy to invest in well-appointed multi-unit buildings to house urban

117 “Splendid Flat Building Now Being Erected on Telford Avenue Clifton,” Cincinnati Enquirer (March 12, 1899) 16. Seifert’s Department store was located in the 1200 block of Vine Street in Over-the-Rhine, but Seifert’s home was located on Clifton Avenue, so that the Delmoor was actually built at the rear of Seifert’s own lot. Gustave Drach is known as the architect of Cincinnati’s Woodward High School (now residential lofts) and Good Samaritan Hospital among others. 118 Site Visit, November 2016.

244 professionals, buildings like the Delmoor sprung up across the country.119 Generally speaking, these buildings were, like the Delmoor, of masonry construction, three to five stories in height, and featured spacious units with amenities similar to those in a single-family home.

Middle-class apartments, like the Delmoor began in New York City in the mid- nineteenth century.120 From there this building type moved outward to other cities, first as an urban form, and appearing in near suburbs by the 1880s. At first these investments were risky as potential renters’ decisions about moving hinged on concerns about what class of neighbors they might experience and whether there would be adequate privacy balanced against what types of services they could expect to gain by the move.121 These buildings were inhabited by a social class described at the time as, “young business-men, professional people, artists, literati, employe[e]s, and others who by their education, culture, and position may fairly claim to live in seemliness and comfort.”122 This expectation of seemliness was notably relevant in MacMillan and Pattee’s lives, as they hosted meetings and professional guests in their home without any hint of concern about the status of their relationship.

The Delmoor was among the first three multi-unit buildings built within the Ludlow

Avenue business district in Cincinnati’s then suburban Clifton neighborhood. The Herford on

Clifton Avenue was the first building of flats listed in city directories, followed by the Roanoke

119 Gunther Barth, City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980) 45-52. 120 Cromley, xiii. 121 Ibid. 122 Cromley, 7, quoting an article in Appleton’s Journal 5 (1878) 535.

245 and the Delmoor, both appearing first in the 1900 city directory.123 The neighborhood, first a rural retreat for the extremely wealthy, began to be settled as an upper and middle class suburb once streetcar service reached the Village of Clifton in 1888, with streetcar lines traveling directly down Telford (originally called Cook) Avenue.

123 Williams Cincinnati Directory (Cincinnati: Williams and Company, 1899) 78-80; Williams Cincinnati Directory (Cincinnati: Williams and Company, 1900) 78-80; The Parkside is also listed just beyond the business district abutting Burnet Woods.

246

This 1911 traction system map illustrates the reach of Cincinnati’s streetcar network out of the downtown into suburban areas including Clifton. The detail image shows Clifton with a streetcar traveling directly past the Delmoor on Telford Avenue. (Cincinnati Views, http://www.cincinnativiews.net/streetcars.htm) In 1891, the land closest to the streetcar lines was subdivided for residential development, and in 1893 the City of Cincinnati annexed the Village of Clifton, opening the door for the city services, including sewerage and municipal fire service, necessary for large scale residential and commercial development.124 Though the initial development on these lots were single family homes, apartments followed within a decade. As in most cities, Clifton’s new flats appeared directly on transportation lines. This allowed residents to take advantage of previously inaccessible urban entertainments and conveniences.125 Before streetcars, Clifton residents would have been limited to activities within walking distance unless they could afford to keep their own team of horses or hire one for trips into town. By the time MacMillan and

124 Henry D. Shapiro and Zane L. Miller, Clifton: Neighborhood and Community in an Urban Setting. A Brief History (Cincinnati, OH: The Laboratory in American Civilization, 1976). 28-40. 125 Cromley, 3.

247

Pattee moved to the Delmoor in 1919, Clifton’s commercial core contained more than ten middle-class apartment buildings and all the businesses necessary to serve them.126

A key piece of Clifton’s transition from rural enclave to suburb was movement of the

University of Cincinnati. The University of Cincinnati, chartered in 1870, opened its Burnet

Woods campus just south of Clifton in 1889.127 With the growth of the University, Clifton’s

Ludlow Avenue boomed, so that by the time of Seifert’s investment in the Delmoor, it served a diverse combination of students, proprietors of shops and restaurants, university faculty, and professional and upper-middle-class families.128 While initial residents of the Delmoor were generally fairly wealthy, as more apartment buildings were constructed in Clifton, the building quickly transitioned to house solidly professional population. By the time MacMillan and Pattee moved into the Delmoor in 1919, they shared the building with a retail vice-president, an insurance agent, two railroad postal clerks, two teachers, a freight agent, a dentist, a UC education professor, and two traveling salesmen, as well as two home-makers, two students, and a live-in janitor. 129 The residents’ family units took all shapes including four bachelors living alone, a widower and his adult son, two married couples, a professional woman and her mother, a father, son and boarder, Other apartment buildings nearby housed secretaries, college professors, teachers, bank tellers, and salesmen, with a smattering of artists and

126 Williams Cincinnati Directory (Cincinnati, OH: Williams Directory Company, 1919). 127 “University of Cincinnati Campus Heritage Plan,” August 2008. www.ud.ecu/content/dam/uc/af/pdc/campus_heritage_plan/Campus%20Heritage%20Plan%20(13nb).pdf. 5-8; Note that though UC now uses 1819 as its founding date, this is actually the date of an earlier institution later annexed into the university system and predates the 1870 founding of the institution named The University of Cincinnati. 128 United Federal States Census, 1900. Hamilton County, Ohio. Ward 31, Enumeration District 268. 129 Williams Cincinnati Directory (Cincinnati, OH: Williams Directory Company, 1919).

248 musicians mixed in.130 An apartment building like the Delmoor, gave these professionals the design features and conveniences of single family homes without the responsibilities and cost of maintenance and upkeep. The Delmoor’s suburban location allowed the women to avoid the basin’s urban grime, yet maintain access to the civic and cultural institutions downtown. It gave them access to tree-lined streets and a large urban park. Yet at the same time, the Delmoor was a twenty-minute walk from the University of Cincinnati where Pattee worked, and it offered direct access to several streetcars.

The design of the Delmoor included significant aesthetic appeal and modern conveniences, some of which were unusual in single family homes. The building was H-shaped to allow for maximum light and air to each apartment, setting it apart from the dense tenements of the urban core.

130 Ibid.

249

The H-shaped plan of the Delmoor clustered skylight-lit circulation spaces (a front stair and back service stair) in the center of the building. Each wing of the building contains two apartments, one front and one back, for a total of four units per floor. (1904 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County) Each apartment was well-appointed with claw foot tubs, hardwood floors, marble-topped sinks, tile fireplaces, pocket doors, and butler’s pantries. Rooms were arranged off a central corridor with the bathroom and bedrooms in the darker rear of the unit and the parlors and dining rooms at the front of the unit bathed in light from the large double-hung wood windows.

Balconies were added to the units in 1909.131

131 Though I have not investigated this, visual analysis would suggest that many of Clifton’s early apartment buildings were built without porches and had them added later, likely in response to the new provisions for light and air in Cincinnati’s revised building code passed in May 1909. (Fairbanks, Making Better Citizens, 23)

250

This floor plan of MacMillan and Pattee’s apartment at the Delmoor shows entry from the back of the apartment, a bathroom immediately opposite the front door, and a central hall leading to well-lit front rooms and a porch. (City Center Properties, The Delmoor. https://www.citycenterproperties.com/apartments/Ohio/Cincinnati/delmoor/two-bedroom-one-bath) Apartment seven is on the second floor of the Delmoor in the southeastern corner.

After climbing the ornate entry stair, MacMillan and Pattee would have entered their apartment looking directly into the bathroom with a clawfoot tub, sink with a marble surround, and toilet near a single window. Turning left down a central hallway they would have come first to a front room, probably intended as a living or dining room since it connected to the kitchen through the pass-through butler’s pantry. To the right of the hall were two large rooms, probably used as bedrooms, and in the rear of the apartment was the kitchen and a small

251 eating area. While the 1921 probate inventory of Pattee’s belongings included no household goods, the inventory submitted by the executor of MacMillan’s estate in 1936 gives interesting insights into what filled the rooms described above.132

The first room described in MacMillan’s inventory, listed as “guest room,” contained a bed, table, marble top dresser, couch, rocking chair and dresser set. Mary probably brought these items from her mother’s house and they were likely old family items. The values assigned to these items illustrate that these Victorian items were outdated when Mary died in 1936. For example, the marble top dresser was valued at $1.00, or $17.83 in today’s dollars.133 The inventory goes on to list six items in MacMillan’s kitchen—a lot of utensils and dishes valued at

$2.00, an “ice refrigerator,” a stove, two camp chairs (presumably for use on the adjoining porch), one chair and one table. The paucity of possessions in the kitchen is a good indication that Mary was not a committed cook. Unlike the lonely arrangement in the kitchen, the dining room, which contained a table with six chairs, and other spaces for entertaining were well stocked.134 The dining room contained decorative items and serving ware including four brass ash trays--MacMillan was a known smoker135 The living room had a “smoking stand” and was crowded with three rockers, two couches, two straight chairs, three tables, a telephone stand, and a combination desk and bookcase and a free-standing bookcase, both filled with books.

There was an additional bookcase full of books in the apartment’s long hall. Finally, MacMillan’s

132 Mary L. MacMillan, Deceased. Hamilton County, Ohio Probate Inventory. 133 Calculated using the currency converter at the United States Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm. 134 Though this is not the subject of this paper, the period between Pattee’s death in 1921 and MacMillan’s death in 1936 was one of two periods when she was involved with Nancy Ely Henshaw. 135 Letter from Ann-Barrows Henshaw Wagstaff to Nancy Birch Podini, undated. Copy in the personal collection of the author.

252 bedroom was tightly packed with a dresser set, cedar chest, four chairs, chiffonier, sofa, table, dresser, and bed.136

The only other clue as to the apartment’s contents are the photographs McMillan took of Edna St. Vincent Milly during her 1920 visit. Beyond their role as evidence of artistic expression and camaraderie, the photos provide the only known glimpse into the interior space inhabited by MacMillan and Pattee. A few pieces of furniture, rugs, curtains, and wallpaper give us our most tangible link into the physical fabric of their lives together. The apartment’s ornate woodwork and fireplace surround were dark. Floral wallpaper covered the walls and the couches were heavy Victorian pieces with dark upholstery. Books and the corner of a table or desk draped in heavy cloth are visible in the edge of one image. Behind Millay a patterned tablecloth or bedspread is stretched over a window to block the light. A brass vessel, possibly an ash tray and a candelabrum can be seen atop a turned-leg table in another image with sheer curtains in the background. Overall, the room appears comfortable, lived in, and dark, but also ordered.137 The photos offer a tantalizing, yet frustratingly incomplete view of the home made by MacMillan and Pattee, only a year before Pattee’s sudden death in 1921.

136 Mary L. MacMillan, Deceased, Hamilton County, Ohio Probate Inventory. 137 Library of Congress, Edna St. Vincent Millay Papers 1882-1992, MSS32920, Box 80.

253

Edna St. Vincent Millay photographed by Mary MacMillan at the Delmoor Flats in 1920. (Library of Congress, Edna St. Vincent Millay Papers 1882-1992, MSS32920, Box 80)

254

Life Together

At the time of her mother’s death in 1917, MacMillan had lived in her mother’s house for twenty-six years, due to financial dependence if nothing else. With the properties and other investments MacMillan inherited from her mother, she became financially independent at a modest scale, so that when her salary was combined with Pattee’s $2,000 annual salary from the University of Cincinnati, the pair could afford the pricey rent at the Delmoor. 138 It would not have been possible to for MacMillan and Pattee to remain in the MacMillan house and maintain their professional lives. Stoking a coal-burning furnace, washing by hand, and other household tasks would have required full-time attention. Either one of the women would have had to devote themselves to the household, or they would have had to hire a servant, which would have come at a cost to their bank accounts and their privacy.139 As historian Trisha

Franzen has shown in her exploration of women’s lives during this period, “To marry, to these women, meant limitations, dependence, and a loss of autonomy.”140 The choice to move out of the Bigelow Street house relieved them from much of the drudgery of household chores, freed them from pressure to marry, protected their privacy from prying servants, and allowed them to reshape their domestic realm as a productive professional center. Their apartment at the

Delmoor facilitated their significant contributions to the artistic, educational, and civic life of their city.

138 Though we do not know how much their rent was at the Delmoor, adds for similar nearby apartments appear in the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1912 and 1914 with prices ranging from $38 to $50, or somewhere between $1,000 and $1,300 in today’s dollars. (See Cincinnati Enquirer April 7, 1912, A9, May 5, 1912, A9, or November 22, 1914, A7 to compare Delmoor ads to those for similar buildings.) 139 Remember that the MacMillans required live-in servants to help run their household. 140 Franzen, 75.

255

MacMillan, born in 1870, and Pattee, four years younger, might have been called New

Women. This term referred to college educated, independent, usually unmarried women, who worked for expanded rights and roles for women in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century culture.141 Women in this era enjoyed what historian Trisha Franzen has called “as close to a golden age for independent women as can be found in United States history.”142 In fact, she says, “the generations of women born between 1865 and 1895 had the highest proportion of single women in U.S. history,” peaking at 11 percent for women, like Pattee and MacMillan, born between 1865 and 1875.143 These women were the drivers and beneficiaries of a changing range of opportunities for women to support themselves outside of married life.144 Franzen reports that, “the unmarried state was respectable for both working-class and middle-class women.”145 Sarah Deutsch adds nuance writing, “those born in the 1870s…opted for a more homosocial world that left their reputations intact, but let them still enter a public realm. They became part of the new professional and managerial middle class.”146 What set these women apart from earlier generations, Franzen writes, “was that they were seeking full, independent lives of work, communities, and companions…possible only because of the new economic opportunities for professional women.”147 “These vital, busy, college-educated New Women, including MacMillan and Pattee, claimed new authority and legitimacy for women in the professions. They often lived together in supportive, and sometimes romantic, partnerships,

141 Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, 178-180; Franzen, 4. 142 Franzen, 4. 143 Ibid., 5. 144 Ibid. 145 Ibid. 146 Deutsch, 104. 147 Franzen, 77.

256 and, as Deutsch points out playing, “not the marginalized part of the ‘spinster aunt,’ but a key role as social arbiter/social glue.”148

The emergence of the New Woman, and modernist ideals in general, in the late nineteenth century led to a backlash against women’s education and professional roles early in the twentieth century.149 MacMillan and Pattee straddle this transition. During their lifetimes women’s same sex relationships began to be defined in strictly sexual terms, as unnatural and perverse.150 Trisha Franzen writes of these New Women, “early in their careers when

‘respectable’ white, middle-class women were assumed to be asexual, these women were able to present themselves as almost ungendered things,” yet this was not the case by the end of

World War I.151 While most literature contends that the work of German sexologists and psychoanalysts had brought lesbianism to the public’s attention and labeled it perverse by the

1910s, MacMillan and Pattee lived as partners until Pattee’s untimely death.152

Beyond romance, MacMillan and Pattee’s partnership included ordinary domestic tasks.

On a trip in Canada in 1920, MacMillan wrote to Edna St. Vincent Millay that she had left the rugs powdered to repel insects and she hoped that Pattee would be the first one home to the apartment so that MacMillan would not have to deal with the rugs upon her return.153 At the

148 Deutsch, 105. 149 Frazen, 5-6. 150 Faderman, “Surpassing the Love of Men,” 297-331. 151 Franzen, 70. 152 Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, 239-253. The evidence that MacMillan and Pattee were living openly is largely in the fact that MacMillan published several explicit love poems to Pattee. In September 1919 The Enquirer reported that they had returned from traveling together writing, “Miss Loueen Pattee and Miss Mary MacMillan have returned to Cincinnati following several weeks spent at Cape Cod,” (Cincinnati Enquirer, (September 21, 1919) 62.) 153 Library of Congress, Edna St. Vincent Millay Papers 1882-1992, MSS32920, Box 80.

257 same time, their professional commitments and busy schedule would have made it impossible for them to keep up with most unmechanized, labor-intensive domestic tasks. For example,

Pattee’s schedule in just the five-week period between March 23 and April 27, 1919, included teaching French and art history and fulfilling her administrative responsibilities at the University as well as directing classes on suffrage for the Woman’s City Club, and attendance at a meeting of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae in Saint Louis, a choral program given by the Clifton

Musical Club, a meeting of the Ohio Valley Poetry Society where she read and offered analysis of several poems, and her first meeting as a member of the board of the Woman’s City Club.154

The services and amenities available in and around the Delmoor would have significantly eased their domestic burden and left time for the pair’s civic and artistic work. Having a small, mechanized domestic realm close to an array of services let them lead professional lives. This choice was shared by women across the country. As Gwendolyn Wright notes, early apartment promoters, “claimed numerous benefits for apartment complexes: economic savings, architectural interest, social cooperation, increased health and efficiency, decreased crime through group surveillance and freedom for women to work outside the home.”155

At the Delmoor steam heat freed MacMillan and Pattee from acquiring and hauling coal, making and stoking fires, and cleaning the sooty dust created by burning coal. We know this was something Pattee valued, as a 1908 letter to Lillian Weaver noted that she was “grieving the lack of steam heat in the Fullerton place,” because the site would have otherwise been the

154 “Club Notes,” Cincinnati Enquirer (March 23, 1919) B8; “Collegiate Alumnae Gathering,” St. Louis Star and Times (March 31, 1919) 11; “Random Notes,” Cincinnati Enquirer (April 20, 1919) 62-63; “Ten Directors Named,” Cincinnati Enquirer (April 27, 1919) 23. 155 Wright, 145.

258 perfect spot for their Munich School for Girls. 156 Like most new construction of this era, the

Delmoor’s fully plumbed indoor three-fixture bathrooms with hot and cold running water freed them from fetching and heating water, traveling to outdoor toilet facilities, and emptying and cleaning chamber pots used overnight.157 MacMillan’s estate lists a gas stove and ice box among her possessions, so the household did clearly possess the equipment required to cook at home, but proximity to restaurants and grocery stores would have also freed the pair from the need for cooking. A candy store, two grocery stores, a dry goods merchant, two bakeries, two restaurants, and two saloons within two blocks of the Delmoor provided food and refreshments for both sit-down meals and home cooking.158 Garbage was incinerated directly from a chute in the building’s rear hall. The apartment’s small spaces required less dusting than a larger home, and maintenance of outdoor spaces and the communal entry way would have been undertaken by the live-in janitor. Though laundry basins, hot running water, and space for line drying were available in the building’s basement, tailors, dressmakers, shoemakers, dry cleaners, a dye house, and a clothing renovator on Ludlow Avenue would have relieved the pair of mending and washing chores.159 In this era before the invention of in-home laundry machines, sending laundry out was a common choice.160 An ad for the Model Laundry Company appearing in the

Woman’s City Club Bulletin in 1920 (just under Pattee’s name among the Board of Trustees)

156 “Correspondence to Lillian C. Weaver from Lou,” Lillian C. Weaver Collection 1892-1919, Special Collections, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Box 2, Folder 3. 157 While it might seem outlandish to think that outdoor toilets were still being used in the 1910s and 1920s, outdoor toilets were not outlawed in Cincinnati until 1967. When the Thomas Sherlock mansion on nearby Clifton Avenue was torn down in 1923, it did not include indoor plumbing. 158 Williams Cincinnati Directory (Cincinnati, OH: Williams and Company, 1920). 159 Ibid. 160 Arwen P. Mohun, Steam Laundries: Gender, Technology and Work in the United States and Great Britain, 1880- 1940 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990) 1-11.

259 connected sending laundry out with doing right by one’s family. It reads “No work-No worry.

Try our family finished work.”161 Freedom from domestic chores left MacMillan and Pattee the time necessary to make significant contributions to the city of Cincinnati.

Mary MacMillan enriched the city’s cultural landscape by organizing lectures and readings by some of the nation’s best-known poets, and by writing her own plays, many of which were performed by local schools and organizations. Several of her poems were set to music and became popular tunes, and one of her plays, “A Fan and Two Candlesticks,” became one of the earliest dramatic performances ever presented on radio when MacMillan performed the piece live on WLW on November 9, 1922.162 Pattee only lived in Cincinnati for five years before her death, but even in a short time, she had significant impacts. She lectured widely and gave her time generously to civic organizations including the Ohio Valley Poetry Society and The

Woman’s City Club. Together the pair made significant contributions to their city—just the types of gifts that feminists of the time would have expected to be possible with apartment living.

The Partnership Comes to an End

The story of MacMillan and Pattee ended tragically in the spring of 1921. Pattee contracted pneumonia at a conference of Deans of Women in Atlantic City. She knew she was sick and as soon as her train pulled into Cincinnati, she put herself under a doctor’s care.163

161 The Bulletin of the Cincinnati Woman’s City Club (November 1920) 13. 162 Christopher Sterling and Cary O’Dell, eds., The Concise Encyclopedia of American Radio (New York: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2010) 226; Erik Barnouw, A Tower in Babel: A History of Broadcasting in the United States to 1933 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966) 137. 163 “Dean Loueen Pattee Ill,” Cincinnati Enquirer (March 7, 1921) 14.

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Three doctors, nurses, and eventually the staff at Christ Hospital were all unable to save her and within three days she was dead.164 MacMillan lived on at the Delmoor for fifteen years, until her own death in 1936, sharing space with Pattee’s lingering presence. It was the physical space of the life they had chosen together, and though they had only two years there, a poem

MacMillan published in 1927 makes it clear that Pattee remained a constant presence.

Why is it that my dead will come to me, Looking at me with the brown October eyes, In dreams, smiling because I am not wise And do not know what is or is to be? Why is it that in dreams she never lies As I last saw her in white tranquility But moves, like music on a silent sea, Glows, like a comet in the western skies? Why is it that my dead will come this way To me in dreams and when I ask her why She had to die and what it is to die And now she’s come again, will she not stay, She says no word but looks at me the while With smiling eyes and on her lips a smile?165 MacMillan and Pattee were unmarried, well-educated, feminist, professionals able to support themselves outside of marriage. Their home at the Delmoor was a hive of activity where books were written, meetings were held, and overnight guests were housed. Their household mixed the personal and professional, the artistic, and the every-day. Their extended circle of educated women blended civic and artistic pursuits with social activity, with the

Delmoor as a hub. The option to live in an apartment allowed the pair to maximize their professional potential and contribute to the civic and educational life of their city in a way

164 State of Ohio, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Certificate of Death, Registration District 49, File Number 15411 (March 9, 1921). 165 Mary MacMillan, “Sonnet,” Ohio Valley Verse III (Cincinnati, OH: Ohio Valley Poetry Society, 1927) 74.

261 which would have been impossible if they had been keeping house or even boarding. At the

Delmoor, MacMillan and Pattee translated their feminist beliefs into spatial reality.

By 1936 Mary MacMillan had opened the heavy double doors of the Delmoor Flats every day for the better part of twenty years. Every day she had pulled the curving brass bar to enter, crossed the tile-floored lobby, and moved up a flight of carved wooden stairs to her apartment. As her health failed, Mary held on to the turn-of-the-century ideal in which independent women were, “the vanguard of women’s struggle for equality.”166 She was active to the last, leaving behind an unfinished novel and a brand-new cantata when she left the

Delmoor for good on July 16, 1936.

Mary MacMillan and Loueen Pattee had a been a part of a special generation of

American women, but by the late 1920s, Franzen has found, “the independent working woman was not only no longer on the cutting edge, she had become marginal…The fall from grace of these independent, educated and active women of the early twentieth century reflect[ed] changes in feminism and in social attitudes toward women generally.”167 The Depression brought push back against educated, professional women who were perceived to be taking jobs from men, and the pathologizing of women’s same sex relationships brought a self- consciousness to same sex couples that limited their social and cultural freedom. These changes also caused the silencing of the contributions of women like MacMillan and Pattee.

While it is impossible to know whether their same sex relationship is what caused the erasure of McMillan and Pattee from our memory, the Delmoor flats stands today as a document of

166 Franzen, 5. 167 Ibid., 6-7.

262 these women--their adventures, their loves, and their work to free themselves from the past and move into modern feminist lives. Reading this built document allows us to rediscover, interpret, and celebrate their many contributions and their place in a special generation of women who made the quantum leap from Victorian to modern in a single life span. Mary

MacMillan wrote about this shift after a visit to Elmwood.

I will go away from the old house, I will go away and lead my own life, I must dream my own dreams, love my own loves, Have my own adventures, Even if I am cramped in my small city flat, I must have my mind free, I will go back to the old house and love them, But I will not stay there To die of the sweet poison of their rose and syringa. I will go out into my own world, Where my own love and adventure wait for me, I will go away from the old house.168

168 Mary MacMillan, Excerpt from “Rose and Syringa,” Ohio Valley Verse, v 2 (Cincinnati, OH: Ohio Valley Poetry Society, 1925) 59-61.

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Chapter 5 Sanctuary of Change: Four Walls and the “Precious Data” They Contain We are convinced by things that show internal complexity, that show the traces of an interesting evolution. Those signs tell us that we might be rewarded if we accord it our trust…I think humans have a taste for things that not only show that they have been through a process of evolution, but which also show they are still part of one. They are not dead yet.1 

The Liberty Street (north) façade of Revelation Baptist Church at 1556 John Street clearly displays the building’s two principal physical layers—the 1865 symmetrical red brick building in the background and the 1976 asymmetrical, textured concrete block addition which wraps it in the foreground. Each of these layers tells an important story in the history of this building, the city, and the nation. (Photo by the author) Security fence ringed the lot. Overgrown grass and trees had overtaken the once manicured lawn. The day was hot and dry. A giant machine, like a mechanized T-Rex, slowly chomped and pulled away pieces of the structure until it fell in great dusty gusts,

1 Brian Eno quoted in Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happened After They’re Built (New York: Penguin Books, 1994) 11.

264 again and again until only the dust and rubble was left where a stoic 155-year-old story- teller had once stood.

Until May 27, 2020, the building known as Revelation Baptist Church contained obvious architectural layers applied one over another creating both a physical and temporal layering of this building’s history.2 Together they formed a palimpsest which helped us to read the history of the building and its neighborhood. The building had served as home to German Jewish, German Lutheran, and Black Baptist congregations and was razed to make way for a major league soccer stadium. This layered story mirrors that of countless other buildings in other low-income urban neighborhoods throughout the country. The layers provided a handhold into the past. They gave us something to work from and peel away, and they reminded us that each building or site in the urban environment holds many stories.

This chapter uses an “if these walls could talk” model to explore the full range of stories within the walls of this one building and to place those stories within the larger history of the building’s West End neighborhood and explores how one building serve a document of an entire neighborhood’s development, growth, and change. In addition to its local significance, the Revelation Baptist Church building bore clear connections to larger national movements of religious change and civil rights, and the urban crisis that plagued cities across the nation in the second half of the twentieth century. The end of the building’s use as a place of religious worship and its demolition document current

2 Nadia Aksamija, Clark Maines and Phillip Wagoner, eds., Palimpsests: Buildings Sites Time (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2017) 9. 265 waves of growth and change in American cities as new urbanism, gentrification, and the use of stadiums and cultural facilities as a tool for economic revitalization dominate the nation’s inner cities. This chapter concludes with a discussion of efforts to preserve this building in the urban landscape and the failures within American historic preservation practice they expose.

In their work on historic sites as palimpsests, Nadja Aksamija, Clark Maines, and

Philip Wagoner explain that the concept of a palimpsest, a piece of paper or papyrus scraped clean and reused, can also be applied to the study of buildings and sites. They write, “In recent years the concept has been expanded and applied to architectural monuments and sites that likewise result from an accumulation of layered materiality and changing meanings.”3 The presence of the successive layers impacts the way later users experience and understand the site. They write, “these vestiges of an earlier time continue to be visible and relevant to later periods of occupation…open[ing] up the possibility for shifting meanings and understanding of those vestiges on the part of later communities who perceived and used them.”4 To uncover and interpret these meanings, the authors advocate,

a close reading of the fabric of the monument or site (combined, of course, with, multi-pronged contextual research based on the available textual and other evidence), not merely in order to identify the significant layers of the palimpsest and the physical processes through which they were created, but just as importantly, to gauge the effects of past viewers’ ability to see each of these layers and to understand the relationships between them.5

3 Ibid., 9. 4 Ibid., 12. 5 Ibid.,13.

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Kaufman has similarly challenged his colleagues to, “Begin looking not just at extraordinary buildings, but at typical ones; not just a single structures, or small units, but at communities; not just at one moment in time, but at the layers of history that exist in aging structures and sites.”6 He argues that this approach “emphasizes inclusion” and “different—even conflicting—views of history.”7 In the case of Revelation

Baptist Church, precisely who is able to see and remember the layers and how those layers and those people are valued in an important part of the story. Because Revelation is located in an urban Black neighborhood, its story is deeply complicated by American racism, making it all the more important that we explore the site fully to “extract and begin to understand the precious data contained in and between [its] layers.”8

Cincinnati’s West End has been largely neglected by scholars. There are a few books and book chapters about the West End focusing on urban policy and the role of race and poverty in cities in the first half of the twentieth century. These are written through the lens of government and policy makers and include few connections to the lives of neighborhood residents.9 Two popular works about the neighborhood’s twentieth-century Black community

6 Kaufman, 234. 7 Kaufman, 234. 8 Aksamija et al., 19. 9 The few secondary works covering the West End are John Emmeus Davis’ Contested Ground: Collective Action and the Urban Neighborhood (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); chapters in Race and the City: Work, Community, and Protest in Cincinnati edited by Henry Louis Taylor, Jr. Race and the City: Work, Community, and Protest in Cincinnati, 1820-1970 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993). including the introduction and “City Building, Public Policy, the Rise of the Industrial City, and Black Ghetto-Slum Formation in Cincinnati, 1850-1940,” by Taylor, “Cincinnati Blacks and the Irony of Low-Income Housing Reform, 1900-1950,” by Robert Fairbanks, and “Making the Second Ghetto in Cincinnati: Avondale 1925-1970,” by Charles F. Casey-Leininger; and the introductory essay in The Planning Partnership: Participants’ Views of Urban Renewal edited by Zane L. Miller and Thomas H. Jenkins Miller, The Planning Partnership: Participants’ Views of Urban Renewal (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1982).

267 were written by community historian John W. Harshaw.10 Both are full of colorful stories and first-hand accounts. The Jews of Cincinnati by Jonathan Sarna and Nancy Klein also contains valuable information about Jewish life and heritage in the West and Cincinnati at large.11

Despite the paucity of works on the history of Cincinnati’s West End, there are myriad detailing the growing segregation of American neighborhoods after World War II, race-based housing discrimination, white flight, and the urban crisis.12 Also relevant to this study are books detailing the layering of change over time in urban neighborhoods, including Outside Lies Magic by John Stilgoe, Palimpsests: Buildings Sites Time, by Nadja Aksamija, Clark Maines, and Phillip

Wagoner, eds. discussed in the introduction, and a few works on the history and preservation of religious architecture.13 One final area of relevance is the history of sports stadiums as told in works including Paul Goldberger’s Ballpark: Baseball in the American City, Aaron Cowan’s A

Nice Place to Visit: Tourism and Urban Revitalization in the Post War Rustbelt , and Costas

Spirou and Larry Bennett’s It’s Hardly Sportin’: Stadiums, Neighborhoods, and the New

10 These are: Cincinnati’s West End (Cincinnati, OH: John Harshaw, 2009), a compilation of oral histories, and Bankers, Writers, and Runners: Playing the Numbers in Cincinnati (Cincinnati, OH: John Harshaw, 2012) about the African American “numbers game” (predecessor of the lottery) in the West End. 11 Jonathan Sarna and Nancy H. Klein. The Jews of Cincinnati. Cincinnati (OH: The Center for the Study of the American Jewish Experience, 1989). 12 A few of these are: Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic (June 2014) https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/; Michael Duneier, Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, The History of an Idea (New York: Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016); David M. P. Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Beryl Satter, Family Properties: How the Struggle Over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America (New York: Henry Hold and Company, 2009); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Keeange- Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019). 13 Works on synagogue and church architecture include: The Synagogue in America: A Short History by Marc Lee Raphael (New York: New York University Press, 2011), Synagogue Architecture in America by Henry Stolzman (Melbourne, Images Publishing, 2006), and Retired, Rehabbed, Reborn: The Adaptive Reuse of America’s Derelict Religious Buildings and Schools by Robert A. Simons, Gary DeWine, and Larry Ledebut (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2017).

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Chicago.14 These last two grapple with issues of public policy, neighborhood change, urban decline and rebuilding, and equity and displacement, all of which are relevant here.

Remnants of historic architecture are scattered throughout the nation’s urban neighborhoods. They sometimes stand out as significantly older than other buildings around them. They sometimes sit vacant in stunning disrepair. Sometimes they are connected to the current residents, but other times they are perceived as remnants of a distant and disconnected past, such as the wealthy heyday of a now low-income neighborhood or the

German heritage of a now African American community. Whatever their circumstances, their very existence in the urban landscape lets us tell stories and ask questions we would not without the building’s physical presence. Tom Mayes explains this phenomenon when he writes,

The essential feature of a landmark is not its design, but the place it holds in a city’s memory. Compared to the place it occupies in social history, a landmark’s artistic qualities are incidental… Memories can survive if places disappear. But memory—collective or individual—will not prove as durable—nor as flexible when the vortex of memory, the mnemonic aid, that urban reminder, that historical trace—the old place—is gone.15 A stunning example of the phenomenon described here by Mayes is the demolition of

Columbian School in Cincinnati’s Avondale neighborhood. Once the jewel in the crown of

Cincinnati’s public elementary school system, the massive school eventually closed and sat vacant. After twenty years of decay it was demolished and turned into a surface parking lot. A

14 Aaron Cowan, A Nice Place to Visit: Tourism and Urban Revitalization in the Postwar Rustbelt (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2016); Paul Goldberger Ballpark: Baseball in the American City (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019); Costas Spirou and Larry Bennett. It’s Hardly Sportin’: Stadiums, Neighborhoods, and the New Chicago (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003). 15 Thompson M. Mayes, Why Old Places Matter: How Historic Places Affect Your Identity and Well-Being (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) 12.

269 piece of salvaged stone was built into a commemorative plaque on the busy corner of Martin

Luther King and Harvey, across the busy street from a McDonalds and a Dunkin Donuts, for twenty years until a new highway interchange brought road widening. By then, no one seemed to care about the plaque or the school. Without any knowledge of the building that once stood there or the drastic changes the Avondale neighborhood had seen, a backhoe operator flattened the stone and brick marker in minutes, its rubble disappearig under newly pooured concrete. The salvaged piece of the building and the commemorative plaque had done little to preserve the stories the building held.

Like the destruction of Columbian School, the demolition of Revelation Baptist Church will deprive the city of the physical thing that will spark questions about the evolution of the

West End and the city of Cincinnati. Many of the questions silenced by this demolition are about race and equity and the agency African American citizens hold over their space and their neighborhoods.

This chapter documents a recently demolished building so that future researchers may use it as a resource, and then connect the history of this place to current urban change and policy-making. I ask what exploring this building’s physical layers and linking those layers to events and individuals in the past can teach us about Cincinnati and urban America. I explore how the absence of this building will alter or silence those stories.

The Building

The building at 1556 John Street was made up of two obvious physical layers. The first was the original building, built in 1865 as the Congregation of Brotherly Love Synagogue. This

270 was a traditional, red brick house of worship with distinct German influences articulated with decorative brickwork at the parapet. This original structure was partially wrapped on three sides by a 1976 addition. This asymmetrical, multi-volume structure was built of textured concrete block and wood and wrapped around the lower portion of the John Street, Liberty

Street, and Bard Alley facades. The only elevation of the building which maintained its original exterior appearance was the Bauer Avenue (formerly Melancthon Street) façade. By beginning this chapter with a detailed description of the building it is my hope that readers will look carefully at the building’s façade, as if they were actually examining the building themselves, and begin to ask questions about when, why, and how it came to look the way it does. With these questions in mind, the reader will build a more meaningful investigation of the chapter to follow.

John Street (west) façade. (Photo by the author)

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The building’s primary façade faced John Street. The original 1865 structure was a tall, narrow, red brick structure with carved sandstone details in a simplified German gothic style.

The top portion of an original arched central entrance was visible above the building’s modern addition. This entrance’s sharply pointed arch pointed directly to a large, elaborately carved, sandstone, sculptural bracket in the center of the building. This bracket would have originally been flanked by two tall, narrow gothic windows with sandstone sills and lintels, only one of which (in the southern bay) was visible at the time of demolition. This window opening held an elaborate stained glass window. Above the bracket was a carved sandstone tablet bearing the name of the original congregation and the date of construction of the building in both English and Hebrew. It read, “Congregation of Brotherly Love 5626.”

Plaque above the original entrance to 1556 John Street written in Hebrew and English. (Photo by the author) Above the plaque was a round opening that once held a small rose window, but was later filled in with wooden paneling. The building’s façade was red brick laid in common bond. The building’s corners were articulated with decorative brick piers containing a sandstone molding above the first floor and topped by a corbelled brick turret. Each of these turrets was capped

272 with an ornamental carved sandstone cap. The roofline at the building’s gabled end was articulated with two carved sandstone bands sandwiching a running band of corbelled brick arches. A crowning octagonal sandstone cupola sat in the center of the building at the peak of the roof. Each of the eight faces of this crowning feature included a carved gothic-arched opening, once open, but later filled in with black wood panels. The roof’s crest was topped with a modern, tubular steel cross, installed as part of the 1976 renovation. An early photograph of the building includes a pointed cap on top of the cupola where the cross sat. This cap was missing by the 1940s when Cincinnati artist, Caroline Williams, published a sketch of the building in the Cincinnati Enquirer.

The original John Street façade was partially wrapped and obscured by the 1976 addition. At the first floor, the building had been extended to the John Street lot line by a one- story textured concrete block and wood addition to the south and a walled entrance patio and atrium to the north. In the 1976 renovation, the building’s entrance was moved from the central bay of the John Street façade to a new side entrance at the building’s northwest (Liberty

Street) corner. The renovation’s projecting entrance vestibule included a glass-paneled wall recessed into the textured concrete block patio. This entrance was protected from weather by a wood and asphalt shingled sloping roof. The 1976 addition to this façade further included a fin- shaped panel of stone cladding projecting one masonry unit’s depth from the façade and extended two-thirds of the way up the northern portion of the front façade. This cladding covered one original gothic window opening of the John Street façade’s northern bay.

The building’s Liberty Street façade, shown in the image which opens this chapter, was originally identical to the Bauer Avenue façade described below. The original building’s

273 brickwork, sandstone bands, running band of brick arches, and brick and sandstone turrets at the roofline of the original building projected above the 1976 addition at the lower level, though the carved decorative sandstone caps to each of the projecting turrets, visible on the

Bauer Avenue façade, had been removed from this face. Additionally, the pointed arches of several of the original window openings were visible above the 1976 addition. Moving left to right, a shorter mass with a roof sloping downward from left to right sat forward of the taller two-story entrance atrium addition. On the west face of this lower one-story addition, diagonal wooden cladding covered a wall punctuated only by one round window opening. This opening held a partial remnant of a stained-glass window, possibly moved in the 1976 renovation.

Beyond this paneled wall to the west was the two-story entrance atrium addition which read as three distinct asymmetrical masses wrapping the base of the historic building.

Bard Alley (east) façade. (Photo by the author)

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The three-bay Bard Alley (eastern) façade revealed the upper portion of the original

1865 structure above the 1976 addition. The gable end of the roof with sandstone banding and running band of brick arches was visible with the projecting brick and sandstone corner piers.

The original façade featured a central round window opening (later filled in with parging), and the upper halves of the brick and sandstone gothic pointed-arched window openings in the two outer bays. At the roof line the missing carved sandstone caps on the Liberty Street façade could be easily compared to the intact caps on the Bauer Avenue façade. The lower portion of the Bard Alley façade read as three distinct asymmetrical masses ranging from one to two-and- one-half stories. Each façade was a solid wall of textured concrete block. The central portion of the addition had a poured concrete foundation. The northern (right) portion stepped back to reveal two wood, stone, and glass facades tucked into the northeast corner of the building.

Bauer Street (south) façade. (Photo by the author) The Bauer Avenue (formerly Melanchton Street) façade was the building’s only intact original façade. It was six bays wide. The base was made up of a limestone foundation of three

275 to six courses, getting taller as Bauer Avenue sloped down to John Street, topped by a course of finished sandstone. The building’s first story consisted of projecting piers alternating with rectangular window openings with sandstone sills and drip molded lintels set into chamfered brick openings. Of these six window openings, the outer four contain stained glass windows, while the central two had been filled in with black panels which reflected an interior change of use from a 1976 renovation. Above the first floor, the piers were adorned with finished sandstone moldings. About the line of these moldings, the bays were filled by tall, narrow, pointed-arched, gothic window openings all of which were filled with stained glass windows installed in 1914. These openings included sandstone sills and lintels in chamfered brick openings. Above the level of these windows was a sandstone band, running course of corbelled brick arches, and a sandstone coping. The top of each of the six projecting piers was crowned with a corbelled turret with a sandstone cap incised with a square large square. The corner piers were carved with two smaller squares side-by-side.

This building was clearly substantial, built at a monumental scale to claim its place in the city. Once looming large over the small residential buildings that surrounded it, the building was later overshadowed by industrial buildings to its northeast. Having stood in place for 155 years, it was both a product and a document of the forces that created it and had played a role in shaping the world around it today. With an understanding of the building in mind, we will explore its role as a document of the history of the West End neighborhood and the city at large.

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The West End

The West End was a physically large neighborhood—once larger than Over-the-Rhine and the downtown combined.16 Like Over-the-Rhine, the West End was a multi-use neighborhood settled before use-based zoning so that residences shared space with schools, churches, factories, shops, and other businesses. The neighborhood is bounded on the east by

Central Avenue, which separates it from the downtown, on the south by the Ohio River, on the west by the Mill Creek, and by Bank Street on the north.

This 1891 Rand McNally map shows the boundaries, size, and street grid of the West End (in blue) as it was near the turn of the century. Its size is larger than downtown (in green) and Over-the-Rhine (in red) combined. The West End’s nineteenth-century city plan shown here was greatly altered by urban renewal, slum clearance, highways, and traffic engineering projects in the second half of the twentieth century.

16 Footnote physical size. Today the neighborhood is much smaller because the lower half has been separated out and renamed “Queensgate.”

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(Map excerpt from http://sandmancincinnati.com/images/Maps/Cincinnati/1876_1900/1891_ Rand_McNally_Cinctii.jpg.pdf) From Cincinnati’s founding, the western edge of development was a street called

Western Row, later renamed Central Avenue.17 Running north/south from the river to the hills that ring the basin, Western Row sat atop an escarpment that marked a topographical boundary between the downtown and the West End. This boundary later became an important shopping street, serving both the West End and downtown. John Street is the only north/south street west of Central Avenue to run parallel to the streets in downtown. After John, the grid shifted due to the Ohio River’s curve and the path of the Mill Creek creating a trapezoidal wedge of land. A new and slightly tilted grid began north of Sixth Street, which was the last of the east/west thoroughfares in the line of the downtown grid.18 The area west of Central from

Sixth Street to the river was irregular. A bend in the Ohio River also meant that several of the downtown streets did not extend completely across the West End to its western boundary, the

Mill Creek, but rather bumped into the river first. West of Central, Second Street extended only five blocks, and not until Seventh Street did the east/west thoroughfares extend to the Mill

Creek. This description of the historic street pattern is a necessary part of any discussion of the

West End, as so few today are familiar with the West End’s original appearance, which was largely obliterated by urban renewal and highway construction in the early 1960s. Though there

17 The directional shift in the name gives you a sense of the direction of the city’s growth. Where originally Main Street was the center of town, as the West End was settled and annexed, the width of the city’s river frontage doubled making the former western age geographically (though not socially) central. 18 The primary north/south thoroughfares above Sixth and west of John Street were, from east to west: Mound, Cutter, Linn, Baymiller, Freeman, Carr, Harriet, Dalton, and McLean Streets, though there were some occasional irregularities where development, parks, or markets caused an obstruction.

278 is little memory of the once-crowded West End, exploring a series of Cincinnati maps can help us understand the neighborhood’s physical growth and change.

Daniel Drake’s 1815 map shows the earliest development in what would become the West End above Sixth Street west of Western Row (now Central Avenue). The Friends’ Meeting House is pictured west of Western Row just below Fifth Street, and a Native American earthwork is pictured at Fifth Street west of the section line at the corner of a street soon to be named Mound Street in its honor. (University of Cincinnati Archives and Rare Books Library)

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Daniel Drake’s 1815 map of Cincinnati shows about six blocks of northward development in the West End beginning at Fifth Street above the flood plain. Just four years later, an 1819 map (republished by Charles Greve in 1904) shows significant additional development with subdivided blocks all the way to the river and a new subdivided area located outside the city limits north of the line of what would become Eighth Street. The Friends’

Meeting House still stands just south of Fifth and a new church has gone up at Eighth and

Mound Streets. Foreshadowing the industrialization of the city’s western riverfront, the map also shows a sawmill and glassworks already located along the Ohio River west of downtown, and a rope walk is also shown in the West End at Seventh and Western. Fifty years of rapid growth and industrialization then drastically transformed this neighborhood.

By 1869, C.O. Titus’ Atlas of Hamilton County Ohio shows the West End’s waterfront as heavily industrialized with a gas works and numerous rail lines, both of which would have made the area extremely dirty and dangerous.19

19 A recent perusal of Hamilton County Morgue records from 1887-1930 has shown that even at that late date, railroad accidents were a common cause of death.

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This close up of the 1869 Titus Atlas shows an industrialized West End waterfront. (Titus Atlas of Hamilton County Ohio From Actual Surveys By R.H. Harrison (Philadelphia, PA: C.O. Titus, 1869)

The neighborhood was efficiently linked to downtown and the wider city by streetcars that ran west along Third and Fifth to Sixth Street into Price Hill, and out of downtown up Central, John,

Linn, Baymiller and Freeman. North of Sixth Street, the map shows residential lots interspersed with thirty churches, two synagogues, eleven schools, two female seminaries (precursors to women’s colleges), a pubic market at John and Wade Streets, a few named businesses, and

Cincinnati’s largest public park.20 Lincoln Park was located in a large block west of Freeman

Avenue between Kenner and Hopkins Streets were the entrance plaza to Union Terminal sits today. The park featured a large lake with boat rides, surrounded by bucolic paths for strolling and thick trees which, “afforded privacy for lovers.”21 In 1943 the A Guide to the Queen City and

Its Neighbors (WPA Guide to Cincinnati) described the then-demolished park as, a signifier of,

20 The eleven schools are one public high school, one public intermediate school, and six public and three catholic elementaries. 21 Cincinnati: A Guide to the Queen City and Its Neighbors (The WPA Guide to Cincinnati) (Cincinnati, OH: The Cincinnati Historical Society, 1943) 225.

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“peace and contentment to the crowded West End.”22 It’s worth noting that even as early as

1869, there were two African American churches as far north as Ninth Street, one on Mound in the block north of Ninth and one on Ninth between Central and John Streets. While the neighborhood’s Black population was most densely concentrated in the lower West End, these churches illustrate the diffused nature of the city’s African American population and the possibility that the congregations were able to afford cheaper land located further from industrialization near the river.23 In the introduction to Race and the City, historian Henry Louis

Taylor makes the point that African Americans were spatially integrated throughout the entire city before 1920. He notes that “racial residential segregation [as we know it today] did not exist.”24 It is clear from the map that development of the West End progressed both north from the river and west from downtown so that in the 1869 map, the northwestern portion of the neighborhood, then known as “Texas” due to its flat terrain, was undeveloped land in use as dairies, farms, and truck gardens. Churches and schools, signifiers of population density, also become more diffused moving to the north and west of downtown.25

In The Planning Partnership, Zane Miller offers a brief history of the lower West End which brings some details into focus beyond what is visible in historic maps. Miller highlights some distinctions between smaller parts of the larger West End. With regard to Texas, the northern portion of the neighborhood, Miller notes that industrial growth there included tanneries, soap making, and pork packing that, along with a number of cemeteries, rendered it

22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 83, 87, 108. 24 Henry Louis Taylor Jr., Race and the City: Work, Community, and Protest in Cincinnati, 1820-1970 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993) 3. 25 Miller and Jenkins, The Planning Partnership, 52.

282 less attractive to residential development early in the city’s development.26 Miller then explains that Cincinnati’s population boom from 26,515 in 1830 to 115,435 in 1850 forced extensive expansion into all parts of the basin, including Texas, but that the neighborhood retained a mixed-use character with residential uses adjacent to industrial and commercial concerns.27

Miller also mentioned an African American enclave known as Little Africa or Little Bucktown, sometimes also called the Swamp, in the Ohio River flood plain of the lower West End.28

Between these two zones were several elite enclaves. The early West End contained several subareas and was home to the entire socio-economic range of the city’s population. Miller describes the West End in the years between 1850 and 1880 as a mixed neighborhood in which wealthy and poor lived interspersed together.29 He noted that, if the district had a predominating ethnic flavor, it was “German Jewish,” the population which built the building that would become Revelation Baptist Church.30

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the West End was home to the majority of Cincinnati’s Jewish residents and their institutions. Beginning on Plum Street with

Plum Street Temple, which opened in 1866 (one year after the Congregation of Brotherly Love in 1866) West End synagogues and other Jewish institutions included Adath Israel at the northeast corner of Ninth and Cutter Streets (founded in 1848), B’nai Jacob on Clinton Street

26 Ibid., 52-53. 27 Ibid., 53. 28 Ibid. Be careful not to confuse Little Bucktown with Bucktown which was another African American enclave in the eastern portion of the city in the Deer Creek valley near Culvert Street. Also note that name Bucktown, used in many cities across the country for African American neighborhoods is a derogatory reference to African American men who were often described in slave sale literature as bucks or in other dehumanizing terms which focused on their physical features in a way strikingly similar to the sale of horses or other livestock. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 57.

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(founded in 1869), Ohav Shalom on West Court Street (founded 1882), Beth Hamedrath

Hagadol at 718 Kenyon Street and later on Wesley Avenue (founded in 1886), Ansche Chesed at

939 Central Avenue (founded in 1897), Beth Teffila on Carlisle Street between Central and John

Streets (founding date unknown), the Young Men’s Hebrew Association on John Street, just three blocks south of Brotherly Love, and the Jewish Foster Home and Hebrew Union College, both originally located on West Sixth Street between Mound and Cutter Streets.31 From humble beginnings in 1821 when Cincinnati’s six Jews banded together to create the city’s first

Jewish cemetery on Chestnut Street in the West End, Cincinnati’s Jewish community prospered throughout the nineteenth century.32 Congregations flourished, cultural, religious, and educational institutions thrived, and Jewish citizens became some of the most productive and respected members of the community.

1556 John Street

1556 John Street is situated in David Wade’s Subdivision A.33 One of Cincinnati’s earliest settlers, David Everett Wade, came to Cincinnati in 1790, just two years after white settlement.34 During the American Revolution, Wade, a Connecticut native, was captured at age

17 by the British and imprisoned on the most notorious of the British prison ships, The Jersey.35

31 Jonathan Sarna and Nancy H. Klein. The Jews of Cincinnati. (Cincinnati, OH: The Center for the Study of the American Jewish Experience, 1989) 15-17; Andrew Steinberg, Hidden Jewish Cincinnati, https://sites.google.com/site/hiddenjewishcincinnati/Home?authuser=0; Evidence that there was still some Jewish presence in the West End into the twentieth century is the presence of the Ansche Shalom synagogue on Clark Street in the 1920s and 1930s, though this was an orthodox Polish congregation made up of later immigrants. 32 Sarna, 29. 33 Records of the Hamilton County Recorder. 34 Harry R. Stevens “David Everett Wade (1763-1842) Patriot, Tanner, Deacon, Alderman,” Bulletin of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio, Volume 13, No. 3 (July 1955) 182; Coincidentally, David Everett Wade was great grandfather of Mary MacMillan from chapter four. 35 Ibid., 181-182.

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After moving to Cincinnati, Wade worked as a tanner, was elected to several municipal and county offices, and was a director of the Miami Exporting Company, the city’s largest bank. He was, with Jacob Burnet, Martin Baum, and William Lytle, one of the eleven founding members of Cincinnati’s first Presbyterian Church where he was a deacon.36 He died in 1842 owning a tract of over 100 acres, then known as Wade’s Woods, near today’s Liberty Street and Central

Avenue now in Cincinnati’s upper West End, and over 2000 acres in Butler County.37 Wade’s

Woods was subdivided when David Wade’s created a lot where an orthodox German Jewish congregation could build their spiritual home, just two blocks from the Liberty Street Bridge which tied the West End and Over-the-Rhine together, and where three religious congregations could made their mark upon a single structure.38

Congregation of Brotherly Love

The first congregation, which built the building at 1556 John Street, was a Jewish community, Achabeth Achim (alternate spelling is Ahavat Achim), or in English, the Society of

Brotherly Love. This congregation emerged out of a meeting held in late 1847 to discuss the creation of a Jewish community in the northern portion of the city (above the canal).39 In

February of 1848 eight men created the congregation and incorporated under Ohio law.40 The congregation first met in rented rooms in a frame building at the northwest corner of Pleasant

36 Ibid., 185. 37 Ibid., 188. 38 Local streets bear the names David, Everett, and Wade Streets after Wade himself while others including Melancthon (now Bauer Avenue) and Oliver Streets were named for Wade’s descendants. 39 Funfzigjahriges Stiftungsfeft: Gemeinde Ahabeth Achim (Cincinnati: Ahabeth Achim, 1898) 9-12. Pamphlet held in the collections of the American Jewish Archive. 40 These men were Leopold Goldschmidt, Samuel Weil, Charles Kahn, Henry Kahn, W. Fecheimer, Henry Winter, I. Bloch, and Moses Westenberger (or Westberger)

285 and Fifteenth Streets in Over-the-Rhine, worshiping as a traditional orthodox congregation. On

May 15, 1848, before they bought land for a permanent house of worship, the congregation purchased three acres of land on Ludlow Avenue in Clifton to create a congregational cemetery, which still exists today. As their membership increased, the community outgrew their rented rooms and soon bought land on Race Street between 15th and Liberty Streets.41 In 1849, the

Congregation of Brotherly Love built their own wooden temple building on this land where, again, the services were strictly orthodox. Over time this synagogue became overcrowded and the congregation chose to relocate to a quieter location.42 They sold their land to Trinity

Lutheran Church. This would not be their last association with the Trinity congregation. In 1865, the Congregation of Brotherly Love entered into a 100-year lease with the estate of David

Wade for land at the northeast corner of John and Melancthon Streets in the West End. The property lease included a provision to buy the property outright at any later date for $100 per foot of street frontage.43 Brotherly Love built a $47,000 brick building, which became known as

The John Street Temple, on the site in 1865, which held its first service in 1866.44 The location was ideal for this German Jewish congregation, as the lower West End, several blocks to the south, was becoming the center of Cincinnati’s Jewish life and Over-the-Rhine to the east was the clear nexus of German culture. While the Miami and Erie canal created a distinct boundary between Over-the-Rhine and the West End in many places, the Liberty Street Bridge made this

41 Funfzigjahriges Stiftungsfeft: Gemeinde Ahabeth Achim. 42 Ibid. 43 Records of the Hamilton County Recorder. 44 Funfzigjahriges Stiftungsfeft: Gemeinde Ahabeth Achim.

286 location one of the few spots with easy access between the two neighborhoods.45 The building would soon be the location of an important transformation in American Jewish history.

The building was designed to serve multiple purposes for the congregation. Congregants entered the building on the lower level, which was split into two parts, one for use a religious school and the other as a rabbinical residence. Upon entering on John Street, congregants could either go directly forward into the religious school or ascend flanking flights of stairs up into the building’s main sanctuary at the second level. From there, additional stairs led up to a balcony.

This design with a ground floor entry and flanking stairs to a second-level sanctuary can still be seen today in numerous religious buildings throughout the basin, including Philippus United

Church of Christ on McMicken Avenue near Elm Street, Prince of Peace Lutheran Church, and

Saint Paul’s Church now reused as Taft’s Alehouse, both on Race Street.

At the time of its construction, Brotherly Love was a relatively grand religious structure, and a significant accomplishment for an immigrant congregation. Though it would soon be eclipsed by far more grand temples, for a brief moment, it stood in stark contrast to the simple ornament and boxy massing of earlier synagogues. For example, Lodge Street Temple was built in 1848 by Congregation B’nai Yesharun. This boxy three-story structure had simple Gothic

Revival details, far less ornate than Brotherly Love’s temple at John Street.

45 There were only four bridges along the path of the canal between Over-the-Rhine and the West End (there were many more to the south of Over-the-Rhine where that neighborhood abutted the downtown). These were 14th, 15th, and Liberty Streets, near Brotherly Love, and the Mohawk Street Bridge, much further north.

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The Lodge Street Temple was built in 1848 by Congregation B’nai Yesharun. It was used until this congregation moved into Plum Street Temple in 1866. It is this congregation that brought Rabbi Isaac M. Wise to Cincinnati. (“Lodge Street Synagogue, 1848-166.” Greater Cincinnati Memory Project, Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. https://digital.cincinnatilibrary.org/digital/collection/p16998coll6/id/3902/) In 1860, Congregation Sherith Israel opened a simple synagogue between Walnut and Vine

Streets north of Fifth. Built in plain orange brick with a simple peaked roof, this building, now located on Ruth Lyons Way, stands as Cincinnati’s oldest remaining synagogue.46

46 Sherith Israel’s temple is currently the oldest surviving synagogue in Cincinnati, standing in the “backstage” district on Ruth Lyons Way. Sherith Israel occupied this building from 1860-1882. Sherith Israel merged with Brotherly Love in 1906. (Sarna, 89.)

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This 1860 synagogue built by Congregation Sherith Israel stands today as Cincinnati’s oldest purpose- built synagogue. Its massing and ornament are simpler than at 1556 John Street, built five years later. (Tomas417 - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25763692) At the time of the construction of the John Street Temple in 1865, the grandest synagogue in town was Congregation Bene Israel, located in the East End on Broadway between Fifth and

Sixth Streets.

The three-story temple of Bene Israel on Broadway is boxy and squat like the Lodge Street Temple,

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shown above, rather than tall and narrow, more similar to gothic church architecture, like the John Street Temple. (Collection of Cincinnati Museum Center. http://library.cincymuseum.org/aag/history/allentemple.html) This building, together with the Lodge Street Temple of B’nai Yesharun, were the two most significant models for synagogue architecture in Cincinnati. A comparison of these buildings to

Brotherly Love shows that the John Street Temple was a significant departure from the city’s previous Jewish religious structures. As the previous images illustrate, before the construction of the John Street Temple, Cincinnati’s finest synagogues were squat boxes, more similar to the residential and industrial architecture of the era, applying only modest ornament to call attention to their religious purpose. The John Street Temple moved away from this precedent with its tall slender massing, more like a Gothic cathedral. For one year John Street may have been the most grand of Cincinnati’s synagogues, but it was quickly eclipsed by the radiant grandeur of B’nai Yesharun’s Plum Street Temple (1866) which was likely under construction at the same time as Brotherly Love, and shortly thereafter by Bene Israel’s new West End Temple on West Eight Street between Mound and Richmond Streets (1869).47

47 When Bene Israel moved to the Mound Street Temple, they sold the Broadway building to what is probably Cincinnati’s most important historic African American church, Allen Temple, which took the name “temple” because of their building’s former use as a synagogue. Allen Temple remained a National Register listed building until the building was demolished to make way for Proctor and Gamble’s downtown expansion in the late 1970s, at which time Allen Temple moved to their current home in Bond Hill. Also note that when Bene Israel closed in 1906, their Mound Street Temple was purchased by Ohav Shalom and continued to function as a synagogue until the 1950s.

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Plum Street Temple (left) at Plum and West Eighth Streets opened in 1866 (one year after the John Street Temple) and the Mound Steet Temple (right) opened in 1869. These two buildings marked a new period in Cincinnati’s Jewish religious architecture. The John Street Temple was a transitional step toward these grand church-like edifices in that its massing was more similar to a Gothic church than any previous synagogue. Its ornament, though still modest, moved beyond previous synagogues. (http://www.cincinnativiews.net/images-3/Jewish%20Synagogue-n1.jpg) The grandiose buildings which followed shortly after the erection of Brotherly Love do not detract from the high quality of Brotherly Love’s brick and stone work, particularly at the roof line, which exhibits a running band of corbelled brick arches, corner turrets, central bracket, and crowning cupola. Though modest, these features clearly show the cost and care that went into the building’s construction. The building was built in a vernacular Gothic style common in religious architecture of the time. Though there are no known records of the original interior details, exterior details include an ornately carved central bracket and entrance arch, and a crowning cupula at the roof. The building’s extenuated vertical massing, well adapted to its long narrow urban lot, is clearly influenced by the towering churches and cathedrals of Germany and France, with which the congregation’s founders would have been familiar. This massing places it together with several of Cincinnati’s other prized religious

291 buildings including Salem Evangelical Lutheran Church (1867) on Sycamore Street, Concordia

Lutheran Church (1871) on Race Street and Philippus United Church of Christ (1891) on

McMicken Street, though it predates all of these. While today we can point to these churches in nearby Over-the-Rhine, the urban renewal-fueled demolition of the lower portion of

Cincinnati’s West End left this as one of the last of many examples of nineteenth-century religious architecture in the West End.

This clipping from the 1869 Titus Atlas shows the Congregation of Brotherly Love Synagogue at the corner of John and Melancthon Streets on lot 184 in David Wade’s Subdivision, just four years after its construction. Note the streetcar line passing right in front of the building down John Street and the Wade Street Market in the center of Wade and John Streets. (Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County)

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This image from the 1884 Robinson Atlas shows the building marked as a synagogue. It was centrally located one block from Wade Street Market. Note streetcar lines on John, Central and Liberty. Also note the plot immediately to the east of the temple which is labeled as property of N. Wade. (Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County)

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This image from the 1891 Sanborn Map shows 1556 John Street marked as “John Street Temple” and includes the placement of the interior stairs leading to the sanctuary. The image further illustrates that the building’s lower level was split in half with the front half being used for religious school rooms and the rear as a parsonage. It notes that the building has both a furnace and individual stoves for heat, and gas light. Also note that the name of Melanthon [sic] Street is in parenthesis showing it as a previous street name. The street had been renamed Bauer Street. Note that this is a dense residential neighborhood (the “D” on most buildings denotes a dwelling) and the pre-1896 street numbering system shows the building’s address at 506 John Street. (Cincinnati Museum Center)

After twenty-seven years, in 1892, the congregation was able to purchase the land from the descendants of David Wade for $4,300 and by 1898 they had paid off the building debt.48

During the time they were saving for their purchase, they were also undergoing a major theological change. The Reform movement was a mid-nineteenth century, “call for modernization of the traditional synagogue worship” which had, begun early in the nineteenth

48 Funfzigjahriges Stiftungsfeft: Gemeinde Ahabeth Achim.

294 century in Germany.49 The movement called for a series of changes including changing the language of services from Hebrew to German, introducing organs and choirs into the service, replacing Bar Mitzvahs for boys with confirmation for boys and girls, seating men and women together, shortening the observance of Holy Days from two days to one, moving services to

Sundays, and allowing worship with uncovered heads.50

In the building at 1556 John Street, in the years between 1871 the turn of the century, the Congregation of Brotherly Love transformed itself from an Orthodox congregation to a

Reform one. This building was one of the physical spaces in which the historic transformation from Orthodox to Reform Judaism took place. The building was originally built for men to be seated on the ground level and women to sit separately in the gallery, as would be called for in orthodox practice, but in 1871, at the urging of Cincinnati Rabbi Isaac M. Wise, Brotherly Love voted to seat men and women together in the main floor in pews which could be purchased by family.51 Though some members of the congregation left as a result of this modernization, the

49 Ann Deborah Michael, “The Origins of the Jewish Community of Cincinnati 1817-1860,” Cincinnati Historical Society Bulletin 30, no. 3-4, 159. 50 Ibid. 51 Though Isaac Wise was not Rabbi of Brotherly Love, his teachings led the transformation of the congregation from Orthodox to Reform. He was close friends with many in the congregation, including Zirndorf, Duetsch, and Steinberg, and he preached at John Street on several occasions. Isaac M. Wise was the father of the American Reform movement, a package of modern religious ideals he brought with him from German in 1846. He was the creator of Minhag America, the first prayer book to unify Reform congregations praying in their spoken language (in this case German) rather than Hebrew. In Cincinnati in 1875, Wise founded the nation’s first Reform rabbinical college, Hebrew Union College, where he also taught. He founded the Central College of American Rabbis in 1889 over which he presided until his death in 1900. Wise published numerous books and two periodicals, The American Israelite (still in publication today) and The Deborah. He also served Cincinnati in numerous secular ways including sitting on the Board of the University of Cincinnati and the Board of Examiners for the Public Schools.51 The 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia closed its entry on Wise with these words: “During his lifetime Isaac M. Wise was regarded as the most prominent Jew of his time in the United States. His genius for organization was of a very high order; and he was masterful, rich in resources, and possessed of an inflexible will. More than of any of his contemporaries, it may be said of him that he left the impress of his personality upon the development of Judaism in the United States.” (“The Rev. Dr. I.M. Wise,” Cincinnati Enquirer (September 25, 1878) 4; “Fifty Years of Religious Life: Golden Jubilee of John Street Congregation,” Cincinnati Enquirer (February 28, 1898) 5; Cyrus Adler and David Phillipson, Isidore Singer, ed., “Isaac M. Wise,” Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1906).

295 remaining congregants stayed the course of Reform, bringing in an organ, starting a children’s choir, adding a prayer book, and shortening the observance of several traditional holidays including Passover, Succoch, and Shevuoth.52 In the nineteenth century, the congregation is often listed in the Enquirer as Orthodox, but by time of its merger with Sherith Israel in 1906 the same paper refers to Brotherly Love as Reform.53

Beyond its importance in the history of Reform Judaism, the congregation was also connected to several important citizens and scholars. In its fiftieth anniversary publication

(which was published in German, but widely copied in English), the congregation listed some of the Rabbis who had been associated with the congregation.54 While many of these men lived nearby or even in other neighborhoods, the 1891 Sanborn map shows that the lower level was used as a parsonage, implying that some of these Rabbis resided in the building itself. Two of the congregation’s most important Rabbis, Heinrich (Henry) Zindorf, who served the congregation from 1889 to his death in 1893, and Gotthard Deutsch, described in the New York

Times as “one of the most remarkable minds in America,” were connected to Hebrew Union

College (HUC) where they would have also associated closely with Rabbi Wise.55 Zindorf was a well-known scholar, historian, and author who, though he taught history only briefly at HUC, was a key contributor to Isaac M. Wise’s journal The Deborah. He was also a friend of Rabbi

http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/14954-wise-isaac-mayer; Funfzigjahriges Stiftungsfeft: Gemeinde Ahabeth Achim.

52 “Fifty Years of Religious Life: Golden Jubilee for John Street Congregation,” Cincinnati Enquirer (February 21, 1898) 5. 53 “Union Has been Decided Upon: Jewish Congregations Combine and Will Erect a Handsome Temple on West Walnut Hills,” Cincinnati Enquirer (May 21, 1906) 10. 54 Funfzigjahriges Stiftungsfeft: Gemeinde Ahabeth Achim. 55 “Gotthard Deutsch, Great Scholar Dies: Dean of Hebrew Union College Could Quote Bible from Memory: Noted and Divine Writer,” New York Times (October 15, 1921) 10.

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Wise and it was Wise who gave Zirndorf’s funeral sermon in 1893.56 Gotthard Deutsch was the

Chair of History and Philosophical Hebrew at Hebrew Union College where he taught from 1891 to 1921.57

For many years the president of the congregation was Joel Steinberg. At the time of his death in 1898, the Cincinnati Enquirer called Steinberg, “one of Cincinnati’s most important

German citizens.”58 He was the president of the Turner’s Society (1885-1897), vice president of the German Day celebration, treasurer of the German-American Kindergarten Association, and a member of numerous other local organizations, many of which signal a belief in humanist and liberalizing influences in politics and urban life.59 Joel Steinberg’s funeral was conducted by

56 “Dr. Zirndorf: A Great Scholar and Rabbi,” Cincinnati Enquirer (December 18, 1893) 4; “Thronged Was the Temple at Rabbi Zirndorf’s Funeral,” Cincinnati Enquirer (December 20, 1893) 4; “Dr. Zirndorf: A Great Scholar and Rabbi,” Cincinnati Enquirer (December 18, 1893) 4; “Thronged Was the Temple at Rabbi Zirndorf’s Funeral,“ Cincinnati Enquirer (December 20, 1893) 4.). 57 “Past Presidents,” Hebrew Union College: Jewish Institute of Religion: About. http://huc.edu/about/past- presidents; Gotthard Deutsch’s papers are held by the American Jewish Archive; Charles Fredrick Goss, Cincinnati the Queen City 1788-1912 v.2 (Cincinnati, OH: S.J. Clarke Publishing Co, 1912) 37-38; “Rabbi Duetsch: The Union College’s New Professor,” Cincinnati Enquirer (December 3, 1891) 8: “Rabbi Deutsch Resigns,” Cincinnati Enquirer (December 9, 1898) 5; Other known Rabbis of this congregation are: Rev. Dr. T.S. Goldammer, Rabbi Illiowitzi, Rabbi Eppstein, William Lowenberg who served in the late 1870s and resigned in 1880, Max Rosenstein who served the congregation in 1887 and 1888 and was also a student at Miami Medical College, J. Mandel who served in the mid-1890s and left in 1897 to return to Europe, and Jacob Meilziner who served the congregation in the late 1890s and through its merger with Sherith Israel in 1906.57 (“Rabbi Mandel’s Farewell,” Cincinnati Enquirer (June 4, 1897) 5.; Charles Fredrick Goss, Cincinnati the Queen City 1788-1912 v.2 (Cincinnati, OH: S.J. Clarke Publishing Co, 1912) 37-38; “Rabbi Duetsch: The Union College’s New Professor,” Cincinnati Enquirer (December 3, 1891) 8: “Rabbi Deutsch Resigns,” Cincinnati Enquirer (December 9, 1898) 5; “Rev. William Lowenberg,” Cincinnati Enquirer (June 28, 1880) 5; “Union Has been Decided Upon: Jewish Congregations Combine and Will Erect a Handsome Temple on West Walnut Hills,” Cincinnati Enquirer (May 21, 1906) 10). 58 “Peculiar Mishap Caused Death of Mr. Joel H. Steinberg: Prominent Cincinnatian,” Cincinnati Enquirer (October 25, 1898) 7 59 “Peculiar Mishap Caused Death of Mr. Joel H. Steinberg: Prominent Cincinnatian,” 7. It makes sense that someone like Joel Steinberg would be a part of liberalizing Brotherly Love as his connection to the Turner Society belies a belief in humanist and liberalizing influences in politics and urban life. The Turners were foremost a gymnastic club founded in Cincinnati by immigrants fleeing the 1848 European revolutions. Turning originated in Germany in the early nineteenth century based on the idea of founder Friedrich Jahn. The first of scores of American Turner Societies began in Cincinnati in 1849. (Catherine M. Gulchutt. The Career of Andrew Schulze 1924-1968: Lutherans and Race in the Civil Rights Era (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2005) 18-19).

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Rabbi Isaac M. Wise and then-Rabbi Gotthard Deutsch.60 The Cincinnati Enquirer reported, “Drs.

Wise and Deutsch spoke freely of their long acquaintance with the deceased and the many pleasant hours they had enjoyed in his society.”61 Steinberg, Wise, and Deutsch were among

Cincinnati’s most prominent Jews and most prominent Germans, illustrating the religious diversity and tolerance within Cincinnati’s nineteenth-century German community, and connecting the John Street Temple to Cincinnati’s religious and cultural heritage.

Though 1556 John Street had been significantly altered since Brotherly Love’s occupation, the exterior plaque, parapet treatment, other ornament, and overall footprint remained. On the interior only the a stone-lined mikvah basin tucked behind folding chairs and maintenance supplies in the building’s cellar gave testimony to the building’s Jewish heritage.

As in the other neighborhoods of the basin, the opening of inclines in the 1870s began a wave of significant change. Those with the means to do so began to move out of the crowded and polluted basin to developing hilltop neighborhoods. As in Over-the-Rhine, the wealthier families moved out of the neighborhood to find new homes with three-fixture bathrooms, electric light, steam heat and other amenities. The neighborhood’s German Jewish residents were among those who began to move out of the West End.62

In 1904 the Congregation of Brotherly Love, with only forty members remaining in the once-active congregation, sold the John Street building to Emmaus German Lutheran Church.63

The dwindling congregation was a byproduct of the movement of established German Jews up

60 “Peculiar Mishap Caused Death of Mr. Joel H. Steinberg: Prominent Cincinnatian,” 7. 61 “Sorrowing Friends,” Cincinnati Enquirer (October 27, 1898) 5. 62 Miller, 62. 63 “Church Site Being Sought in Avondale and Walnut Hills” Cincinnati Enquirer (March 14, 1905) 5.

298 and out of the basin neighborhoods to Cincinnati’s hilltops.64 Avondale became the next home to most of the West End’s former Jewish residents.65 In his 1912 history of Cincinnati Frederick

Goss wrote, “The members of Ahabeth Achim began moving away from the West End years ago, and as was the case with Sherith Israel it became apparent that neither organization would exist by itself.”66 The members debated whether they should dissolve the congregation and distribute the money between themselves, or use it to improve the congregation’s cemetery on

Ludlow Avenue.67 In the end, the money was held and put together with funds from

Congregation Sherith Israel to build the Reading Road Temple.68

Emmaus Lutheran Church The second congregation to inhabit 1556 John Street was Emmaus German Lutheran

Church (alternate spelling Emmaeus) which purchased the building for $15,000 from the

Society of Brotherly Love on March 3, 1904.69 This congregation split off from Trinity Lutheran

Church five blocks away at 1522 Race Street, on the land they had initially purchased from the

Congregation of Brotherly Love, over a disagreement about how the church’s school on York

64 Davis, 104. 65 Charles F. Casey-Leininger “Making the Second Ghetto in Cincinnati: Avondale 1925- 1970 in Taylor, 232-257. 66 Charles Frererick Goss, Cincinnati the Queen City 1788-1912 v. 2, (Chicago: S.J. Clark Publishing Company, 1912) 37-38. 67 “Distribution of Money,” Cincinnati Enquirer (February 22, 1904) 10. 68 “Union Has been Decided Upon: Jewish Congregations Combine and Will Erect a Handsome Temple on West Walnut Hills,” Cincinnati Enquirer (May 21, 1906) 10; “Reading Road Temple,” Hidden Jewish Cincinnati, https://sites.google.com/site/hiddenjewishcincinnati/avondale/reading-road-temple; Arnold W. Brunner, “Synagogue Architecture,” The Brickbuilder v. 16, n. 3 (March 1907) 40; Today the Reading Road Temple is New Friendship Baptist Church; “Institutional Sketch,” Finding Aid to the Congregation Bene Yesherun Records American Jewish Archives; In 1906, they merged with Congregation Sherith Israel, and together they purchased the land on which to build the Reading Road Temple, designed by Cincinnati architects Tietig and Lee. The congregation’s official name became Achabeth Achim-Sherith Israel. This congregation merged again, this time with Isaac M. Wise Temple in 1931. 69 “Church Incorporated,” Cincinnati Enquirer (February 21, 1904) A8.

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Street was being administered.70 The history of Cincinnati’s Lutheran churches is riddled with splits and schisms like the one that led to the formation of Emmaus. Emmaus’ mother church,

Trinity, originated out of one such split within the congregation of Zion Evangelical Church on

Bremen (now Republic) Street in Over-the-Rhine.71 As in the Congregation of Brotherly Love, at

Zion, Trinity, and Emmaus, church services were celebrated in German as were services at nearly all Lutheran churches. When the 1910 census asked for “mother tongue” on the census form, over 125,000 Cincinnatians (about one-third of the population) listed German as their first language.72 German neighborhoods north of downtown, including part of the West End, were places where residents could work, worship, shop and attend school without ever speaking English. This census marks the end of the period of German dominance in Cincinnati’s basin neighborhoods. Anti-German hysteria accompanying World War I ended German language instruction in the Cincinnati Public Schools, saw thousands of German-language library books removed from the shelves, and pushed businesses, churches, and other institutions to conduct affairs in English. Prohibition further dismantled the area’s German character by crippling the brewing industry, one of the area’s largest employers and all its peripheral trades including coopers, bottlers, teamsters, and saloons. As the center of male

70 Today the former Trinity Church building is home to Prince of Peace Church. A third church Our Savior Church in Norwood, was formed from the same congregation. It was distinguished as the first English speaking Lutheran church in Hamilton County. (“Lutherans Dedicate,” Cincinnati Enquirer (May 11, 1914) 2.) Emmaus’ founding pastor was Reverend Paul Schulz who came to Cincinnati from Browntown, Indiana, and the church belonged to the Missouri and Ohio Synod of Lutheran Churches which set its theological standards (“Coming to Cincinnati,” Cincinnati Enquirer (February 24, 1904) 11.) 71 Trinity was formed when pastor Theodore Wichman left the congregation in 1850 over theological issues. Prior to this time, Zion had been home to both Lutheran and Reform Germans, but with Wichman’s departure, Zion established itself as Reform and the Lutherans followed Wichman to found Trinity. (“Concordia Lutheran Church,” The Sacred Spaces of Greater Cincinnati and the German Influence. Digital Exhibition, University of Cincinnati Archives and Rare Books Library. https://digital.libraries.uc.edu/exhibits/arb/sacredSpaces/concordia.php) 72 Don Heinrich Tolzmann, Cincinnati After the Great War (Bowie, MD: Clearfield Publishing) 7.

300 political and social culture in Over-the-Rhine and elsewhere, the decimation of Cincinnati’s saloons was an added push to move the basin’s old German residents up to the hillsides where they might find less crowded and more sanitary accommodations than were available in Over- the-Rhine or the West End.

This clipping from the 1904 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map shows the building’s detailed footprint and indicates that a furnace heats the building and that it is lit by gas. This map and the 1891 map shown above, show the building’s context before the widening of Liberty Street in the 1950s. (Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County) Emmaus retained close ties to its mother church, and when a disagreement erupted at

Trinity on Race Street in 1911, Emmaus’ pastor, Reverend Paul Schulz, was given temporary authority.73 On May 4, 1914, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported that the church on John Street had been rededicated for its tenth anniversary with a $5,000 renovation that included new stained glass windows, paint, a new pulpit, new stairways, and electric chandeliers.74 Though we do not know what the original Brotherly Love-era windows looked like, they were likely either plain glass or stained glass in simple patterns as were included in the much more

73 “A Church Controversy,” Cincinnati Enquirer (May 13, 1911) 3. 74 “Rededicated is Emmaus Lutheran Church on Occasion of Tenth Anniversary,” Cincinnati Enquirer (May 4, 1914) 7.

301 expensive Plum Street Temple a year later. The windows installed by Emmaus Lutheran Church featured three sections, an upper decorative portion which conformed to each opening’s pointed arch and featured a central Christian symbol such as a Bible, lily, or baptismal font, a central section featuring a standing biblical figure, and a small lower section inscribed with the names of Emmaus parishioners who sponsored each window. The windows were the most significant and lasting change to the building at 1556 John Street during the period of Emmaus’ residency there. Many of these windows installed in 1914 were still extant in the church at the time of its demolition. A photograph taken for the congregation’s twentieth anniversary in 1924 is the only known image of the building’s interior during the residency of either Brotherly Love or Emmaus. The image shows an altar at the west end of the building under the central round window. The opening, now closed in, contains a small rose window. Below the window are what appear to be wooden doors to Brotherly Love’s Torah ark facing west toward the Western

Wall, partially obscured by a large metallic altar screen mostly covering the cabinetry behind. A central hanging polygonal light fixture seems better sized to cover a bimah than an altar, but is electric making it also likely to have been added during Emmaus’ renovation in 1914. Moldings and other details are simple, though a central painted scene is barely visible surrounding the small rose window. Fluted columns flank the central bay and a raised pulpit with gothic carving is positioned to the left of the altar. This pulpit was part of the 1914 renovation carried out by

Emmaus Lutheran. Simple wooden pews, presumably the ones installed by Brotherly Love in

1871, fill the remainder of the sanctuary.

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This 1924 image is the only known photo of the building’s interior during the building’s use by Brotherly Love or Emmaus. (20th anniversary booklet in the possession of Don Heinrich Tolzmann) In 1914, the Enquirer reported that all three of the churches formed from the 1904 split at Trinity celebrated Emmaus’ tenth anniversary together and that “the hatchet has been buried for all time. ”75 Emmaus’ second pastor was P.L. Dannefeldt who served the church until, in 1927, the church reunited with its former mother church to form Concordia Lutheran Church and returned to the 1522 Race Street location. At the time of the merger, the Cincinnati

Enquirer reported that, “removals of members of both churches to the suburbs and the change in racial constituent elements in the West End make this merger desirable.”76 P.L. Dannefledt

75 “Rededicated is Emmaus Lutheran Church on Occasion of Tenth Anniversary,” Cincinnati Enquirer (May 4, 1914) 7. 76 “Two Congregations Merge,” Cincinnati Enquirer (May 6, 1927) 14.

303 preached the first sermon for the new reunited congregation before he moved on to take a call in Fort Wayne. This, his last sermon as pastor, was broadcast on WLW radio.77

The twenty-three-year existence of Emmaus German Evangelical Lutheran Church coincided with a period of significant change in Cincinnati’s German population. Formerly residing principally in Over-the-Rhine, the turn of the century brought opportunities for

German Americans to move out of the crowded basin neighborhoods and out to new suburban neighborhoods like Pleasant Ridge, Kennedy Heights, and Westwood. Cincinnati’s streetcars and interurban lines provided easy access between these more distant neighborhoods and jobs in the basin. Anti-German hysteria made German Americans less likely to speak German and pushed German language institutions, like Lutheran churches, to anglicize. At the same time,

World War I initiated an influx of Appalachian migrants and southern African Americans into northern cities like Cincinnati. Already home to an existing Black enclave, the West End became home to most of these new African American residents.78

Revelation Baptist Church

The African American community in the West End began as Little Africa or Little

Bucktown in the flood prone bottoms closest to the Ohio River.79 As African Americans began migrating to northern cities during World War I, this small enclave began to expand northward.

Little Africa expanded to include the entire lower half of the West End, roughly to Laurel

Street/Lincoln Park Drive (now Ezzard Charles Drive). The upper West End remained white

77 Ibid. 78 Obermiller, 5. 79 See previous foot note regarding Bucktown.

304 longer, but changed from an affluent neighborhood to a neighborhood of working class whites who could not afford to flee to new hilltop suburbs.80 As historian John Emmeus Davis reports,

“between 1900 and 1910, the white population of the West End grew by 22,949 people, an increase of 63 percent; the black population grew by 5,043, a 140-percent increase.”81

This change, Davis notes, “signaled a coming change in the neighborhood’s racial composition.”82 Between 1910 and 1930 as the first trickles of the Great Migration became a torrent, Cincinnati’s African American population increased by 28,179 forcing Blacks into a larger portion of the West End, which filled up with, “newcomers who were too poor to live anywhere else and with long-time residents who were too poor to leave.”83 Because racism and residential segregation limited African Americans to the West End and a few other small enclaves throughout the city, landlords had little incentive to make improvements to their buildings, most of which had been constructed in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, so that by the mid-twentieth century the West End was Cincinnati’s African American “ghetto” where crowding, poor sanitation, and divestment created some of the worst housing conditions in the nation.84 Yet at the same time, according to Miller and Davis, this period, “spawned a distinctive

80 Davis, 105. 81 Davis, 107. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid. 84 Taylor, 2-10 I use the word ghetto in quotation marks to denote my discomfort with this term. It is used to describe the West End by historians John Davis, Charles F. Casey-Leininger, and Zane Miller, so I have included it. I, however, believe that use of this label results in a disregard for the complex web of support that existing in low income neighborhoods and reduces areas so-labeled to irredeemability. As Daniel B. Schwartz wrote in his recent piece on the topic in Time Magazine, “the term powerfully conveys the intractable, prison-like nature of black segregation, the reality that residence in inner-city neighborhoods remains involuntary for most, practically if not legally.” (Daniel B. Schwartz, “How America’s Ugly History of Segregation Changed the Meaning of the Word Ghetto,” Time Magazine (September 24, 2019) https://time.com/5684505/ghetto-word- history/)

305 black bourgeoisie composed of undertakers, theater operators, porters, doctors, teachers, preachers, and social workers who possessed the time, energy and organizational talents to give black power a voice in Cincinnati”85 and who developed a, “diverse, highly developed institutional matrix of churches, clubs, associations, and neighborhood-based organizations dedicated to improving the circumstances of the area’s residents.”86 One of those churches was

Revelation Baptist Church, founded in 1921.

The Black population of the West End doubled from 19,776 in 1920 to 39,042 in 1935.87

This surge in population exacerbated existing crowding and the resultant issues with sanitation, health and other services. Beginning in the late 1930s, public housing began to address the issue of crowding with modest numbers of modern units designed to, “reward the ambitious but moderately poor black family that wished to avoid the pathology of the slum but could not because of conditions beyond its control.”88 By 1950 this strategy had changed to embrace the wholesale demolition of inner city “slums” embedded in modern urban renewal schemes.

According to urban historian Robert Fairbanks,

As a result, bulldozers razed the city’s most dilapidated slum areas, worsening the housing shortage, which led to overcrowding and slum formation in other parts of the city as the private real estate market proved totally incapable of providing good housing for needy blacks. And the new public housing policy abandoned ambitious blacks, who had once benefitted community-oriented public housing projects to the whim of a racist private housing market.89

85 Miller and Jenkins, 71; Davis, 115. 86 Davis, 108, 113. 87 Taylor, 177. 88 Robert Fairbanks, “Cincinnati Blacks and the Irony of Low-Income Housing Reform, 1900-1950” in Henry Louis Taylor, ed., Race and the City, Work, Community, and Protest in Cincinnati 1820-1970 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003) 205. 89 Ibid., 206.

306

The change in the West End’s African American population described here can be clearly traced in the history and ministry of Revelation Baptist Church.

Revelation Baptist Church was founded on George Street in the West End on November

20, 1921, by Alabama-native Reverend Wesley Thomas. Revelation moved to several rented locations throughout the West End before parishioners Horace and Melvina Sudduth purchased the building from the German Evangelical Lutheran Emmaus Congregation in October of 1927 for $27,000.90 Horace Sudduth was an important member of Cincinnati’s African American community and owner of The Manse Hotel in Walnut Hills.91 There is no mortgage on file between the Sudduths and the congregation, but they transferred the building to the church in

July of 1928.92

The move into the building at 1556 John Street created a permanent home for

Revelation Baptist Church which allowed it to expand its ministry and its membership. Over the years, the West End changed around the church. Where the West End had been home to an ethnic mix before 1920, “between 1920 and 1940 … residential segregation increased drastically and whites fled the basin.”93 Revelation Baptist Church emerged as an important hub in the Black community, attracting some of Cincinnati’s most prominent African American

90 “History of Revelation Baptist Church,” A New Day: Revelation Baptist Church Dedication (April 24, 1977) Pamphlet held by Cincinnati History Library; Hamilton County Recorder Deed Book 1464, page 573. (October 28, 1927); The two known addresses for Revelation prior to 1556 John Street are 955 West Fifth Street and 845 West Fifth Street, where the congregation worshipped immediately prior to 1556 John Street. 91 Records of the Hamilton County Recorder. 92 Records of the Hamilton County Recorder. 93 Henry Louis Taylor, “City Building, Public Policy, the Rise of the Industrial City, and Black Ghetto-Slum Formation in Cincinnati, 1850-1940” in Henry Louis Taylor, ed., Race and the City, Work, Community, and Protest in Cincinnati 1820-1970 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003) 164.

307 residents and later playing an active role in the Civil Rights movement in Cincinnati and elsewhere.

Photo of the 1933 dedication of Revelation Baptist Church. Note the large well-established congregation, the building’s original central entry, and the dense urban conditions which surround the building. (Collection of Interim Pastor Todd Ingram) A significant change in the city’s physical fabric impacted Revelation Baptist Church when, in 1956, the city began widening Liberty Street to provide faster east/west vehicular access across the city. To do this the city of Cincinnati demolished properties on the south side of Liberty Street to make room for additional vehicular lanes.94 This alteration to the urban

94 Ann Senefeld, “Liberty Why So Wide,” Digging Cincinnati History (January 30, 2014); “City Expects Outlay of Near $ 1 1/3 Million for Liberty Street,” Cincinnati Enquirer (March 14, 1956) 1.

308 fabric significantly changed the site of 1556 John Street, as the demolition of all buildings to the north exposed the church to Liberty Street. Where previously this building was recessed into a dense multi-use/residential neighborhood, the widening of Liberty made it more visible from the now-bustling thoroughfare. Though this change altered the site of 1556 Liberty Street it also left it as a significant remaining structure in a neighborhood where few historical structures of this quality and age are to be found.

This Caroline Williams sketch from 1941 provides an image of the building’s façade prior the 1976 renovations and includes the homes that stood next to the building prior the widening of Liberty Street. The plaque from Brotherly Love and the stained-glass windows from Emmaus Lutheran are both clearly visible in this view. The caption reads “an old church building is glimpsed through the trees of a small city park at John and Liberty Streets. Now the Revelation Baptist Church, the building for many years housed a German Evangelical Lutheran Congregation.” Note that the caption completely forgets Brotherly Love’s residency despite the name plaque clearly displayed on the building’s façade. (“A Spot in Cincinnati,” Cincinnati Enquirer (November 16, 1941))

309

Revelation Baptist Church’s most famous minister was its seventh, Reverend Fred

Shuttlesworth Sr., who was called to the pulpit in 1961.95 Shuttlesworth was born Freddie Lee

Robinson in Mount Meigs, Alabama, on March 18, 1922. In 1952, Shuttlesworth earned a

Bachelor’s degree at Alabama State College and became pastor of Selma’s First Baptist Church.

In 1953, he moved to Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham. In 1956, Rev. Shuttlesworth founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) seeking to overturn

Birmingham’s segregation laws. As a result of his activism with the ACMHR and the local

NAACP, Shuttlesworth was repeatedly physically attacked and, on Christmas Day 1956, his home was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan. Though Shuttlesworth was home at the time of the bombing and the house had to be demolished as a result, Shuttleworth was unharmed in the attack.96

95 Between 1921 and 1966, Revelation Baptist Church had six pastors including the founder. Wesley Thomas is listed in the 1930 census living in the tenement building at 414 Bauer Avenue (still standing) directly behind Revelation Baptist Church (it is worth noting that of the four families listed in the building, three families are white and only the Thomas family is listed as “negro”). In 1932 The Cincinnati Enquirer reported the death of the congregation’s second minister, Reverend A.C. Healy. At the time of his death the paper lists Rev, Healey’s residence at 1556 John Street. Rev. M.W. Robinson served as the church’s third pastor from 1933-1939 and Rev. P.L. Herod served from 1939-1945. In 1947 Pastor G.W. Sangster was called to the pulpit at Revelation. Sangster came to Cincinnati from Little Rock, Arkansas, where he had graduated from Arkansas Baptist College and held an honorary Doctor of Divinity from the same institution. Reverend Sangster served the congregation until September 1960 when he died after collapsing while preaching. Since Fred Shuttlesworth’s time the church has had five more pastors. They are: Lewis Griffin, who served the church from 1966-1972, James Howell, 1973-1978, under whose leadership significant changes to the church’s sanctuary were carried out, Daniel T. Smith, 1979-1992, Robert R. Collins, 1993-1999, and Pastor Daryl Woods, who became pastor in 2003 and passed away suddenly in 2018. The church is now searching for their next pastor. (“City in Brief,” Cincinnati Enquirer (October 21, 1932) 16; “History of Revelation Baptist Church,” A New Day: Revelation Baptist Church Dedication (April 24, 1977) Pamphlet held by Cincinnati History Library; “Rev. Sangster,” Cincinnati Enquirer (September 20, 1960) 23; “Revelation Baptist Church History,” email from Reverend Todd Ingram to the author April 20, 2020). 96 Andrew Manis, “Fred Lee Shuttlesworth” Encyclopedia of Alabama. http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-1093

310

Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth’s home adjacent to Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham was bombed on Christmas Day 1956. (Getty Images) In 1957, Reverend Shuttlesworth worked together with Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.,

Ralph Abernathy, and other civil rights leaders to found the Southern Christian Leadership

Conference (SCLC) which would go on to lead much of the American Civil Rights Movement.

Also, in 1957, Shuttlesworth made national news when he was severely beaten while trying to enroll his daughters in an all-white high school.97 In 1960, Shuttlesworth delivered a sermon at

Zion Baptist Church in Cincinnati. Zion’s pastor, Venchael Booth, approached Shuttlesworth about the pastorate at Revelation.98 Though Shuttlesworth had declined Reverend Booth’s offer, Booth mentioned it to the pulpit committee of Revelation where member Louise

Shropshire and others decided to pursue Shuttlesworth as pastor for their church.99 After an

97 Matt Schudel, “Fred L. Shuttlesworth, Courageous Civil Rights Leader Dies at 89” Washington Post (October 5, 2011). 98 Isaias Gamboa, We Shall Overcome: Sacred Song and the Devil’s Tongue (Beverly Hills, CA: Gamboa Music Group Publishers, 2011). 99 Gamboa, 141.

311 emotional plea from Shropshire, Shttlesworth moved to Cincinnati in 1961.100 In April and May of 1963 Shuttlesworth worked with Reverend King to orchestrate a series of desegregation protests throughout Birmingham, eventually leading to the desegregation of Birmingham’s department stores.101 In May of 1963, when Shuttlesworth was knocked over by fire hoses turned against protestors and had to be taken away in an ambulance, notorious Birmingham police chief, Eugene “Bull” Connor was quoted saying that he wished it had been a hearse.102

Shuttlesworth was arrested during the demonstrations and had his case taken up by the

Supreme Court in October of 1965.103 These demonstrations pressured President John F.

Kennedy to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ending segregation in public accommodations throughout the nation.104 Meeting with King and Shuttlesworth on the day the bill was introduced, Kennedy was quoted saying, “but for Birmingham, we would not be here today.”105

Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, along with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy, was considered to be one of the most important organizers of the early campaigns of the Civil Rights movement. He was committed to non-violence and used faith as a guide personally and for his followers.

While remaining involved in the Civil Rights movement in the south, Shuttlesworth led

Revelation Baptist Church from 1961 until 1966.106 In March of 1965, the church served as the

100 Ibid. 101 Manis. 102 “Negro Leader Returns: Shuttlesworth Has Mission,” Cincinnati Enquirer (May 18, 1963) 3. 103 “Supreme Court Faces Rights Issue: Shuttlesworth Case Now Underway,” Cincinnati Enquirer (October 13, 1965) 4. 104 Manis. 105 Ibid. 106 “History of Revelation Baptist Church,” A New Day: Revelation Baptist Church Dedication (April 24, 1977) Pamphlet held by Cincinnati History Library.

312 starting point for a large Civil Rights march. Over 5,000 marchers, including at least 1,000 white allies, gathered at Revelation to march one mile to the Hamilton County Courthouse in a

“sympathy march for Negro rights” organized by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and SCLC under

Shuttlesworth’s leadership.107

What was probably Cincinnati’s largest civil rights march to date began at Revelation Baptist Church on Saturday, March 13, 1965. Over 5,000 peaceful marchers processed from Revelation to the Hamilton County Courthouse (Cincinnati Enquirer (March 14, 1965) 1) In 1966 a schism within the congregation led to Shuttlesworth’s move to Avondale and the creation of Greater Light Baptist Church.108 Though Shuttlesworth’s association with the building at 1556 John Street is often overlooked, his time there was the most productive period

107 “5000 March Here in Civil Rights Plea – all’s Quiet,” Cincinnati Enquirer (March 14, 1965) 1. 108 “Revelation Vote Will Be Fought,” Cincinnati Enquirer (November 8, 1965) 26

313 of his civil rights work and it was the congregation at Revelation who supported him to continue his work in the south. Shuttlesworth’s departure split the congregation. They would never regain their membership in the thousands, but they would still make a significant impact on the building at 1556 John Street.109

In addition to Revelation’s connection to Shuttlesworth, the church has another important connection to the Civil Rights Movement. In 1954 Revelation parishioner and musician Louise Shropshire received a copyright for an original song entitled “If My Jesus Wills,” written in 1942.110 This song is now known to be the origin of the Civil Rights anthem, We Shall

Overcome.111 Though a copyright for We Shall Overcome was granted to folk legend Pete

Seeger and others in 1960 and 1963, this copyright application acknowledged that the song was derivative, though failed to note that it had been derived from an existing copyrighted song belonging to Ms. Shropshire.112 A 2018 story in the Cincinnati Enquirer explained that FBI transcripts have revealed that it was the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. who asked Shropshire to change the lyric of her song from “I shall overcome” to “we shall overcome” when he stayed in the Shropshires’ Mount Auburn home while in town for a banquet welcoming Reverend Fred

Shuttlesworth as Revelation’s new pastor.113

109 Pastor Todd Ingram, Personal Interview (April 23, 2020). 110 Gamboa. 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid. 113 Shropshire’s husband Robert was a bail bondsman involved in the local Civil Rights movement particularly in helping to bail out jailed activists; “Civil Rights Anthem Belongs to Cincinnati,” Cincinnati Enquirer (February 1, 2015) https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2015/02/01/shall-overcome-belongs-cincinnati/22593805/; “Cincinnati Woman Gets Her Due for Civil Rights Anthem ‘We Shall Overcome,’” Cincinnati Enquirer (February 3, 2018) https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2018/02/03/cincinnati-woman-gets-her-due-civil-rights-anthem- we-shall-overcome/1082465001/.

314

Robert and Louise Shropshire together with Revered Martin Luther King Jr. and Revelation Baptist Church’s pastor, Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth (“Cincinnati Woman Gets Her Due for Civil Rights Anthem “We Shall Overcome” Cincinnati Enquirer (February 3, 2018) https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2018/02/03/cincinnati-woman-gets-her- due-civil-rights-anthem-we-shall-overcome/1082465001/)

This photo from the 1950s shows Revelation Baptist Church as it appeared before the 1976 renovation. (Collection of Interim Pastor Todd Ingram).

315

Partially in response to the change to Liberty Street and as a means to reinvent itself after the 1966 schism, the congregation significantly reworked the church building in 1976.

Revelation Baptist Church added the atrium lobby that wraps around the building to the north and west and an administrative wing at the building’s northeast corner. At the same time the sanctuary’s interior was reoriented and dropped so that the altar is now on the lower level along the building’s south side in front of a built-in emersion baptismal bath.

316

These design drawings for Revelation’s 1977 renovation were published in the church’s rededication booklet in April of 1977. They illustrate a reorientation and modern intervention layered on top of the original building. (A New Day: Revelation Baptist Church Dedication, April 24, 1977. Cincinnati Museum Center) In altering the existing building to meet their needs and take advantage of the open space now to their north, Revelation put their own mark on the building, adding a third layer to the building’s historic fabric. In challenging the traditional preservation wisdom that an addition like this one would compromise a building’s integrity, Bluestone asks, “could it be that the changes themselves constitute part of the significance of the building?”114 In How Buildings Learn,

Stewart Brand writes that, “institutional buildings act as if they were designed specifically to

114 Bluestone, “Conservation’s Curatorial Conundrum,” 250.

317 prevent change for the organization inside and to convey timeless reliability to everyone outside.”115 The significant and dynamic change undertaken by Revelation in 1976 speaks to the vitality of the church’s congregation, which had outgrown the existing building and wanted to modernize their appearance, reputation, operations, and their worship.

Futball Club Cincinnati

The fourth phase in the life of this building and its site is unfolding as this dissertation is being written. On May 10, 2019 ownership of 1556 John Street was transferred to a holding company called West End Holdings LLC. West End Holdings is a subsidiary of the Futball Club

Cincinnati (FCC), a major league soccer team building a new stadium nearby.116 As part of that stadium construction FCC had already demolished several historic buildings, including a theater,

The State Theater, then in use a Black church, dating from the first decade of the 20th century.117 On July 3, 2019, FCC submitted an application for a demolition permit for from the city for the Revelation Baptist Church building, and thirty three days later, on August 5, 2019,

Cincinnati City Councilmember Chris Seelbach submitted an application to designate the building a local landmark based on three criteria: architectural merit, association with significant historical figures, and association with important historical events.118 The application

115 Brand, 7. 116 Records of the Hamilton County Recorder. 117 Greg Hand, “FC Cincinnati’s Construction Recalls Cincinnati’s Long-Vanished Jewish Ghetto,” Cincinnati Curiosities, https://handeaux.tumblr.com/post/180067455130/fc-cincinnati-construction-recalls- cincinnatis?fbclid=IwAR0bv7DuWZseuxsCIcRq7m7D1wF186wmALtvE3EN2-bmQUsVOy02JwDi4mY; Alyssa McClanahan “State Theatre: A Brief History“ Cincy Archive; https://www.cincyarchive.com/stories/2018/10/26/the-state-theater-a-brief-history?fbclid=IwAR04- aZphOeIB03EFkUIt89WC8Amlzvtt-ak-_zU_LJG8HVxdQj32SgTALc 118 Audio file of Historic Conservation Board Meeting, November 4, 2019. Note that this application for designation was largely ghostwritten by this author. Some of the text has been reused here.

318 was reviewed by the city’s urban conservator, Beth Johnson, who recommended against landmarking based on architectural merit, but supported the other two criteria. Cincinnati’s local landmark process consists of three steps in which designations must be approved first by the Historic Conservation Board, then by the City Planning Commission, and finally by Cincinnati

City Council. Because FCC’s demolition application was received by the city prior to the application for landmarking, it took precedence, meaning that even if the building were to be landmarked, the designation could not stop its demolition.119 Seelbach went forward with the application as a way to provide a public record of the building’s historic importance. FCC had picked up their demolition permit from the city on September 23, 2019, giving it six months from that date to demolish the building.120

Cincinnati’s Historic Conservation Board (HCB) met on November 4, 2019 to consider the proposed designation. While the Urban Conservator supported designation, no one else spoke in support. Those who spoke against designation included a lawyer from FCC, two members of Revelation Baptist Church, and two former members of the Historic Conservation

Board. During this meeting a great deal of time was spent explaining why this building was not architecturally significant due to its altered state.121 Though he began his remarks by saying that he was not going to spend much time on the building’s architectural merits because the Urban

Conservator was recommending against designation based on architectural merit, former HCB member, Jeff Bracer said, “three of four exterior walls have been covered with concrete block.

119 Nick Swartsell, “Cincinnati City Council Member Files to Save Historic West End Church Marked for Wrecking Ball” CityBeat (August 6, 2019). 120 Cincinnati Historic Conservation Board Meeting, November 4, 2019, audio recording. 121 Ibid.

319

If this building were a movie it would be called Attack of the Concrete Block,” and spent nearly ten minutes discussing the reasons why the building was not architecturally significant. Bracer characterized the building as, “really just an echo of what the building used to be at one point in time. It has completely lost whatever architectural significance it once had.”122

When discussing the other criteria for designation, Bracer made the point that “Abe

Lincoln never made a speech here” as a way to prove that its association with historical individuals and events was not significant enough to merit landmark designation.123 He went on to undermine the significance of Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth’s connection to the church and said, “this building is the least of all important buildings” connected to Shuttlesworth.124 Veiled threats of a legal challenge were made by FCC’s fifth speaker, and the HCB voted against landmark designation.125 With this recommendation, the designation went forward to the

Cincinnati Planning Commission.

On December 5, 2019, the Cincinnati Planning Commission recommended against designation of the building. As a result of lack of support in the Historic Conservation Board and the Planning Commission, Councilmember Seelbach withdrew the application for landmark designation. 126 Revelation Baptist Church held its last service in the building on March 29,

2020, and the building was demolished on May 27, 2020.127

122 Ibid. 123 Ibid. 124 Ibid. 125 Ibid. 126 Dan Monk, “FC Cincinnati wins City Hall Skirmish Over West End Church” WCPO (December 5, 2019) https://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/i-team/fc-cincinnati-wins-city-hall-skirmish-over-west-end-church. 127 Ambriehl Crutchfield, “Church Leaves the West End, Raising Questions of the Role of the Black Church,” WVXU: Public Radio Cincinnati (April 4, 2020) https://www.wvxu.org/post/church-leaves-west-end-raising-questions-role- black-church#stream/0.

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The administrative framework in place to preserve and protect built heritage within the

City of Cincinnati did not work in the case of Revelation Baptist Church, in part because of the political clout of FCC and in part because alterations to the building were viewed as a detriment rather than an asset. Bluestone advocates for a preservation framework that celebrates layered changes in the urban fabric protects and embraces them as a part of the historic landscape. He writes, “Historic preservation needs standards and guidelines that are more flexible and open to buildings and places that change through time; it is precisely by observing and understanding the dynamics of architectural and historical change that we can begin to surface historical agency in ways that help people focus on their own actions as citizens with the ability, the imperative, to help shape their own world.”128 Though two members of Revelation Baptist

Church testified to the HCB against designation of the building, this was not because they thought their building to be worthy of demolition. On the contrary, they so highly valued the building’s stained-glass windows that they had negotiated a contract with FCC that allowed them to remove the stained glass for reuse in their new building. A landmark designation of the building would have interfered with their contractual right to remove the treasured stained glass, leading them to speak out against designation. The deep pockets, planning apparatus, and legal power brought to bear by FCC, muted any voices who might have spoken out to preserve Revelation.

The reality that low-income neighborhoods can be easily steamrolled by sports teams and other institutions, including universities and hospitals, is nothing new. In their exploration

128 Bluestone, “Conservation’s Curatorial Conundrum,” 250.

321 of stadium construction in Chicago, Costas Spirou and Larry Bennet explain that the stadium boom which has overtaken American cities since the 1960s, “reveals crucial insights about the distribution of political influence in a city” and note that “although in the minds of their advocates stadium development projects always promise to sustain or even regenerate adjoining communities, local neighborhood residents routinely object to them.”129 The remaking of American cities following the urban crisis of the 1960s and 1970s has focused on bringing affluent people, both tourists and residents, into cities. Leisure activities including museums, parks, and stadia have played a significant role in the so-called rebirth of urban

America, though, as historian Aaron Cowan points out in his exploration of tourism and urban revitalization in postwar rustbelt cities, “significant power inequalities” enabled this development.130 He writes, “tourism’s often exploitative nature has little to do with tourism’s inherent characteristics, but, rather, lay in the choices of civic leaders who saw a revitalized downtown as their highest goal and wielded their powers of public subsidy, investment capital, and political influence to achieve that end. “131 In the case of 1556 John Street, national leader in Culture Resources Management, W. Kevin Pape, stated the situation clearly when he said,

“power easily overcame opposition because it is a poor Black community.”132

Demolition and Preservation

In his book on architectural adaptation and change, Stewart Brand writes, “the older a building gets, the more we have respect and affection for its evident maturity, for the

129 Spirou, 4. 130 Aaron Cowan, A Nice Place to Visit: Tourism and Urban Revitalization in the Postwar Rustbelt (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2016) 9. 131 Cowan, 159. 132 Phone interview with W.K.Pape, June 3, 2020.

322 accumulated human investment it shows, for the attractive patina it wears—muted bricks, worn stairs, colorfully stained roof, lush vines.”133 While this observation is largely true, 1556

John Street is a clear exception. Caroline Williams’ 1941 sketch of the building illustrates a nostalgic fondness, yet the subsequent widening of Liberty Street, urban crisis-fueled abandonment of American cities, and 1976 alteration of the building’s façade have seriously hindered affection for this building, based largely on visual appeal.

Racist segregation in postwar America made this church and this neighborhood places where few twenty-first century white people with power ever visited. It was unlikely that they would see the church at all. If they did venture in, they saw a drastically altered building surrounded by a fast-moving eight-lane street, parking lots, tire shops, large factories, and an underused public park. Despite the engraved plaque and nineteenth-century details still clearly evident on the building’s façade, most viewers saw only the 1976 addition “attacking” the building and thus not worthy of the “love” Stewart Brand says should come with the layers of age. This shortsightedness is similar to the way John Emmeus Davis describes outsiders’ reactions to the West End in the 1920s. He writes, “Cincinnatians who lived outside the Basin felt no such ‘vital tow of optimism’ when surveying conditions in the West End. Their assessment excluded any appreciation for the social differentiation, institutional diversity, and interpersonal networks that were developing amidst the decaying structures of this overcrowded neighborhood. They saw only the slum.”134

133 Brand, 10. 134 Davis, 113.

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The perceived lack of architectural importance of the 1976 addition largely robbed 1556

John Street of its ability to be landmarked, as those with regulatory power view the building as having lost its architectural significance, rather than having gained something. Most preservationists saw only what Pape referred to as a, “bizarro lamination” affixed to the outside of a once architecturally significant building.135 This situation is not unique to Cincinnati, but plagues the preservation profession across the nation. Kaufman wrote of New York,

preservation groups…were accustomed to judging and advocating for sites largely on their architectural merits. There was nothing in law or industry that required this—the city’s landmarks law recognized many other reasons why buildings or sites might deserve protection—but for years both the city’s official preservation agency and the leading advocacy groups had emphasized architectural values.136 In discussing a series of preservation issues in New York, Kaufman concluded, “what these sites revealed was the lack of consensus on the importance of non-architectural values like historical association, local tradition, and place affection.”137 This makes sense within the American preservation landscape in which preservationists are often pitted against big money developers, institutional interests, and even municipal planners. Because American historic preservation practice is largely rooted in “architectural significance,” 1556 John Street’s cultural significance was underappreciated. Kaufman discusses the failure of traditional preservation practice to preserve culturally significant sites writing, “many such sites are not only undistinguished as architecture but have also been poorly built, altered, and generally used hard…they pose the problem of how to protect places that matter more for their stories than

135 Pape. 136 Ned Kaufman, Place, Race, and Story: Essays on the Past and Future of Historic Preservation (New York: Routledge, 2009) 226. 137 Ibid., 227.

324 for their material or aesthetic values.”138 The belief is that architectural merits can be easily quantified and defined, providing a set standard against which a site’s significance can be objectively judged, or as Daniel Bluestone explains, “architectural design and connoisseurship came to constitute something of the gold standard for preservation practice”139 This is opposed to the associational value of a site which may be open to interpretation or shifting value judgements and thus difficult to qualify or legislate. Who is to say how important 1556 John

Street’s associations with Isaac Wise or Fred Shuttlesworth Sr. are? Wise was never the Rabbi of this congregation, though he influenced it greatly, and Shuttlesworth went on to a longer pastorate in another church, though most of his most important civil rights work happened while at Revelation. What about the role of Louise Shropshire in the history of women, or music, or the Civil Rights movement? These are subjective values, often viewed as nostalgic or sentimental. Yet, as Mayes explained, once the physical structure is removed, the memory aid that it provides us is eliminated from the urban landscape and from our physical and intellectual travels.

Preservationists generally lack strategies for the preservation and interpretation of buildings with multiple, especially newer, layers. Ned Kaufman lays out this dilemma writing,

Preservationists have long wrestled with the problem of how to restore a building that has undergone significant changes: practice has generally favored restoration of the original appearance… Yet buildings and places pick up significant associations along the way. A preservation practice that is sensitive to historical narrative [rather than architectural “integrity”] will treasure and protect those associations wherever possible.140

138 Ibid., 17. 139 Bluestone, “Conservation’s Curatorial Conundrum,” 237; This article is an excellent resource for discussion of the privileging of architectural merit over cultural factors. 140 Kaufman, 241.

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He suggests that preservationists begin to think of buildings as the shells of hermit crabs, reused again and again by new inhabitants and encourages preservationists to interpret sites dynamically to provide, “imaginative access to the rich, confusing swirl of urban life that has passed through them.”141 These shells, he writes, might bear the marks of earlier occupants and the dissonance between those clues to the building’s past and its present are the document that allows us to measure historical change.142

This can be challenging to preservationists who are trained to conserve and curate buildings as revered objects. Kaufman reminds us that, “because elements sometimes considered undesirable form an architectural viewpoint may possess great historical significance, their protection may lead to results substantively different from those produced by a purely aesthetic approach to regulation.”143 Specifically, “the challenge for preservationists is not to merely save the building, but to provide access to the sweep of its historical associations. This may mean retaining accretions or alterations even where they compromise the building’s original design integrity.”144

In their exploration of architectural palimpsests Aksamija et al. detail the stages the palimpsest’s accrual of layers and meanings, noting that they are both additive and subtractive and that these two processes can work together as “additive erasure,” where these two seemingly opposite actions, “coalesce together into a singular act.”145 Beyond the obvious steps of initial construction, removal and alteration or replacement of something original, and

141 Ibid. 142 Ibid. 143 Ibid., 273. 144 Ibid., 242. 145 Aksamija, 9.

326 removal and alteration or replacement or subsequent layers, they are careful to point out that an important step in the creation of the palimpsest is “one of recognition,” which they describe as, “a historically cogent cognitive act experienced by perceptive beholders at various points along the palimpsest’s temporal arc.”146 These places and their layers are defined as meaningful through human understanding of the value of human activity or experiences prior to the current moment, and, as with the recent interest in the history of Revelation Baptist Church, this ascribing of value is itself one of the layers accrued.147 The meanings we give to a place might come either through memory or discovery. There are those who knew nothing of

Revelation Baptist Church before the FCC stadium construction and are just now discovering its value, and there are those who may have grown up in the congregation whose memories are full of meaningful people and events. The layers are part of the richness the site’s history and its physical historic fabric.”148

Thought Revelation has been a fixture in the West End since the 1920s, as successive populations have moved through the neighborhood, layers of memory have been lost. This is, at least in part, due to racism. Where in many neighborhoods older populations remain linked to their old neighborhood’s cultural institutions through community organizations, churches, and even funeral homes, the tightening of racial segregation and isolation meant that the West

End became a place that the building’s Jewish and Lutheran populations were unlikely to revisit.149 This, coupled with the reality that the neighborhood’s African American residents

146 Ibid. 147 Ibid. 148 Kaufman, 274. 149 Joan Potter, “Funeral parlors the Last to Go,” New York Times (May 29, 1977) 193.

327 have either been displaced or are devalued within the structural hierarchy of cultural merit, means that most people in power do not believe there is much worth saving or celebrating in the West End or within the physically layered structure at 1556 John Street. Even if, and maybe especially if, the history of the West End is difficult, the demolition of 1556 John Street is an

“erasure” and, “a loss of the opportunity for…history to be acknowledged and transformed.”150

The 1976 addition to 1556 John Street has been a significant stumbling block in the recognition of this building’s cultural and architectural value. Rather than detracting from the building’s value, it might be more appropriate to view this addition as an act of agency and self- determination on the part of the church’s African American congregation. As the community evolved and the urban landscape changed around them, they found that their Civil War-era building no longer suited their modern needs. They altered the building, as each congregation before them had done, to suit their needs and reflect modern standards. In the National

Civil Rights Movement in Ohio” religious buildings and their additions are considered in light of their significance to the Civil Rights movement. The report notes, “additions that postdate the building’s period of significance are also an important consideration for the integrity of churches, because some congregations have added education wings or community centers in the last forty years.”151 Though this is not a particularly powerful statement of the value of

150 Mayes, 27. 151 United States Department of the Interior, National Parks Service. National Register of Historic Places. Multiple Listing Documentation Form: Twentieth-Century African American Civil Rights Movement in Ohio (Washington, DC: United States Department of the Interior, National Parks Service, 2019) 131. http://www.ohiohistory.org/OHC/media/OHC- Media/Documents/SHPO/IR/Civil_Rights_MPD/Civil_Rights_MPD.pdf

328 these additions, it opens the door to consideration of the 1976 addition to 1556 John Street as an important layer in the site’s African American history—a possibility which, unsurprisingly, has been overlooked by those with the power to preserve this building. Because established

American historic preservation practice has focused on quantifiable architectural significance for many years, this is the measure most Americans now use to gauge a site’s significance. Yet

Ned Kaufman and others have posed a challenge to “look past the architecturally oriented criteria of value that many of use bring with us, to recognize historical significance in its many guises.”152 Even as historic preservation practice begins to expand its range, those outside the profession remain fixated on architectural merit. Both professional preservationists and the general public fail to “consider the palimpsest both separately and simultaneously in their physical and semiotic dimensions.”153

1556 John Street was a layered document of the passage of time in Cincinnati’s West

End and in urban America. It witnessed the end of the Civil War, the transition from Orthodox to Reform Judaism, the growing pains of German Protestantism, the development of Black religious autonomy and power, urban renewal, the coming of the automobile age, the Civil

Rights Movement, and the decline and divestment of the urban crisis. It will not see the next developments in Cincinnati’s West End and it no longer stands to inspire the questions that produce these stories—"the mnemonic aid, that urban reminder, that historical trace—the old place—is gone.”154

152 Kaufman, 236. 153 Aksamija, 13. 154 Mayes.

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Beyond cultural constructs about what is valuable—pristine architectural specimens and the history of important and powerful people in the majority—the failures of professional preservation are also connected to ideas about authenticity. That is, the concept that some layers are the “real” layers while those that came later are detritus to be cleared away so that we can more clearly see the layers that matter. Aksamija et al. note that, “part of the problem in and foreground the palimpsestual nature of some the…most esteemed monuments, as doing so could potentially destabilize their perceived authenticity.”155 Sharon Zukin’s 2010 book,

Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places, explains this phenomenon more fully.

She writes, “the fertile urban territory of cultural creation is being destroyed in the conspicuous displays of wealth and power typical of private developers and public officials who build for the rich and hope benefits will trickle down to the poor…and by the tastes of new urban middle classes who are initially attracted to this identity, but ultimately destroy it.”156 The gritty authenticity of nineteenth century urban fabric is appealing to those from outside the city, but once there, the expectations and standards for safety, cleanliness, parking facilities, and other amenities different from those that would sustain a vital urban residential neighborhood work together to transform and sanitize the authentic urban space which was once so compelling.

Zukin asserts that authenticity as it is used today in the recreation of urban America is social construct based in power—“a cultural form of power over space that puts pressure on the city’s old working and lower-middle class, who can no longer afford to live or work there.”157 The

155 Aksamija, 16. 156 Sharon Zukin. Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) xi 157 Zukin, xiii.

330 layers of 1556 John Street were the authentic story of the building, the West End, and urban

America. They will now be replaced a tourist attraction surrounding by parking lots and bars designed without the least regard for the livability of the West End for her working class and low-income residents.

FCC’s West End soccer stadium is the next phase in the life of Cincinnati’s West End, but this phase is different. It eliminates and silences all the layers and storytellers that have come before it. Writing about possibly the most well-known and multi-layered urban place in

America, the narrator of Michael Gold’s 1930 autobiographical novel about Jewish life in New

York’s Lower East Side writes, “each group left its deposits, as in geology.”158 Yet in this case we will be left without the layers that generate the questions, that make places compelling, and that give us a rooted sense of connection to our past and help us make better cities for our future. Ned Kaufman is hopeful that his profession is moving toward a more thoughtful appreciation of all the layers within our urban landscapes. He writes,

many preservationists are looking back to their roots and rediscovering history— not the same old history, but one fortified by a new appreciation of the richness of our urban society and its many interlinked strands…the history of how we became the city we are…the aspirations and accomplishments—and the sufferings and disappointments, too—of each of our communities. We mean, the prologue to our future as a city.159 The three congregations which have called this building home, and now a soccer franchise, have marked it as a powerful reminder of Cincinnati’s patterns of urban change. The building was demolished on May 27, 2020. This is the prologue to our future as a city.

158 Michael Gold, Jews Without Money (New York: Public Affairs, reprint of 1930) 180. 159 Kaufman, 233.

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(Photo by Michael Stehlin, May 27, 2020)

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Conclusion: Public History and Historic Preservation as Tools for Public Engagement What is a historic place? It is a place where something happened—an event, a pattern of events, a movement, a way of life, a traditional ceremony or activity. But it is more. It is a place where something can be understood, remembered, or retold especially well because of the physical survival of a structure or landscape.1 

Our job as historians is to dig into the past, interpret what we find, build a narrative, and use it to understand and explain our present and future. This dissertation proposes that we use buildings and urban spaces to help us do that work, or to do that work in new ways, particularly to help us fill in the silences and absences and uncover new pieces of the puzzle we had not understood before.

This conclusion offers some brief methodological comments, followed by an overview of the fields of public history and historic preservation, and the tools historians might select from those tool chests. It then reviews each of the previous chapters with two goals; first to elaborate on the role of the built environment in the research process, and second, to detail the ways in which the material in each chapter has been presented to the public. The successes and challenges of each strategy for public engagement will be explored, particularly in consideration of the level of community engagement (an area where the author, like most historians, has fallen short). Ideally analysis of the public dissemination of the information in the chapters of this dissertation will provide examples of effective strategies for bridging

1 Ned Kaufman, Place, Race, and Story: Essays on the Past and Future of Historic Preservation (New York: Routledge, 2009) 233

333 between academy and community and inspire innovation and enthusiasm in the practice of history.

Notes on Method

An area not yet explored in this dissertation are the methods by which historians may undertake the work of built environment inquiry. While the method is not the primary subject of this dissertation, there are two aspects worth consideration here.

First, a strength of this dissertation is that the built environment was the initial starting point for inquiry. That is, the questions asked were formed from direct observation of the built world. This is different from using a building as a source to explore a question formed through archival sources or using it to illustrate a point already understood through other means, because it centers and privileges the built world as a source for new or potentially hidden stories. This dissertation has attempted to show that when historians begin with the built environment, we ask new questions and find new answers. These new answers allow us to interpret and understand previously hidden or lost aspects of the past. This moves us closer to understanding and telling the full story of the past.

Second, while the act of reading the built environment fully may require background knowledge, there is a great deal to be gained by simple observation and the curiosity it can spark. While Kaufman is correct when he says, “historical and cultural sites don’t necessarily release their meaning to casual spectator, meaning needs to be teased out and explained,” built environment practitioners including John Stilgoe, Allan Jacobs, and Kevin Lynch repeatedly make the point that careful observation can deeply enrich our understandings of the world

334 around us and its past.2 While simple observation may not tell us the whole story, it can engage curiosity and spark important questions. It also makes this approach to historical inquiry accessible to almost everyone. Allan Jacobs makes this point, in his guide, Looking at Cities, writing, “People who live in cities…take cues from their physical environment every day, knowingly or not, and they often base their actions on those messages. They should therefore learn to look carefully…One of my purposes is to help everyone look more keenly, more caringly at the cities where we live.”3 Or as John Stilgoe writes,

The whole concatenation of wild and artificial things, the natural ecosystem as modified by people over centuries, the built environment layered over layers. The eerie mix of sounds and smells and glimpses neither natural or crafted—all of it is free for the taking, for the taking in. Take it, take it in, take it in more every weekend, every day, and quickly it becomes the theater that intrigues, relaxes, fascinates, seduces, and above all expands any mind focused on it. Outside lies utterly ordinary space open to any casual explorer willing to find the extraordinary.4 By following this advice, I have found stone walls and the echoes of demolished privies. I have learned the stories of a once-fancy apartment building, a threatened church, and an out-of-place bridge. They were not hiding, but they were not be immediately evident either. In seeking them out and sharing them, my goal has been to encourage other historians to use the physical city to invigorate their practice and build connections to those who live in and use the city every day.

2 Kaufman. 3 Allan B. Jacobs, Looking at Cities. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) 6. 4 John R. Stilgoe, Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places. (New York: Walker and Company, 1998) 2.

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Telling the Stories

Once historians have crafted the stories of the past, their job is then to put them out into the world in some way. They can choose to keep that conversation among themselves as by sharing work through academic journals with small readerships of like-minded academics and academic conferences where only peers are welcome, or we can choose to put our new understandings out into the broader public realm. If the goal of understanding the past is, at least in part, to help society move toward a better future, then moving beyond the academy is required. Historians often struggle with this potential aspect of their work and prefer to rest within the comfortable confines of academic publications and presentations. Bluestone notes this discomfort as a key difference between historians and historic preservation. He writes, “As objective, ‘impartial,’ chroniclers of history many historians sought to narrate history, not make it. The politics and advocacy inherent in preservation often seemed to cut against the historians’ stance of detached and neutral weighing of history.”5 Many historians may fear the label of the “activist historian” who bends the stories of the past to their own purposes, and yet we have powerful role models in our midst. In the biographical postscript of the festschrift to

Cincinnati’s own Zane L. Miller, Making Sense of the City, Roger Lotchkin writes that Miller’s life had not been, “limited to verbal exhortation and intellectual constructs. He has heavily invested his own life in these things [neighborhood, city, and metropolis] as well. The list of his local activities reads like a grassroots organizer…Miller’s engagement with his community has been

5 Daniel Bluestone, “Academics in Tennis Shoes: Historic Preservation and the Academy,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 58, no. 3 (September 1999) 303.

336 the total, civic kind.”6 Today the field of public history intervenes between Bluestone’s polarities of impartiality and politics, yet even that mode of public engagement seems difficult for most historians. Despite this difficulty, I would contend that the public dissemination of accessible and relevant historical knowledge is the key to the future of the historical profession.

Sharing historical understandings with a wide audience can be daunting, but it is important work. In his explanation of an historic place Kaufman writes,

it is a place where something happened—an event, a pattern of events, a movement, a way of life, a traditional ceremony or activity. But it is more. It is a place where something can be understood, remembered, or retold especially well because of the physical survival of the structure or landscape… such living landmarks remind us that history not only happened, but is still happening here, and that the past is connected to the present.7 This speaks to the way that whole historic neighborhoods are still making their own history. In

Cincinnati, the recent gentrification of Over-the-Rhine has caused a look backward to the neighborhood’s German heritage. Yet if this is the only story about Over-the-Rhine we tell and value, we overlook other histories also embedded in this place. The later stories of Appalachian and African American residents broaden our understanding of this neighborhood, the city, and the nation, and widen the circle of histories and communities of value here. In this way, historic landmarks serve as guideposts in the journey toward our urban future. In moving from mere preservation to interpretation Kaufman writes, “We need a heritage program in the city that reduces isolation, explores our common roots, confirms us as a city of connectedness rather than segregation, makes room for constantly evolving understanding and modes of expression,

6 Robert B. Fairbanks and Patricia Mooney-Melvin, eds., Making Sense of the City: Local Government, Civic Culture, and Community Life in Urban America (Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2001) 181. 7 Kaufman, 233.

337 presents the layers of history and stories about each site, and shows us that no one and no one generation has exclusive claim on the history of any site in the city.”8 In fighting against what he calls, “the threat of neglect, of forgetfulness,” Kaufman urges his fellow preservationists to engage themselves in the work of not only saving, but of interpreting historic sites.9

The work of interpreting historic sites, as discussed in relation to Revelation Baptist

Church, awakens concerns about who controls the process. Who decides which stories are told? Who decides which buildings are preserved? In his plea for change in New York City’s traditional preservation practice, one rooted in architectural merit, Kaufman writes,

We invite preservationists to take up a wide-angle lens and begin looking not just at extraordinary buildings, but at typical ones; not just at single structures or small units, but at communities; not just at one moment in time, but at the layers of history that exist in aging structures and sites. It is an approach that emphasizes inclusion; encourages different—even conflicting– views of history; and calls for the involvement of many disciplines, communities, and institutions in the process.10 Mayes concurs, writing, “One underused way to reconnect people to place is to facilitate opportunities for people to express what places matter to them. What are places that residents value in their communities? The places chosen may not be those that would be identified from an architectural or historical perspective, but may be significant and deserve our attention.”11

Historian and preservationist Andrew Hurley similarly advocates for, “creating a process by which ordinary citizens make meaning from a place” as a way to allow, “communities to

8 Ibid., 290. 9 Ibid., 233. 10 Ibid., 234. 11 Thompson M. Mayes, Why Old Places Matter: How Historic Places Affect Your Identity and Well-Being (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) 116.

338 articulate their priorities and increase[s] the likelihood that preservation activities remain consistent with a grassroots vision of neighborhood development.”12 It is worth noting here, that diversifying the field of historic preservation to add richness to our narratives and analysis should also be a part of this goal. But how do we put these ideas into practice?

Though buildings are accessible to all, this dissertation illustrates that their stories are often unknown or hidden and encourages not only the retention of historic buildings and sites in the urban landscape, but also their interpretation and public presentation. Kaufman writes,

“because the stories associated with a historical site are often hidden from the eye, we must also take every opportunity not only to save buildings that contain important stories, but to tease out, tell, and explain those stories.”13 This is the role historians must play in the history of our city, but we cannot do it alone. Hurley focuses on low income communities when he writes,

“inner-city communities can best turn preserved landscapes into assets by subjecting them to public interpretation at the grassroots. Bereft of interpretation, recycled buildings lose their capacity to anchor people in the flow of time and to expose relationships between the past and present.”14 Kaufman acknowledges, “the key to successful interpretation…may lie in finding partners who can contribute knowledge, production skills, and access to audiences.”15

One of the significant pitfalls of the work of most historians is a lack of community engagement. All too often we position ourselves as experts bringing the stories of the past to those outside our universities, rather than community partners working together with those

12 Andrew Hurley, Beyond Preservation: Using Public History to Revitalize Inner Cities. (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2010) 31. 13 Kaufman, 234. 14 Hurley, iv. 15 Kaufman, 252.

339 outside our universities. True partnerships and community engagement are time consuming to be sure, and they require sharing authority with those who may not be trained as professional historians. This loss of control can be particularly difficult for many historians used to working at their own pace within the prescribed structures of academic history. Despite these obstacles, the advantages are significant. Chief among them: the potential to gain new understandings of the past through new sources accessed through community partners. Often opportunities for oral history interviews, access to private documents and objects, and translation of coded intercultural communication can only be accessed through the trust and collaboration built through partnership and community engagement.16 Patricia Limrick’s idea that, “recognizing the importance of race and gender to urban history will ‘escort one to the edge of one’s ignorance’”17 captures the very reason that historians fall short in addressing inequalities in the academy, the archive, and the historical record. Historians, like most humans, are often afraid to reveal their own ignorance and to engage in the humbling practice of admitting what they don’t know. The process of making meaning of the built world together with a broad range of urban stakeholders can bridge this fear, but it is not easy. After years of experience in this realm, Hayden wrote:

Public history, architectural preservation, environmental protection, and public art can take on a special evocative role in helping to define a city’s history if, and only if, they are complemented by a strong community process that establishes the context of social memory. That is not to say that there are simple guidelines for a good public process…In all of these related fields some practitioners are looking for ways to merge their knowledge and concerns with those of residents. There are bound to be conflicts between the outsiders and the insiders…For the

16 For an excellent example of one such academic/neighborhood partnership see chapters three and six in Andrew Hurley’s Beyond Preservation: Using Historic Preservation to Revitalize Inner Cities. 17 Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995) xi.

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historian, this means leaving the security of the library to listen to the community’s evaluation of its own history and the ambiguities this implies. It means working in media—from pamphlets to stone walls—that offer less control and a less predictable audience than academic journals or university presses do.18 Public history and historic preservation offer historians and architectural historians two well-worn tracks for dissemination of historical information to the public. The stories uncovered in this dissertation have been disseminated to the public in many ways, sometimes strictly academic, sometimes using the tools of public history, sometimes using the tools of historic preservation. Each strategy has advantages and challenges. In the latter half of this conclusion I will share my experience of the advantages and challenges of each approach.

 Public History Public history is the practice of communicating the stories of the past to a popular audience in the present. Public historian Thomas Cauvin reports in the introduction to his public history textbook, that the earliest definitions of public history were “history practiced outside the classroom,” or “the employment of historians and historical method outside of academia.”19 Luckily the adversarial or dichotomistic aspects of these early definitions have evolved to build a field now rooted in partnerships and engagement across the entire spectrum of history practitioners.20 The tools of public history are the means by which historians, whether professional or not, communicate to the public.

18 Hayden, The Power of Place, 76. 19 Thomas Cauvin, Public History: A Textbook of Practice (New York; Routledge, 2016) 10. 20 Michael Frisch’s now classic Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990) and more recent contributions like Bill Adair, Benjamin Filene, and Laura Koloski , eds., Letting Go” Sharing Historical Authority in a User Generated World (Philadephia, PA: Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, 2011) and Rebecca S. Wingo, Jason A. Heppler, and Paul Shadewald, eds.,

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Public historians use relevant and engaging strategies to educate a broad audience.

These include exhibits, tours, talks, guidebooks, brochures, websites and other digital applications, plaques, living history interpretations, performance, music, demonstrations, outreach projects like oral history projects or history harvests, and experiences of all sorts. The goal is to engage a wide audience in accurate understandings of the past to build connections between the past and the present.

Public history, like historic preservation, is a field that developed first outside of the academy and was largely built on the sweat and passion or untrained practitioners who saw the value in communicating important stories about the past to a broad public. As public history has moved into universities it has been monetized and “professionalized,” so that now students can pay for training and credentials in the work that has, for decades, been the purview of

“amateurs.”21 The shift into the academic realm serves universities well but may not be as useful within communities. As Cauvin reflects, “people may be interested in the past, but they do not necessarily trust professionally trained historians.”22 If the goal is to create an “inspired, informed, and thinking citizenry,” historians have to build bridges of trust between their universities and their communities. Caring for cherished historic structures in partnership with the community can help us do just that.

Beyond undergraduate and graduate programs in public history, there is little formal structure to the profession. The field’s professional organization, the National Council for Public

Digital Community Engagement: Partnering Communities with the Academy (Cincinnati, OH: University of Cincinnati Press, 2020) all push to break down the boundaries between academic and public history practitioners. 21 The first public history program was established at UC Santa Barbara in 1976. 22 Cauvin, 1.

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History (NCPH), holds yearly conferences to bring together public history practitioners to share best practices and promising new approaches. The NCPH offers guidance to public history practitioners, but beyond these there is no code of conduct to dictate the behavior of individual practitioners. The field is made up on an incredibly diverse array of organizations, communities, and individuals, all working independently on projects which vary widely in scope, method, span of time, audience, professionalism, and, sadly, accuracy. Yet, within this diversity, as

Hurley notes, “public historians and archeologists have contrived increasingly sophisticated techniques for engaging diverse urban constituencies in the act of historical interpretation.”23

Hurley proposes that historic preservation take a lesson from public history to implement similar practices within professional preservation.24 Kaufman, though limiting his understanding of the tools of public history to museums, also encourages collaboration between preservationists and public historians. He writes, “even if every historic site in the city were preserved and marked, we would still need history museums to help us think and talk about them” and,“ in fact, history museums should be leaders in promoting discourse about our city’s history and its implications for the future.”25

Historic Preservation

Historic Preservation in the United States evolved out of efforts to save the nation’s colonial history. Newport’s Touro Synagogue, Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, and George

Washington’s home at Mount Vernon were some of the nation’s first preservation projects.26

23 Hurley, 31. 24 This is the subject of Hurley’s 2010 book, Beyond Preservation: Using Public History to Revitalize Inner Cities. 25 Kaufman, 254. 26 William J. Murtach, Keeping Time: The History and Theory of Preservation in America. (Pittstown, NJ: The Main Street Press, 1988)26-29; It is worth noting that the preservation of these buildings helped to craft and promote a

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Beginning in the 1920s, efforts to save significant assemblages emerged, including the effort to restore and recreate historic Williamsburg, Virginia, and the designation of the first historic district, Charleston, South Carolina’s “Old and Historic District.”27 The unsuccessful fight to save

New York’s Pennsylvania Station in 1962 and 1963 galvanized emerging preservation forces in

New York and across the nation, prompting the passage of the National Historic Preservation

Act of 1966 and local preservation legislation in cities across the nation.28 While this legislation provided the justification for saving thousands of buildings across the nation, it was rooted in the art historical approach to buildings as works of art. As discussed in chapter five, although the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 set out four criteria for evaluation--associations with events that have made contributions to the broad patterns of our history, association with the lives of significant people, embodiment of distinctive characteristics of a type, period, method of construction, or master craftsman, or likely to yield information about prehistory or history--most historic designations relied in criteria three’s recognition of architectural distinction.29

This focus on architectural quality led to a legalistic interpretation of the merit of the built environment to promote designation and preservation of sites that could be objectively determined to be physically significant and provided little follow up once designated. Though buildings were saved, little was done to help make meaning of them. Further, in their drive to

particular narrative about colonial America for the benefit of the moment in which those narratives were being crafted. This reality calls us to also interrogate our own preservation practice to explore how we are in the process of bending the narrative to our own designs 27 Murtach, 35-37. 28 Bluestone, “Academics in Tennis Shoes,” 304. 29 National Register Bulletin: How to Apply the National Register Criteria for Evaluation (Washington, DC: US Department of the Interior, 1990) 2.

344 save historic fabric, preservationists have also mobilized the language and tools of economic development to help their cause, inadvertently creating an atmosphere in which most preservation projects are closely linked to for-profit urban development. Hurley captures this shortcoming of historic preservation. He writes, “in an earlier era, many shared the conviction that carefully interpreted landscapes could bind people in a common enterprise and even act as a constructive force for social change. The problem with [modern] preservation for profit was that landscapes were barely interpreted at all.”30 Hurley skillfully describes both the best and worst of historic preservation. He writes, “At its best, it not only invigorates local economies but strengthens communities by nurturing a deeper attachment to place, greater levels of social cohesion, and a collective agenda for local development. At its worst, however, it operates as a mechanism of capitalistic opportunism and aggravates social tensions by pricing the poor out of their own neighborhoods.”31 He goes on to note, “what was sacrificed,” in preservation’s quest to save architecturally significant structures which could be redeveloped to drive economic gain

“was preservation’s capacity to facilitate a constructive dialogue between past and present and unify people around a shared civic vision. As a result, neighborhood rehabilitation caused social disruption and conflict” through gentrification efforts aimed to bring economic elites into historic city neighborhoods which had long been home to low-income populations.32

The most significant tool that preservation can offer to the interpretation of the built environment is a regulatory framework by which to save significant properties from demolition.

As discussed in chapter five, the mere existence of a site in the historic landscape maintains its

30 Hurley, 19. 31 Ibid., iv. 32 Ibid., xii. For a more comprehensive exploration of the shortcomings of historic preservation, see pages 22-25.

345 availability as a source for inquiry and interpretation. Beyond this initial step, professional preservation offers a body of architectural knowledge that can be used to make sense of buildings in the urban landscape. Additionally, access to regulatory and governmental systems offer some vehicles for interpretation and training not readily available to public historians. For example, New York City’s extensive program of street signage within locally designated historic districts informs passersby when they are in a district and offers a brief summary of the district’s merit, and the U.S. Department of the Interior’s extensive collection of free digital preservation briefs educate the general public about how to work through preservation’s legislative frameworks, and maintain and interpret historic buildings.33

A push against the preservation approach which favored pristine architectural specimens rehabilitated to drive tourism and urban redevelopment began in the 1990s. Part of this call for change was the Municipal Arts Society of New York’s landmark assessment of preservation in that city, History Happened Here, which pushed “lovers of the city to broaden their definition of ‘preservation’; to throw themselves into the challenge of interpreting with the same zeal that they have long applied to saving. For in interpretation lies the saving of the stories, associations, memories, and lessons that make historic sites valuable to people.”34 It urged “those who love the city and care about preserving what is best and most important in its fabric to broaden their sense of mission; to recognize traces of history in all its many wonderful

(and often unexpected) guises, and to care for them with the same solicitude that they extend

33 For additional conversation about the tools of historic preservation and their overlap with public history in the arts of public art, museums, community partnerships, and historic markers, see Kaufman 248-263. 34 Kaufman, 232.

346 to the beautiful cornice or the rare fanlight.”35 This report and similar reassessments of the success of professional preservation, led to a shift toward more thoughtful interpretive strategies, expanded community partnership, and inclusion of a broader range of histories, specifically including the stories of women, LGBTQ Americans, and People of Color. This proactive approach focusing on interpretation promises to defuse the current reality that preservation is largely “fueled by a sense of impending crisis.”36 By surveying and interpreting sites of cultural merit before they are threatened, preservationists will be able to save and interpret more of the layers of history within the built environment. Yet, with each act of interpretation we leave our own mark. As Aksamija et al remind us, “each subsequent act of reinscription represents a new act of creation, making each new stage of the palimpsest a new work, a re-presentation that is linked to—but also different from—the palimsestual original.”37

The way we chose to interpret a building adds another layer and it says not only something about the site, but also a great deal about the moment in which we made our interpretive decisions. What follows is a description of the interpretive choices made and vehicles employed to share the stories of this dissertation with a public audience.

 Chapter One: The Man Who Moved The Bridge: Cincinnati’s Roebling Suspension Bridge and Its Inconvenient Site Method:

35 Ibid. 36 Hurley, 19. 37 Nadia Aksamija, Clark Maines and Phillip Wagoner, eds., Palimpsests: Buildings Sites Time (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2017) 10.

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Chapter one is an example of a question developing from direct observation. Anyone who attempts to use the Roebling Bridge can see that it is in an inconvenient place. I converted this obvious reality of urban life into a question to explore. So often we take the things we see every day for granted and fail to notice the ways that anomalies, like the bridge’s site, could tell us something about the past.

From the initial question about the bridge’s site, I explored collections of John

Roebling’s papers at both Rutgers University and Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute, government archives at the Ohio State Archive, and historic newspaper and map collections through the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County and the University of Cincinnati’s

Archives and Rare Books Library.

Public History Applications:

Chapter one is nearly identical to an article with the same title published in the Fall 2017 issue of Ohio Valley History (OVH) to celebrate the end of the bridge’s 150th anniversary year.

OVH is a peer-reviewed regional history journal with a readership of about 3,000, also available digitally through Project Muse.38 The journal is scholarly, but not exclusively so, and reaches an educated popular audience interested in the history of the Ohio River Valley.

The advantages of dissemination through a peer-reviewed journal are peer readers to vet and strengthen the work, the help of an editor to improve the prose, and a professional stamp of approval. Another advantage of peer reviewed journals is that they are preserved in

38 “Ohio Valley History,” The Filson Historical Society, https://filsonhistorical.org/publications/ohio-valley-history- journal/.

348 libraries and in search engines making the work available, in theory, forever. One challenge is that most ordinary folks do not read peer reviewed journals, so they reach a narrow audience.

Another challenge is that there is little opportunity for conversation or dialogue about the work. Many historians understand their role to be furthering understanding of the past among the scholarly community. Any conversation or feedback on a scholar’s work would be conducted in the pages of scholarly journals in the form of reviews or new articles which either add to or refute the earlier piece. This is a slow way to move historical understanding forward and it speaks almost entirely to a scholarly audience.

In the case of chapter one, the feedback from publication was exactly one piece of snail mail from a scholar interested in the origins of my middle name, and an email from Northern

Kentucky University public historian Paul Tenkotte. Over lunch, Tenkotte pushed me to consider that I had missed an important piece of Samuel Wiggins’ motivation for maintaining the ferry.

He felt strongly that Wiggins was using the ferry to move slaves across the river from slave state to free, and that Wiggins feared the bridge would make this work harder. This idea of one historian’s work inspiring another historian to connect it to their work and together weave a richer tapestry of historical understanding is the point of work for an academic audience. While the idea that Samuel Wiggins was helping slaves escape is interesting, and may be supported by some anecdotal evidence like Wiggins’ tight connection to abolitionist lawyer Salmon Chase and the anti-slavery leaning of many in his religious congregation including Nicholas Longworth, the mere suggestion of this idea without significant evidence makes it difficult to pursue. There is one mention of Wiggins in William Wells Brown’s autobiography from the time Wiggins ran the ferry at Saint Louis. Brown, then a slave, had escaped but been apprehended and was

349 returning to Missouri in chains when Wiggins approached him and inquired about his situation.

Brown wrote of Wiggins briefly,

The next morning, a blacksmith came in, and put a pair of handcuffs on me, and we started on out journey back to the land of whips, chains, and Bibles. Mother was not tied, but was closely watched at night. We were carried back in a wagon, and after four days travel, we came in sight of St. Louis. I cannot describe my feelings upon approaching the city. As we were crossing the ferry, Mr. Wiggins, the owner of the ferry, came up to me and inquired what I had been doing that I was in chains. He had not heard that I had run away. In a few minutes we were on the Missouri side, and were taken directly to jail.39 This passage only tells the reader that Wiggins had a conversation with Brown which appears to have been somewhat sympathetic to his plight. It does not give any evidence that Wiggins would have been using his ferry to help slaves escape, though it is interesting that both of his ferries ran between slave states and free states. I would love another scholar to pick up on the possibility of Samuel Wiggins’ anti-slavery work, but at least right now, I am not that scholar.

The invisible piece if Cincinnati’s history that I uncovered in chapter one was what a dominant force the ferry was in pre-bridge Cincinnati. This understanding has the potential to change the way we think about the city and tell the stories of the past, but because this forgotten piece of Cincinnati’s past was published in a scholarly journal, it might not have had the largest possible reach. The audience is interested and thoughtful, but narrow.

Chapter Two: “Her Child was Born and Dropped into the Vault”: Urban Privies and Women’s Reproductive Choice in Nineteenth-Century Cincinnati

39 William Wells Brown, Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave (Boston: Anti-Slavery Society, 1847) 73.

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Method

The impetus for this chapter came from my work with historic tenement buildings and my understanding of their original infrastructure, which included privies in the rear. Several remnants in Over-the-Rhine today, both ghosts of old privies and the one surviving porch toilet, led me to an exploration of Cincinnati’s sanitation history. It was in the process of this work that

I noticed the pattern of newspaper articles containing information about babies in privies.

While it was the built environment, and actually an absence in the built environment, that began this inquiry into privies, it was archival research that led me to my question regarding the pattern in the newspaper of stories about privies and dead babies. Yet, my questions about who these women were and why they were using privies as a site for managing unwanted pregnancies, then led me right back to the built environment. Because cities were dense and crowded, these women had little privacy. Because the privy was a zone where they would be left alone and where they could conceal evidence of their actions, it became the most viable location for women’s reproductive actions.

Clearly just the thought of squatting in a dirty, smelly privy to deliver a child is inconceivable to us today, so we immediately get a sense for the wide gulf between our lived experience and the lives of pregnant nineteenth century tenement dwellers. Add to that gulf the significant improvements for the lives of infants and unwed mothers, in terms of health and mortality, social acceptability, opportunities for employment, social service programs, and child care between end of the Civil War and today, and we come to understand how completely desperate women must have been. Women who used privies as a site of reproductive action, especially infanticide, did so because it was the most viable option available to them. There is

351 no way to study the emotional scars their choices left on these women, but they must have been deep.

A personal experience with privies also informed my work on this chapter. In the rear yard of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City there is a bank of rebuilt privies. The museum’s Irish history tour starts in the courtyard where visitors are encouraged to explore these privies. They were built about ten years ago to recreate the ones which stood in the yard before indoor toilets were installed in the building’s stair halls. There were about twenty people on my tour, yet I was the only one to open the door to one of the privies and step inside. A privy is what we might today call an outhouse. It is a small wooden structure usually four feet square. I knew the general proportions of a privy and I knew that there would be a wooden platform with a seat above an open vault. What I didn’t know was that the floor in front of that wooden platform was narrow and failed to provide enough room to even take one step. It certainly wouldn’t have been enough space to sit down—especially for a woman in thickly layered nineteenth century garments. As I closed the door, I knew it would be dark and that the little crescent carved out of the top of the door wouldn’t let in much light. What I didn’t know was that I wouldn’t be able to see at all without several seconds for my eyes to adjust. Even then, there would be no chance of seeing where I was sitting or what lay below the seat without the help of a light even though it was the middle of the day and the rear yard was wide open to the sky since the buildings behind it had been torn down long ago for a street widening intended to solve the crowding in New York’s tenement blocks. This was a brand new privy. It had never been used. It didn’t smell of excrement or urine and its seat and floor were unblemished.

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As I stood in the dark, claustrophobic wooden box unable to turn around without fear of tripping in my fitted blue jeans as a person with a relatively small frame, questions about the past took over the tickertape of my thoughts: How did people ever do their business in here without coming out covered? How could anyone possibly take good aim? Did you sit on the seat or squat? Wasn’t the seat covered with other people’s messes? So did you have to bring a candle or a lantern with you every time you went to the privy, even in the daytime? Where did you hang it? Was it hard to “hold it” while you hung up the lantern and hitched up your skirts?

Did women’s underwear have holes in them to avoid having to pull anything down? Did women even wear underwear? How did really big men even fit in here? How did little boys even reach the hole? Is there any chance they hit their target even some of the time? How bad must it have smelled? How long must people have held it before they braved this place? How horribly cold must it have been in the winter?

The power of being in this place was that it gave me all new questions. It sent me in new directions. It connected my lived experience to someone else’s. It let me imagine myself outside of my own time.

Public History Implications

Chapter two is the piece of this dissertation that has had the least public attention. It is a tricky topic. This chapter began as a graduate research seminar paper on privies in Cincinnati.

In the process of writing that paper, I discovered a pattern of newspaper articles about privies. I gave a more general talk about the history of privies as a conference talk at the University of

Cincinnati’s student conference, the Queen City Colloquium, in April of 2016, and I gave a public

353 talk on the privies of Over-the-Rhine as part of the Over-the-Rhine Museum’s “Three Acts in

Over-the-Rhine” quarterly lecture series in the summer of the same year. The Over-the-Rhine

Museum also includes a great deal about the history of privies, largely informed by this general privy research, in their two tenement life walking tours. The only public dissemination of the material specific to women’s reproductive choices in privies were two very short talks. I used

Agnes Baker’s story as the center of a three-minute “lightning round” talk at the 2020 American

Historical Association conference, but I was not particularly pleased with the result. I had one great question from the audience asking what I learned from the built environment that I would not have learned through other sources, which helped to clarify the intention of the entire dissertation. I also used this chapter as the center of my “Three Minute Thesis” competition talk for the University of Cincinnati, but the format wasn’t conducive to feedback or exploration. In fact, the competitive nature of the talk and the time crunch within which the talk had to be delivered made it a wholly ineffective way to share the learning of the chapter. The video of this presentation is available online, but it is not useful in educating the public about the stories of women who used the privy as a locus for reproductive choices. I also had intended to use this chapter as the center of my Taft Dissertation Fellowship talk in March 2020, but it was cancelled due to Covid-19 pandemic.

Rather than these more structured and formal presentation types, which include a professional barrier between presenter and audience, a promising avenue for the dissemination of the story of women and infanticide is urban history walking tours. On the

Over-the-Rhine tours I lead, I talk a lot about privies. People are fascinated by the striking differences between the way we deal with bodily functions and the way city dwellers just one

354 or two generations ago managed the same issues. We look at a photo of the last privy we know of, which was on Pleasant Street, and we look at the three-story porch toilet on Findlay Street.

Yet, in none of the tours do we talk about privies as a site for reproductive choice. I assume that it would be a sensitive subject for some participants and worry that its inclusion might alienate participants. Yet it is important to tell hard histories and expose people to the realities of the past. I think what I want to try to do is work the harsh truth of women’s reproductive reality into the women’s history tour currently under development. I assume that audience would be more open to hearing about this topic and would quickly connect to the modern-day implications. Walking tours are a great way to have a sustained interaction with the public. The group is together for a set period of time and participants feel empowered to ask questions as the tour goes on. There is the opportunity to judge the interest level of the group and introduce more controversial topics , like this one, if the group seems engaged at a level that would allow them to consider and discuss a challenging topic. The downside of a walking tour is that it is a lot of time and effort to reach a small group of people, though the high level of feedback and engagement generally makes it worth it.

It feels paradoxical to me that the more important and current the topic, like this one, is, the more politically and socially charged it is and therefore, the more difficult it is to discuss in a public history setting. This disconnect gets at the idea that history happened in the past and people don’t want to think about the implications for the present. Why is it that many people are comfortable learning about the past as if it is over, but not applying it as part of a long continuous human story still in progress?

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Figuring out how to share the stories I learned in chapter two is also still a work in progress. I’m hoping to publish it in a scholarly form eventually, but also I think it would be fun to tell the story as a Choose Your Own Adventure book or a video game based on the same idea, which is that almost every choice you make leads you to some horrible end and few walk away unscathed – which seems like exactly the situation for a young, poor, single, pregnant woman in nineteenth-century Cincinnati.

Chapter Three: Schools for the City: Cincinnati’s Elementary School Architecture 1829-1945 Method:

My question in chapter three evolved from my literally life-long exploration of public school buildings, walls, and other remnants in Cincinnati’s built environment. The work of this chapter was locating these clues scattered throughout the city and piecing them together to form a cohesive pattern. Once I identified the idea that the pattern of these schools and school sites must teach us something about growth and change in Cincinnati, I consulted archives, maps, photographic collections, and the annual reports of the public schools to piece together the story of the architectural development of the district. A big part of my process in figuring out the story embedded in the walls of those school buildings was generating the maps of school locations by date of construction. The maps so clearly show the pattern of urban growth just in their current simple form. I would love to make them more complicated to include the dates that schools went out of service and find a wat to animate it so that you could see when schools pop up in the city and when they go out of use. It would be even more amazing if I could then overlay the dates of annexation of each area onto the map.

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I am still adding to my knowledge of public school architecture, and just this week discovered a short-lived school that came into the system with the annexation of Riverside. I had never heard of this school, but sure enough the building is still standing. I called the owner of the business in the building and I have an appointment to tour the building this week. The familiar, physical, sensory nature of historic schools makes them a particularly effective way of connecting people to the past through their own childhood memories, and while memory is a notoriously flawed driver for academic history, it is a particularly effective one for public engagement.

Public History Applications:

The bulk of chapter three is the text of a panel exhibition I curated entitled Schools for the City: Cincinnati’s Public Elementary School Architecture, 1829 to World War II. I funded the exhibition in partnership with The Art League, a local non-profit dedicated to preserving and celebrating the art in and on Cincinnati’s public schools. Using their 501(c)3 status, I applied for, and won, a grant from Ohio Humanities to support the exhibit. The exhibit was eleven panels of text and many other images and objects. It was on view at two locations, each for about two months. It started at the Clifton Cultural Arts Center, which was then housed in my former elementary school, Clifton Elementary, and then moved to the Irish Heritage Center, which is housed in the McKinley School in Cincinnati’s East End. The first location was in a public space open pretty much all the time, so hundreds of people saw it there. The second location was a gallery that required monitoring, so very few people saw it in that context. At each location there was an opening party. I hosted a panel discussion of people who had worked in schools and gave a lecture about H.E. Siter while it was on view in the second location, which brought in

357 several folks to see the show. I also hosted a walking tour of school sites in the basin, and two bus tours of local school buildings. A local bicycle group, the urban basin bicycle club, picked up the theme and led a bike tour of the sites of historic schools. Over five hundred people came out to either see the show or participate in one of its associated events.

As a result of the show, I was asked to give the annual meeting talk for The Art League in

2018 on H.E. Siter and E.H. Dornette and was thrilled when one of Dornette’s descendants came to the talk. I I gave a talk specifically about Webster School at a conference in Dortmund

Germany in November 2019 and again at the Miles Greenwood Society’s annual meeting in

February 2020. I was also slated to give that same talk about Webster School at The Art

League’s Annual Meeting in April of 2020, but Covid-19 interrupted that plan. The Webster

School story brings up the same issues of memory and selective story-telling, as Revelation

Baptist Church does. In both cases the histories of African Americans are deemed less important and secondary to the dominant narrative.

Similarly, because both sites are now demolished, there is the issue of the loss of the memory aid to help us generate the stories. An example of this happened with Columbian

School. When Columbian was demolished in the early 1990s to make way for a parking lot for

Jewish Hospital, the hospital agreed to put up a plaque at the corner of MLK and Harvey to commemorate the school.40 The plaque had two parts, both built into a brick wall. The original carved stone from above the door to the school (pictured in the introduction) was gui together with an informational panel with text historic photographs. Within a few years Jewish Hospital

40 “Schools: Saving Some Class Acts,” Cincinnati Enquirer (January 5, 1999) C7.

358 relocated to Kenwood and the parking lot was sold.41 In 2015 MLK was widened to accommodate traffic for the new entrance ramp to I71 and, as I learned in conversation with the construction crew, as a part of that process the commemorative plaque to Columbian

School, including the last remaining physical remnant of the building, was bulldozed. No one in charge remembered or cared about Columbian School. Precisely because of the population shifts discussed in chapter three, often those who would find meaning in the site have moved on.

The material in this chapter has had the broadest public reach of any. I have found that because it covers basically every neighborhood in the city, most people can find some compelling piece of the story to draw them in. Whether they grew up here or they have passed an old school or always wondered what that random wall was, the response to this show was positive from those who attended the show or related events. The biggest problem with the exhibit was getting people to come out to see it. It was difficult to communicate why people should be interested if they were not already. I think one of the key challenges for public historians is that after all the research and product creation, they still need to make sure people see their work. Just like publication in an academic journal, public history installations run the risk of limited appeal and accessibility.

A key piece of the puzzle of getting work in front of people is choosing the vehicle of dissemination. In this case, I chose a fairly wordy panel exhibition, which ideal for sharing lots of images and physical objects and text, is not a particularly portable format. People had to come

41 Tim Bonfield, “Jewish to Close in Avondale,” Cincinnati Enquirer, August 19, 1997. 1.

359 out to the show, and in the second venue had to come during open gallery hours, if they wanted to explore the history of public school architecture in Cincinnati. I know I would make the time to do that, but I am in a small and special club of urban public school architecture aficionados. In retrospect I could have also created a website or longer-lived application of the information. Yet, a website brings up its own issues. First someone needs to design it, then pay to buy the domain name and host it, then there are issues with image permissions. Archives generally seem more willing to grant use of their images for one-time installations, over a web application where the image will be indefinitely digitally available to the public. Bringing people to see your work also requires marketing and promotion, which are not always skills at the top of an historian’s skill set. Promotion also requires community connections, as news outlets and community information outlets are more likely to promote your work if you have an established relationship. Most universities do not train historians to do this work.

The talks and tours associated with the Schools for the City exhibition were definitely the most successful component. They brought people out to see the show and they shared information directly. The two tours which included access to the interiors of historic school buildings were particularly effective because they gave participants a physical experience with the building and an understanding of the spatial dimensions of public school architecture.

While there is no way to measure its effectiveness, the exhibit did have a stealth activism component designed to help preserve Cincinnati’s historic school buildings for the future. The final two panels of the show focused on the remnants of lost schools in the urban landscape and schools that were currently vacant or abandoned. The idea was that people would want to save the buildings still standing from the fate of the last schools. Probably the

360 most at-risk school in the whole show was Benjamin Harrison School in Sedamsville which was close to collapse. Though the show had nothing to do with this per se, one particularly thrilling moment of the exhibit was when I gave the talk on H.E. Siter and the brand new owner of

Benjamin Harrison school who came to learn more about Siter and the history of his building.

These kinds of human interactions are the things that makes the public engagement aspect of public history rewarding for the historian, but they are not necessarily an accurate measure of the work’s effectiveness. A viewer might take information gathered from the exhibition and use it in some unexpected way that the historian would have no way to trace.

Finally, a more measurable form of public engagement was the Schools for the City facebook page. For the six-month period that the exhibit was open, I actively updated the page with photos of historic schools, experiences visiting school buildings, and questions about users’ memories of Cincinnati public schools. The benefits of this type of engagement are that it has the potential to reach a broad audience and that people can access it anywhere or any time.

Three hundred sixty-five people follow the page. The challenge is really finding the time to keep up the level of engagement to keep people involved. I was clear that I would only maintain the page during the exhibition, but I could easily have kept it going as a longer-lived piece of the story if I had committed the time and energy to do that. The page is still up, but I do not maintain it. Occasionally someone will post there or like an old post.

The take-aways from Schools for the City are that public engagement takes work. As an independent public historian and graduate student it was very hard for me to maintain do all the work to host the exhibit, organize the tours, give the talks, promote the project and keep up the facebook page. What I think I learned is that projects like this probably work better when

361 embedded in an institution like a museum, university, or historical society which has an established base of support and some of the infrastructure needed to support a public history project. If universities want their students to practice these skills, they will have to set up structures for funding and training to support student work.

Chapter Four: Apartments of Liberation: Suburban Multi-Family Dwellings in Early Twentieth Century Cincinnati Method:

The starting point for chapter four was a family letter, rather than direct observation of the built environment, yet the spark that really brought the project to life was the fact that the Delmoor was a building I had walked by hundreds of times in my life, having grown up nearby. When I realized that this totally accessible and familiar building had a story to tell about Cincinnati’s lesbian history, I was off on the search.

I used a wide range of sources and archives to piece together biographies of MacMillan and Pattee. Since neither they nor their siblings had any children, their story had been almost completely forgotten. I wonder if Mary MacMillan’s published work might have been intentionally ignored because of her known same-sex romantic interests. On the other hand, her work is fairly dated and somewhat mediocre, so it may just be that it fell out of favor as times changed. For me, the most important part of their story was discovering the spaces Mary

MacMillan had lived in before the Delmoor and seeing what a shift it would have been for her.

These physical differences between the Victorian homes she shared with her parents, and the apartment at the Delmoor she shared with Pattee is what convinced me that their decision to live there was a conscious choice about built space and urban connection, rather than

362 happenstance. Once I was sure they had chosen to be there, I set out to understand why.

Secondary literature was helpful here and allowed me to craft a convincing narrative. In this chapter, like chapter two, I had to piece together the story based largely on inference and scholarship about other places. In both cases analysis of the buildings and sites is an important piece of that picture.

Public History Applications

The public history goal for this chapter was merely to increase awareness of MacMillan and Pattee and to daylight one everyday LGBT story as a sample of the thousands which must be everywhere around us. Because no one had ever heard of them, it was relatively easy to boost awareness from nothing to something. This happened in many ways.

On December 11, 2016, I gave a research talk about MacMillan and Pattee for the Ohio

Lesbian Archives. It collected a small admission fee which supported their important work as a repository for LGBT history. The audience was about twenty individuals, but all had a specific interest in lesbian history. The idea of the talk was that it shared research in progress with the idea of tapping into other histories or connections participants might bring. The talk was effective in that it linked the Delmoor, just a block from the site of the talk, to MacMillan and

Pattee, giving attendees a physical connection to the story. The question and answer period after the talk also provided me with some additional context of lesbian and cultural networks during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Cincinnati. I also gave a conference paper on MacMillan and Pattee at University of Cincinnati’s student history conference, the

Queen City Colloquium, in April 2017. Again, the audience for this presentation was small.

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Mostly students and faculty, this talk exposed a group not specifically interested in LGBT history to MacMillan and Pattee. These two talks juxtaposed against each other provide an interesting comparison. In the first case the audience chose and even paid to attend. The discussion afterward was lively and people were engaged in my talk. At the student conference, the audience was mostly other presenters and faculty. They were there to support me, but not because of a deep interest in the topic. There were few questions and I didn’t leave feeling I’d really educated anyone.

I published a story about Loueen Pattee in a popular anthology entitled From The

Temple of Zeus to the Hyperloop: University of Cincinnati Stories, published in 2018.42 The book is a collection of stories about the history of the University of Cincinnati edited by Greg Hand.

The story I wrote about Loueen Pattee placed her in the larger context of the history of UC and her contributions as Dean of Women. This vehicle for telling her history has the advantage of longevity, but it also has a limited audience. Only readers interested in the history of the

University of Cincinnati are likely to find this story, although I have had some surprising feedback on the piece. People will sometimes, unexpectedly tell me that they read about

Pattee. These moments are satisfying because I feel like it gives her a bit of the legacy she never had.

On April 16, 2019, I gave a talk at a local history story-telling series, “Stand-Up History,” an informal event that takes place in bars around Cincinnati four to six times per year. I presented the story of MacMillan and Pattee at a bar called Japps on Main Street in Over-the-

42 Anne Delano Steinert, “No One Ever Came for Dean Loueen Pattee,” From the Temple of Zeus to the Hyperloop: University of Cincinnati Stories (Cincinnati, OH: University of Cincinnati Press, 2018) 35-42.

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Rhine. The event had fifty to sixty attendees and a ripple effect through Facebook where one post included an event photo and the text, “Anne Delano Steinert brought down the house last night at Stand Up History.”43 This was an opportunity to share MacMillan and Pattee’s story with a broad audience not specifically interested in LGBT history. This event was probably the most successful public history application of this story. The downsides of this approach are that

I gave the talk in a loud and crowded bar with my slides showing on a tiny screen. People in the back definitely could not hear, and so I doubt that most people got the whole story. Also, just in crafting a talk for this kind of performance created challenges. I had to tell the story in a way that was funny or astounding and had “punch lines,” so that impacted which parts of the story were emphasized and which were left out. I know I put a lot of emphasis on story of finding

Loueen Pattee’s ashes in the closet at the crematory, which was astonishing, but also sad, which is hard to get across in a crowded loud bar.

I was the guest blogger for Ohio History Connection for June of 2020. The post, on Mary

MacMillan’s suffrage work, was a part of their series on women’s activism in Ohio celebrating the anniversary of the ratification of the nineteenth amendment. The post focused on

MacMillan, rather than the partners together, but it was a good way to share their story broadly. The tone of the piece was conversational and therefore broadly accessible. But the site is a little hard to find and the audience is mostly people who are already predisposed to be interested in history. Like the bridge article from chapter one, which is available online in perpetuity, the advantage of the blog post is that it is hosted by a reputable historical

43 Facebook post, Dr. Rebecca Wingo. April 17, 2019.

365 institution and will have a long life in the internet. It will be available to researchers and students for years to come. The downside of this format is that there is very little direct feedback. Every now and then a friend will stumble upon it and send me a kind note, but other than that there is little possibility for dialogue.

Finally, I was scheduled to co-present at the Mercantile Library for National Poetry

Month in April, 2020 with poet cris cheek.44 Our talk, entitled “A Life in Poems,” planned to use

Mary MacMillan’s poetry as a way to illustrate her life story. I was very excited about this talk because of the high-profile venue, and because of the interdisciplinary format which paired poetry with history, but alas: Covid intervened. Perhaps we will reschedule.

Chapter Five: Sanctuary of Change: Four Walls and the “Precious Data” They Contain

Method:

The work of chapter five was again sparked by observation of the built environment. I had been driving by Revelation Baptist Church for years. At first, I made fun of the building because of the wrap-around addition that I then considered hideous. As time went on though, I came to believe that each of the building’s layers were an important part of the story of the building and the city. I came to appreciate the addition as a document of Cincinnati’s Black history and evidence of agency in the part of the Black community.

Even before FCC publicly showed an interest in Revelation, I realized it was only a matter of time. I tried to warn people and let them know the building was important despite the

44 Yes, his name is in lowercase letters on purpose.

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“incompatible” addition. I did not do this soon enough though and pretty soon FCC owned the building. A friend told Councilman Chris Seelbach about the building, and he said he would like to try to landmark it. I agreed to write a local landmark designation report for the building if someone could provide some research assistance. We hired a college student to find newspaper records and do a title search, but then I wrote the report. I had never done a

Cincinnati local designation report before, though I had read many, and there seemed to be nuances of Cincinnati’s process that were not clear to me. As a result, I wound up writing a report that called out basically any person or event associated with the building, much of which became the text of chapter five. I had expected that my submission would be edited down to make the most compelling case before it was submitted to go through the public review process, but that was not the case, which ended up causing some embarrassment for me.

The process for writing a designation report involves a detailed description of the property, and so I did deeper and more sustained observation of Revelation than any of the other sites in the dissertation. In this chapter, the building itself was the primary document. The clues within the physical building became the source I read most fully.

Of course, I used other sources too. I used newspaper archives and the Cincinnati

History Library at Cincinnati Museum Center, which holds some important documents about

Revelation, and the American Jewish Archives where I found some records of Brotherly Love. I also interviewed Revelation’s interim pastor, Todd Ingram.

Public History Applications:

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I shared the information in chapter five with the public primarily through the local landmark designation report. This report was shared with the press and became part of the public record. Additionally, Revelation’s story was the subject of a talk I gave for the Over-the-Rhine Museum’s “Three Acts in Over-the-Rhine” quarterly lecture series in December of 2019 and was included on a walking tour for attendees of a joint conference between the University of Cincinnati and the Technical College of Dortmund.

The audiences for both of these events were self-selecting so people were interested in the history of Cincinnati, so the level of engagement was high.

The designation process for Revelation revealed huge problems with the preservation process in Cincinnati, and by extension, in other cities across the nation.

Many of these issues are discussed in chapter five, but there are some logistical issues to add. One issue is access. I have a degree in historic preservation and even I had a hard time finding the resources I needed to understand how to write a designation report that met the city’s regulations. There was a particular kind of map that had to be included which a lawyer friend procured for me, and there are recommendations for the treatment of the building that had to be written to the city’s legal standards. Even with expertise and help, the report I wrote was not really what would have best served the designation of the building. It needed to be better vetted and edited down to its strongest points.

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An additional barrier is the cost. It costs $1,500 to submit an application for landmark designation to the city of Cincinnati.45 The two ways around this fee are for a city councilmember or a community board to submit the application. This fee and the two work arounds limit access to those who can either pay the fee or who are connected to neighborhood or city government. Once the application is submitted, there is the three-part hearing process where applications are heard by the HCB,

Planning Commission, and City Council.46 These meetings are held in the middle of the workday, so if you would like to go testify for or against a designation, you have to be free in the middle of the day, although they do also consider written letters of support.

It is hard for me to listen to the audio recording of the November 4, 2019, Historic

Conservation Board hearing. Though some of my difficulty stems from the fact that I wrote the report which witnesses were refuting and sometimes even insulting, more of the trouble listening comes from the active denial that there “ever were significant events here” and the complete disregard for the church’s architectural intervention. In light of current events around the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, the racism inherent in the inability of the white preservation establishment to acknowledge the history of an African American congregation as relevant and important to U.S. history stands out as all the more stark and shocking.

45 City of Cincinnati, Application for Historic Designation/Historic Zone Change (April 2018) https://www.cincinnati-oh.gov/planning/assets/File/Historic%20Designation-Zone%20Change%20Application%20- %20writable.pdf. 46 City of Cincinnati, “Historic Conservation,” https://www.cincinnati-oh.gov/buildings/historic-conservation/.

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The challenges of historic preservation as an approach to sharing the stories of the past revealed in this process were first the high cost of even submitting a local designation report, then the lack of guidance in how to prepare such a document. Together these factors mean that ordinary people are unable to complete the process and must rely on paid experts, making the designation a pay-to-play proposition. In a successful designation process, building preservation would be the result. We would have the building preserved in the urban landscape, protected for all to see and learn from, yet even then, there are no prescribed channels for interpretation. The degree of interpretation any site receives rests largely on the building owner or local non-profit preservation organizations. The need for public interpretation of historic sites discussed at length throughout this dissertation presents an opportunity for historians who wish to bridge from the academy to the community. Helping cities and neighborhoods make meaning of the historic resources in their midst can be an ideal link between what historians do well and meaningful public engagement with the past

Conclusions

Historians must work with the broader community to identify and interpret sites that tell important historic stories about the heritage of our diverse and complex world. This work involves building bridges from the academy to the larger community. The sharing of authority inherent in this process can open historians to a fear of loss of control, yet the risks historians take to connect with outside communities will be rewarded with deeper, more meaningful, and more relevant histories.

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The built environment is an accessible, tangible link to the past all around us. It acts as a primary source from which we can glean new questions about the past and compelling new answers to those questions. Because of its broad relevance and accessibility, the built environment can be a vital link between academic history and the broader community.

Stewardship of the build world can facilitate the rich reciprocal community partnerships necessary to nurture the historical understandings that will lead to better decisions for our shared future.



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