Acquired	Acreage	Cost
Burnet and Reading Road Vine and Holister East End Auburn Place McKinley Park Calhoun, cor. Burnet Woods Ludlow, cor. Burnet Woods Lytle Park Owls' Nest Wilson Common Woodward Park Hunt Street Athletic Grounds Madison Park Inwood Gilbert Ave. extension of Eden Sinton Park Hubbard Tract Linwood	1904-05 1904-06 1904 1904-05 1904-05 1904-05-07 1906-07 1904-05 1905 1905 1908 1905-06 1903 1905-06-07 1904-05 1907 1907	.16 2.50 7.50 .8 1.21 1.50 2.20 1.36 5.8 8.395 10.70 12.8 2.866 19.492 .2 2.33 11.333 .25	$1,880.27 14,429.82 36,555.42 21,640.17 50,694.39 76,626.56 81,784.06 242,922.31 gift gift gift 248,605.93 annexation 108,361.63 12,324.90 255,340.62 17,393.62 annexation
424 - CINCINNATI—THE QUEEN CITY
From 1909 to 1910.
Mt. Echo Park   Hanna Playground   Nursery   Westwood Commons   Rochelle and Falke   Young and Ringgold   Wulsin Tract   Wellington Place   Warsaw and Woodlawn Mayfield and Carson   St. Clair and Jefferson  Hyde Park Fountain   Burnet and Reading	1908-09	46.28 1. 23.29 24. .25 1.996 about .95 .37 1.56 2.053 .50 .25 7.	61,170.84 gift 25,000.00 gift

This gives an aggregate of about two hundred and twelve acres of new park land which added to the old means a little over six -hundred acres. The latest park extension is the important gift of L. A. Ault of what has been called the Red Bank park, but may in future be named for the donor. This piece of property consists of one hundred and fifty acres and is worth about $100,000. It was formally accepted by the city in July, 1911, with the conditions made by Mr. Ault that a road be always kept open into it and that it should always be used- as a park. It is a splendid piece of land for park purposes up hill and down dale, grown with trees, and possessing such fine, rolling, satisfying; lovely views as only hillsides near Cincinnati—and this is one of the loveliest of them—of any place in the whole world can possess. Owls' Nest park is the picturesque name of six acres given to the city by Charles E. Perkins and others in memory of their father and mother who lived for many years in the place known as "Owls' Nest." This was given with the stipulation that the park should retain the name of the old home—what more delightful name could be found ?—and that a tablet should be erected stating by whom the property was given and to whose memory. The donors have also offered to build a fence about at least a portion of the park after the manner of the Harvard Gates. Woodward park at the end of Rockdale avenue, containing over ten acres, was the gift of Joseph C. and Alice H. Noyes, with the condition that it should be called Woodward for their family, of which the founder of Woodward high school was a member. In Sinton Park (Barr, Kenyon, Mound, and Cutter) about $11,0o0 was spent in putting in playground paraphernalia, getting the ground into condition for tennis courts and other athletics, and planting trees. In addition to this money spent" by the city, Mrs. Charles P. Taft gave $10,000 for the "Sinton Shelter," a complete. and commodious building with reading rooms and baths: enough to accommodate from 1,500 to 2000 people daily. Mount Echo Park on the river heights down towards Sedamsville is one of  most beautiful park sites to be imagined. The view extends up and down CINCINNATI—THE QUEEN CITY - 425 the Ohio river and it is to be hoped that the commission will keep the park always in a state of natural woodland beauty. Twelve acres of athletic fields are in the Hunt Street Park. Here the diamonds are in perpetual demand for reservations by baseball teams and it is a refreshing sight on Saturday afternoons from early spring till late fall to see the young men at their merry, splendid play. Those of us who remember the horribly unsightly appearance of the place when it was used for a dump do not a bit grudge the $38,000 that have been spent in reclaiming it. Some lots at the foot of Wellington Place have been acquired so that there may be an entrance directly from Mount Auburn into Inwood Park, which, formally a barren hillside where rocks and yellow mustard throve, has now been converted into one of the most attractive and contenting spots in the city, sloping beautifully, as it does, from Vine street up to Mount Auburn. Westwood Commons has twenty-six good acres. Water has been installed here, the ground graded, and a number of base-ball diamonds laid out. At Young and Ringgold there will be an extensive playground with a shelter house directly in the corner and facing both streets. Skirting the playground and to the westward and south, with the nearest and finest view of the city, to be found anywhere, will be a park where many trees and shrubs will be planted. Property of nearly an acre at Madison avenue and Observatory Road, purchased for $10,80o has been presented to the city by Lucien Wulsin. And other citizens of Hyde Park have subscribed to a fund for the improvement of this park, which will probably be named by Mr. Wulsin. So the work of improving the old property and reclaiming the new, of planting trees and shrubs and flowers, of grading and laying out driveways and paths, of beautifying in every way, has gone on briskly. A few years ago public playgrounds were unheard of in Cincinnati. Lytle Park had the first one; now with full equipment five others have been added—not nearly the right quota, but something—and give joy and health to thousands of children. To revert to statistics again, through the months of June, July, August, September, and October of 1910, there was the following attendance of children in the city's playgrounds :

Inwood Sinton Lytle Hanna Pearl Street Woodward

152,136 93,755 43,299 30,429 29,214 23,130

Making a total attendance of 371,963 children. At the time the park commissioners took hold of affairs here, Cincinnati was the second city in population in Ohio and the fourth in park possessions. About that time or a little later Cleveland had 1800 acres in parks, Toledo 1200, Youngstown 600, Cincinnati 570. This proportion remains practically the same today. In 1996 among the large cities of the United States, Cincinnati stood eleventh in population, twenty-fifth per capita in expenditure for parks, and 426 - CINCINNATI—THE QUEEN CITY fortieth in park acreage. Figures are dull things. Particularly are they so when one is trying to express the beauty and wholesome joy of parks. But they tell the plain, necessary facts—they are the hard little pennies that buy the bread of life which makes blood and brain and labor and beauty and poetry possible. The hope of the park commissioners, patiently as they are working, is yet a very comprehensive one. With the enormous park schemes of Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, and other large cities before them, they desire to give Cincinnati equal park advantages. They wish to relieve the congestion of travel, increasing of course as the city grows, by constructing boulevards and broad park driveways connecting the various more extensive park properties. They wish to establish playgrounds and recreation places within the easiest access to each closely populated district and every residential area. They expect to make fairness out of spots abandoned to abuse and ruin—dumps and clay hillsides. They wish to add large outlying tracts of land to which the city is so rapidly, though all unconsciously to many short-sighted citizens, and so surely growing. And finally they wish to preserve and make use of all the striking natural advantages existing in the conformation of this part of the country. The starting place on the map of the plan for parks—down town would be what is called the Mall, extending from the Courthouse West to Central avenue, and from Court street to the Canal. Assuming that the canal is already a boulevard one would proceed smoothly out over it in one's automobile through the closely built-up west end of the city into Cumminsville, past the House of Refuge, then skirting the Clifton hills, into a large park about equal to Burnet Woods opposite the Cemetery of Spring Grove. From there one might proceed along the branch which runs to the southwest side of the cemetery up into Northside and then to the west into northside Park which would be situated towards College Hill somewhat beyond Chase avenue. Down to the southwest then one would drive into the Westwood Park, and directly to the south crossing the Lick Run road and then back east into Price Hill. Or one might come back from Westwood down through the broad Fairmount Parkway which finally intersects the other parkway coming down from Cumminsville and skirting the hills of Fairmount, proceeding on through what would be the reclaimed Millcreek valley and then skirting Price Hill and on about the hillsides overlooking the bend in the Ohio river above Sedamsville, through Mount Echo park and back north to Elberon Park in Price Hill. Or, if one did not wish to turn to the left when one reached that park opposite Spring Grove, one could keep on to the right still on the old canal route, skirting the northern edge of the Clifton hills and on through Saint Bernard and up the Paddock road through Bond Hill into Carthage. Or even before reaching Bond Hill one might turn to the south and follow down the valley separating Avondale from Walnut Hills, Evanston and Norwood, through the broad Bloody Run parkway, diminishing into a driveway through Walnut Hills east of Park avenue down into Eden Park. Or from Carthage one might turn to the west for a long drive over to College Hill, then over the North Bend road and down to Westwood. Or, again, from Carthage one might turn to the east and run down through Pleasant Ridge and on down past Norwood by the Duck Creek road parkway and on into the Duck Creek park at Evanston, then still on to the south through the delightful CINCINNATI—THE QUEEN CITY - 427 little Owls' Nest park, across Madison road and finally into the Columbia parkway which borders Mount Adams and Eden Park and goes on up along the edge of the river hills away on out to Columbia park. at Columbia—and then even further out to Miami park along the Ohio river, and the Athletic Field and Water Works Park, all of which extensive fields and woodland surround the mouth of the Little Miami river where all sorts of pretty effects from the winding stream are possible. Going back, away back to the canal driveway just under the hill of Clifton one could come over Dixmyth avenue to Burnet Woods, from Burnet 'Woods out Riddle road to the edge of the hill again and then all about the margin of the Clifton hill on the west and south, then up andacross Vine street into Inwood park and from there south and east skirting all the Mount Auburn hillside overlooking the city, and then up to the north encircling the three sides of Mount Auburn. There in the valley below, between the Mount Auburn hillside parks and Eden Park and connecting the two, are the Hunt street Athletic Grounds. From Eden Park to the north just east of Highland avenue is a ridge which forms the parkway connection between Eden Park and Burnet Woods, on the north. It lies about a square east of Highland and then turns directly towards Burnet Woods a square north of Oak street and west of Vernon Place. Another connection cuts through Clifton up from the canal driveway, crosses Carthage Pike below the Zoo, passes behind the Zoo and goes over Forest avenue to the Bloody Run parkway. And from there one might drive on over to the Duck Creek Park and then on out Observatory avenue to the one hundred and fifty acres of park just given to the city by Mr. Ault at Red Bank, then northward coming near Madisonville and back again to the Duck Creek parkway. Beside the many parks included in this plan, a full quota of playgrounds in advantageous places is provided for. Some of the tracts that were only on paper in 1907 have in the last few years really been acquired through gift or purchase. The plan for a park system in Cincinnati is not a chimera, but a young and lusty, healthy, growing thing. Before this history goes to press there are likely to be important gifts in park lands to the city, and before this history has ceased to be up-to-date the park system will be realized. People are beginning to understand the need of parks. They are at last coming. to comprehend the necessity of the out-of-doors, of recreation, and of, physical beauty. The present bucolic tendency is a rational development in the course of civilization; and, the perfection of electric railroads; of automobiles, and of air ships—who knows? in the next few years transform our way of living and make us, even more, demand open space and free air. Cincinnatians are, moveover, coming to appreciate the matchless physicial possibilities of the city and of the surrounding country so rich in soil and so rich in quiet charm. "Nowhere," said the educated and traveled old Yankee, Edward Mansfield, "nowhere have I seen more beautiful views and richer landscapes than those which surround Cincinnati." Every visitor who has ever got beyond, the little circumscribed old city under the hills agrees with him, and even the most narrow-minded and parsimonious element of self-depreciatory citizenship will be compelled to grant to their home—even to their home —the credit of being what some other and Vol. I-28 428 - CINCINNATI—THE QUEEN CITY more discerning souls have always known her to be, that is notably, delightfully, contentingly, picturesque. FAMOUS HOMES. Mary MacMillan. Symms. The master of the manor, John Cleves Symmes, was a picturesque and resolute old figure. Erstwhile Revolutionary patriot, lieutenant-governor, member of council, judge of the supreme court of the state of his adoption, New Jersey —for he was born on Long Island—he had in him the adventuring blood of the pioneer and became the patentee of the Miami Purchase. His first visit to the new country was probably in the summer of 1787. The following year he came across the mountains with- his family, horses and other animals, wagons and provisions. A traveler, meeting him, comments upon his complacency and the pleasing fact that his handsome, dark-eyed daughter was with him. He himself came down the river with, a surveying party Of men in the fall but returned to Limestone, now Maysville, where he had built him a "comfortable house," and intended to spend the winter. But the importunity of the Indians and others to see the new proprietor compelled him to "fall down the river" with his family in all the unpleasantness of January cold and floods. He passed the first settlement, poor little Columbia, drowned save for one house, in the high water, and Losantiville, afterward Cincinnati, to the place of his particular choice, North Bend, called so because here the Ohio in a great graceful curve that is almost a complete horseshoe, makes its most northern point after it has dropped to the south in the eastern part of the state. Though his eyes had first looked upon the place of the sweeping river and rolling hills in the fairness of glowing summer and misty autumn, he was not sentimentalist enough to choose it purely for its beauty. Counting, as men did in those days, entirely on the waterways for commerce, he considered this spot most advantageously situated on the Ohio, and in his imagination saw Symmes City stretching across the neck of land of only a mile to the Great Miami river where the White Water flowed into it. To his friend, Captain Dayton he wrote an interminable and prosy yet paradoxically entertaining letter, all about the landing and settlement and subsequent trials and tribulations—for the poor-Judge had these latter thicker even than the woods he lived in. The first houses were cabins constructed merely for comfort, tight against the cold. It was not till some six years later, about 1795, that the famous White House was built. Judge Symmes, as he was always called distinctively, was the father-in-law of one President of the United States and the grandfather of another, but the naming of his house had no connection whatever with the Presidential mansion at Washington. For the house was called so in his day—the overlapping years of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—when he was a greater man in, the country than William Henry Harrison or the then undreamed of Benjamin. In fact the astute Judge objected to the match between his and the impecunious young Captain and when he knew the mar- riage was to take place, he got upon his good horse and rode into Cincinnati. The ceremony did, not actually occur in the White House but in a little stone CINCINNATI—THE QUEEN CITY - 429 dwelling down by the riverside where dwelt Dr. John Woods, "Squire Woods," a friend of the family, and where the young couple had invited a few joyfully sympathizing friends. It had the reputation and certainly the flavor of a run-?may match. They had met in Kentucky it seems, where Miss Symmes attended school'. And when the young lover asked her father's consent, the latter demanding to know what property Captain Harrison had to support a wife on, the Captain quietly laid his hand upon his sword. Those were the days of captains and romance. The White House was a big, rambling, two story frame building, painted white and containing twenty-six rooms. It stood among the green hills back .from the Ohio about a mile to the northwest of North Bend towards the Great Miami, on a tract of land of one hundred and eighty acres. Here dwelt the Judge with his lady, a Miss Livingston of New York, who was his third mattrimonial partner, and his daughter. It was the first country mansion of the countryside and its lord, being the proprietor of all the lands, must have given much hospitality and conducted much business within its walls. For in those days the great gentleman of a district had his office in his home and, when men came to see him on business, traveling some times for miles on horseback, they were entertained at his table and often stayed over night, sleeping in one of his canopied beds. The Judge was no total abstainer and likely plenty of wine and old Monongahela rye flowed upon his sumptuous table. In those good times all the savory dishes were placed directly upon the board and a guest could see exactly what was ahead of him, proportioning his appetite accordingly. In the evenings, lighted by candles that seem nowadays always like offerings before the shrine of the past, they sat around the great open brick fire-places where snapped and glowed huge logs of wood. That pleasant liar, Thomas Ashe, who cheated poor Dr. Goforth out of his eye-teeth and his mastodon's bones and went home to England to publish a `book about his travels in America, describes the Symmes family life so as to give them the effect of a collection of genteel but doughy puppets who merely sat about or played with wild animals. Mr. Ashe says effusively that he found it difficult to tear himself away from them. The White House, a feudal estate, in democratic simplicity, was a little community in itself. Provisions, brought from afar, had to be bought by the wholesale. Women in those days not only had to do their own knitting, sewing and embroidering, but their own spinning and weaving. Some of them took the wool which grew upon the backs of their own sheep in their own pasture and had it fashioned at the nearest woolen mill into cloth and "coverlids" and blankets—and some of these blankets are still giving sweet comfort on cold winter nights in Cincinnati. In the early spring of 1811 the house was destroyed by fire, the incendiary, some one whom the Judge had refused to appoint to office, having rowed across the river from the Kentucky shore one night to apply the brand. Nobody living, of course, ever saw the White House. The blaze of it glowed among the hills over a hundred years ago. But for long afterwards the place was known as "the Burnt Chimneys" from the four great tall chimneys which stood there gauntly for years and in the days of their activity extended far above the roof- 430 - CINCINNATI—THE QUEEN, CITY that rooftree which gave shelter to great Indian chiefs, the governor of the giant young territory, famous generals, men of affairs, travelers from afar. The burning of the White House was a terrible loss for in it Judge Symmes kept his papers, the destruction of which produced much confusion and invalidated titles to property. It was another blow to the ageing man who for years had been beset by worry and disappointment. Ernest Thompson, Seton says that every wild life ends tragically—it would seem that every human life ends .pathetically. John Cleves Symmes lived out his years amid opposition or disregard and, his home burned, died in Cincinnati. A note of poetry is in the end. For to North Bend down the river on a boat with military honors his body was borne—the body which in life had been "great and majestic"—and carried up the hill to the little cemetery. It is an old-fashioned grave with brick earthwork above surmounted by a big horizontal stone slab. Around the lot is a rusty iron fence with rusty. iron padlock at the gate. The place is decayed and neglected and grown with brambles. But, high above the quiet river and the noisy trains, perfect peace is there. Overhead the sky is the wonderful blue with softly wandering white clouds in April—a red bird sings and is beautiful and the long new grass waves in the wind of the warm spring afternoon. Harrison. Only a few rods away, down the white road through a little declivity, and up on another knoll stands another and more famous tomb, that of John Cleves Symmes' son-in-law, General William Henry Harrison. The hill overlooks the silent sweeping bend of the river and the valley below in the soft green veil of spring. The knoll is supposed to have been an Indian mound and the thought of that is pleasant. It is oval and over its ridge extends a line of emaciated black cedar trees like sentinels wasting away. The present tomb is a gray granite square topped by cement, erected by General Benjamin Harrison about fifteen years ago. By the side of it is a tall metal flag-staff from the top of which floats the American flag, bright and mindful and thrillingly comforting in this place where death lies neglected. It is said that river captains used to salute whenever they passed the tomb of Harrison and that once when General Andrew Jackson was aboard the captain went to him, told him of the custom and asked what he should do. The general knitted his heavy eyebrows. "Yes, give him two salutes for his good generalship," he said, "but, —damn his politics !" The Harrison house, too, was destroyed, set fire to by a "she-devil of an Irish-woman in the middle of the night," says his son-in-law, Colonel W. H. Taylor, so that the household barely escaped in their nightgowns. The chimneys, ruins of out-houses, and heaps of bricks and stones stood there among the grass, hopeful hardy perennials, flowering shrubs and fruit-trees as late as 1868. Nearby were the wooded banks of a little creek flowing "through a little marshy dell into the Ohio just. above." The house itself owned its famous existence for many years: General Harrison went forth from it to the War of 1812 and, crowned with victory and illustrious, came back to it to live there the life of a country gentleman almost continuously except for the short time spent as United States Minister to Bogota until his campaign for the presidency in 1840. He CINCINNATI—THE QUEEN CITY - 431 lived only a month in Washington after his inauguration but the house stood king after its master was laid away in the tomb on the hill near by. It stood only about three hundred yards from the river. Across was the never-failing beauty of the Kentucky hills, and up and down the waterway moved the steamers that even in Harrison's day were beginning to be the float. ing palaces which a little later made trips to St. Louis and New Orleans famous and fashionable. Standing on "the White House" tract, about a mile southeast of judge Symmes' house, was a big two-story frame building with wings of one story. Rambling and oddly planned, it probably never was planned but added to at various times. The oldest part of it was in the centre to the left as you entered the hall, and was originally a log cabin tavern which at one time was in deplorably bad repute, being the shameless rendezvous for cock-fighting, horse-racing and other subversive sporting interests of the day so frowned upon by good folk. When General Harrison ran for the presidency some enemy said that he lived in a log cabin. The insult was taken up and made into a war-cry, as it has so often happened in history, and all the log-cabin lore in song and story goes back to that campaign. "The log-cabin and hard-cider campaign" it was called—the hard cider element in it owing its 'existence to a different story:. it was said that when General Harrison returned from the wars rather impoverished and with an expensive family to keep up, he started a distillery ; but later, seeing the error of his way, he abandoned it and henceforward hard cider was the unoffending beverage always offered in the "log cabin." That the house and the life in it were not precisely what the imagination conjures up with the term "log cabin" is brought into strong evidence by various side-lights. Timothy Flint, having taken refuge there from a storm on the river, remarks in a letter that the day was most pleasantly spent in receiving the hospitalities of the general. Also, for his entertainment the Harrison children were put through their paces by their private tutor, whom he pronounces an accomplished scholar and that they showed remarkable progress in geometry. The general had leisure to give a whole day to his guest. And the Reverend Timothy, who must have visited the Harrisons numerous times, speaks delightedly of the welcome every visitor received and of the table laden with substantial good cheer, which 'made him think of English hospitality. He tells of the different kinds of game that lured their appetites and one remembers that April, 1816, brought the wild woods very close. General Harrison was a small, sallow-faced man, not popular and yet having fire and magnetism. Always the same characteristics are commented upon in Mrs. Harrison—her dark eyes, her delicacy, her modesty. They conducted their large household with an almost prodigal hospitality, a sumptuous simplicity that might have been ruinous to time and purse but was the ideal of western republicanism in that day. Occurrences often unrelated save in spiritual significance beguile one's imagination: In this house, the 'home' of a general and future president of the United States, was born his little grandson, Ben, who was also to be a general and president of the United States, on a night when Harriet Beecher Stowe slept under its roof of brooding import. 432 - CINCINNATI—THE QUEEN CITY Ludlow. While it is pleasant to reconstruct these beautiful and picturesque old houses in one's fancy, it is a pity that almost all of them have been destroyed either by fire or pulled down by what I would not call modern progress but modern disrespect. We Americans fly to Europe to see exactly what we seem mad to prevent in our own country. We build houses to look as if they cost as much as possible, says Henry James, and when we can afford 'more expensive ones we tear the old ones down. It may be we are becoming sanitary but we never can be picturesque. In recent years the old Ludlow house in Cumminsville was pulled down. It was the intention of Judge Symmes and the other proprietors of the Miami Purchase to establish little settlements, or "stations" as' they were called, through the country. Three block houses where troops were kept were White's, Covalt's and Ludlow's. Of these Ludlow Station was the first and most important, having been built by Israel Ludlow at government orders in' 1790, the same year that Fort Washington was finished. Israel Ludlow, a New Jersey man and son of a revolutionary colonel, went to Nassau Hall (Princeton) and became a civil engineer. He was appointed surveyor of the Miami lands and after the death of John Filson became one of the three proprietors of Cincinnati. When the apportionment of property was made he preferred instead of town lots to take a farm of one hundred and twenty-five acres in what is now Cumminsville and the edge of the Clifton hills. Here in 1796 the young man brought his charming bride, Charlotte Chambers. The country was all deep forest then but the soil was wonderfully rich and it required only labor to fell the trees and turn their acres into a luxuriant farm. In later years Mrs. Ludlow speaks of the beautiful and rich-bearing apple orchard which she remembers planting. The ground of it was once the encampment of General Wayne's army and the lines extended from the spring in the orchard to the spring at the door of the house, two rows of tents being parallel all this distance. Before that even the farm had been the site of St. Clair's encampment both before and after his pitiable defeat. In the earliest days after coming west when Charlotte Ludlow might have been expected to be a little homesick in the loneliness and seclusion of her new life, she writes of her new home only in joyous content. She plans, so she says in a delightfully naive letter to her mother, to have a garden the exact counterpart of that one at home where in the moonlight her "beloved Ludlow" first told her of his love. The block-house at Ludlow's Station stood where Knowlton street intersects the C. H. & D. railroad; the Ludlow house itself was further north towards Spring Grove on a knoll west of the C. H. & D. and looking down over the valley to the wooded hills which are now Clifton. It was originally a log structure, was later, covered over with weather boarding and at the time of its completion was the largest and best looking house in Cincinnati. Probably Colonel Ludlow would have added to it if he had not been cut off by death. His widow and children moved into the town, but, six years later she married the Reverend David Riske and came back to Ludlow's Station. In the meantime the house was occupied by Colonel Jared Mansfield, who was a professor CINCINNATI—THE QUEEN CITY - 433 at the United States Military Academy, surveyor general of the Miami lands, arid father of Edward Mansfield who afterwards became so intimately connected with all Cincinnati history. Colonel Mansfield used part of the house as his office. Col. Israel Ludlow, Col. Jared Mansfield, John Cleves Symmes, Gen. St. Clair, Gen. Wayne, Little Turtle, Gen. Harrison, Gov. Worthington, Hon. Salmon P. Chase, Judge Este, Gen. J. H. Piatt, Judge Burnet, Nicholas Longworth, Oliver M. Spencer, Judge Goforth, Gov. Meigs, Bok-on-ja-ha-lus, Gov. Cass, Gen. Totten, Gen. Gano, Gen. Lytle—these are among the notable personages who have entered the door of the Ludlow house. Even the last picture of the old house taken just before it was pulled. down 'when it. was in a state of miserable dilapidation compared to that of the days of its keenly alive proprietors, shows it to be pretty, fair, attractive. There is a .wonderful charm in the ground a man has worked lovingly into his home. The trees and shrubs and flowers; the grass itself, seem to answer the care of his hand. All this the Ludlow place had. Three great weeping-willow trees, es pecially, the mistress writes, of again and again; to them she turned to say goodbye when she went away the last time on a vain journey for health. Twenty years earlier these trees had grown to a state of perfection, she had written in the fairness of her old-fashioned fluent style, when one day in the leafy month of June she sat in her parlor looking out at the trees and the green grass. Two men approached and proved to be Indians, the great Bok-on-ja-ha-lus and another chief, Kin-ka-box-kie, whom Mr: Ludlow down in the town that 'morning had invited to dine at his house. They entered and stayed with her to dinner, behaving with good-breeding, she remarks, the good-breeding which excludes useless ceremony. Kin-ka-box-kie could not speak English and both men were silent and depressed. They had been to Washington and the president had told them that their young men would have to plough and their maidens to spin. Mrs. Ludlow asked them when they might return and Bok-on-ja-ha-lus shook his head and replied with a horizontal gesture of the hand, "me old, me soon lay down." As they were bidding her farewell Bok-on-ja-ha-lus said, "but we will meet with Jesus." "Do you know Jesus ?" she asked. "Me know Jesus, me love Jesus," the dark old chief answered. He felt this to be the parting and it was.' The two old Indians never were seen here again and soon after died. Drake. In the days when militarism still must form the nucleus of settlement in the savage-haunted wilderness a fort was like the original cell in a vegetable growth around which the other little cells gathered close and grew. In Cincinnati the first log cabins were built around. Fort Washington. These were succeeded by frame houses or, in many instances, were weatherboarded and added to, as in the case of the William Henry Harrison house, until they became very attractive dwellings. On the square between Lawrence and Pike, Fourth and Third, which has' commonly been called Lytle Square, Dr. Richard Allison who came' with the army and was the first physician in Cincinnati, planted a peach orchard and built 434 - CINCINNATI—THE QUEEN CITY a house. A field of several acres stretched to the east and north and the place bore the pleasant name of Peach Grove. Here dwelt a little -later Dr. Allison's successor, Dr. William Goforth, and here was the first home in Cincinnati of Dr. Goforth's noted pupil, Dr. Daniel Drake. At night the boy slept in the shop where he helped to compound the evil-smelling medicines and ointments of those days, and in the daytime, whenever he could be spared, took his books and studied under the trees along Deer creek. After young Drake was married he lived in a house on Sycamore street between Fourth, and Third. The picture of it shows a quaint little old weather boarded house with prim little walks—gravelled probably—and. fence and gate and low wall beneath the fence to the street. The house itself had two stories with two wings, one of them of one story and the other built out like a bridge from the second floor to a high terrace—a house for a tale, a house for a honeymoon. When Fort Washington was abandoned the doctor bought part of the property included within the fort,: and, after his sojourn for the sake of depressed health and finances in the country up towards Mount Auburn in the cottage he called "Mount Poverty," he descended and built the summer of 1818 his house -on the south side of Third street near Ludlow. Later he had his abode in various houses both in Cincinnati and in Kentucky. In the directory of 1834 his address is given at the corner of Vine and Baker—the little court running from Vine to Walnut between Third and Fourth. This house, too, he built and it was here he and his daughters entertained Miss Harriet Martineau at tea after he had taken her a delightful drive all afternoon through the town and country round. Miss Martineau speaks contentedly .of the meal being in no wise different from an English tea. In this house, too, were held many of the meetings of the society to which belonged such people as the.'Mansfields, General and Mrs. King, the Beechers and Stowes, Mrs. Caroline Lee Hentz, and Judge James Hall. Dr. Drake sat at a little table and rang a bell to begin the evening and then followed papers and discussions. Some of these were upon heavy subjects but they were never treated heavily. It seems to have been a social time the members all delighted in. Dr. Drake called it the Buckeye Club—he liked to have the buckeye for decoration and a big buckeye bowl to hold their beverages.. And he delighted to call this house, long since torn down, Buckeye Hall. However, it is the house near the corner of Third and Ludlow that seems more essentially the Drake house. It is standing still and it is still called so. It is the third entrance from Ludlow on the southwest corner and is now the Salvation Army Settlement. Built after the usual fashion of city houses, nevertheless it gives the impression that it was in advance of the houses of the time just as the doctor was in advance of the men of his time, and it has an unusual breadth* of frontage just as he had an unusual breadth of view. Stone steps go down from the street to the basement where probably he had his office as did so many physicians. of the past generation. Square cappings are over the windows and doors, stone steps go up to the front door opening into the broad hall. To the left as you enter are the big double parlors and back of them the dining room whose windows open upon a little balcony with a pretty iron balustrade the counterpart of the little balcony at the front of the house opening from the parlor. CINCINNATI—THE QUEEN CITY - 435 Behind is the back yard, a desert place enough now, but doubtless then turned into a joyous garden by the man who loved nature so Well that he could make a semi-scientific treatise, the "Floral Calendar," read like a prose poem. Mansfield. King. It is all historic ground, that square between Ludlow and Broadway. To the west of the Drake house where, the Lorraine building now stands, was the famous Trollopean Bazaar and midway, between was the Mansfield house. It still, ,stands and is the ordinary city -house, narrower and less individual than Dr. Drake's; its hallway has a straight staircase 'running up to a landing and its double parlors are on the left. There is nothing to describe about the place, yet it was the home of the Mansfields and afterwards of the Kings, and men like Edward Mansfield and Rufus King would give interest to a sleeping-car berth. One does not call it holy ground, but it is ground delightfully rich in memories and suggestion. Burnet. The square between Race and Vine and Third and Fourth was once a part of the property of that excellent old citizen, Jacob Burnet. Here on the corner of Third and Vine, on ground which the Burnet House now covers, stood his house. It was the plain and usual home of the time not too like a city house, with an entrance in the centre of the front and a hall through the middle. It was two stories and a mansard and had in the rear a two-storied porch roofed and pillared. In front was a row of big trees. Judge Burnet lived there till the financial crisis which involved so many of Cincinnati's important citizens. He: was compelled to sell this property and later built a house on Seventh and Elm where the Odd Fellows Temple now stands. Foote. On the opposite corner of Third and Vine stood the home of Mr. Samuel Foote, Harriet Beecher Stowe's jolly, sea-faring uncle, who brought home wonders of the Indies and made her childhood visits in her grandmother's home at Nut Plains a season of delight. He came to Cincinnati whither his brother had preceded him and, which was to be the future home of his brother-in-law, Lyman Beecher, and built the fine mansion which was to be his home till the disastrous financial crisis of 1837, after which he returned to the east. Most of the meetings of the famous Semi-Colon club were held in this house. These were very delightful, says the biographer of Mrs. King. There were papers on important subjects followed by discussions and sometimes the pleasant elements of music and verses. Always the evening ended with a glass of fine old wine and delicious sponge-cake, a cup of coffee and sandwiches, topped off with a gay Virginia reel led by the reader of the evening and a merry-hearted girl. This and Judge Burnet's and other houses whose walls could tell tales of people and things that have made Cincinnati what it is for us now, were torn down in the dim days of the past. Asphalt and cement cover the earth where 'their apple trees grew. Swarming, business buildings cumber the ground where 436 - CINCINNATI—THE QUEEN CITY they offered cake and wine in their restful dining-rooms. Electric lights glare where sperm-oil lamps glowed. But the spirit of those sane good men and of that hopeful spontaneous little city breathes in the air we breathe and speaks movingly to every one of us who loves our land. Cary. While in the city these essentially city homes were building for men of great civic influence, out in the country a little house was put up which was to have far wider fame. merely because of two little girls who lived in it. On the broad white way of the Hamilton turnpike, a short distance beyond College Hill stands this little brick house among the green grass and trees. It is a neat, pretty satisfying edifice with a distinction that seems to say quietly to you, "Yes, I am a little different from the others, you seer because I was the home of the soul of a poet." It faces toward the setting sun and across the road stretch away broad fields where the farmer drops his grain into the brown soil and the marauding crows strut in awkward and knavish impudence. Perhaps the most attractive. thing about the house are the pillars in the rear, built of brick and supporting an upper balcony. Here the shade is cool to sit in and right at hand is the well where Alice Cary must often have drawn up the dripping cool bucket from the dark wet depths in which always some sort of Nicklemann dwells. Back of the garden is the stable, that hay-sweet place of the farm, home of soft-nosed horses and fresh-breathed cows. And, behind, the ground drops away in meadows and pastures with here and there at a fence corner a gentle blooming apple-tree. The place has all the sweetness of Ohio farm country which, so strongly formed the inspiration of Alice and Phoebe Cary's poetry. Made famous by them Clovernook has another distinction for the noble-hearted Trader girls have established it as a home for the blind. So that generous philanthropy has taken the place of gentle verse in the spot which still breathes of bird-song and poetic life. Beecher. Out Gilbert avenue way when it was a road and not a very good one, either lived a family in the thirties and forties whose name is known the wide world over. The Reverend Lyman Beecher came from Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1833 to teach theology in Lane Seminary. The Beechers, Lyman and Henry Ward, were of a tribe of preachers, and the daughter, Harriet Beecher Stowe, had all the tribal instinct, the ethical aptitude of the men of the family. They were all violently opposed to slavery and took an active hand in working the underground railroad after they came to Cincinnati. It was here that Mrs. Stowe collected all her materials for Uncle Tom's Cabin. The house in which the Beechers lived still stands on the northeast corner of Gilbert and Foraker avenues. It has been very much added to and changed—a good house showing that it has always had a dignity of its own, standing back from the street on a low hill which slopes down and then drops abruptly to the pavement in a stone wall. The old panelled big front door and the few greet trees are the same. In the days of the Beechers there was a rushing brook below the hill and plenty of room for trees and quiet thought on Walnut Hills. CINCINNATI—THE QUEEN CITY - 437 The Beechers were of Puritan ancestry but were saved from the puritanical by the grace of humour. Edward 'Mansfield who knew them in Litchfield when he was a law student there before they and he came out to Cincinnati says that Dr. Beecher would come home from a funeral service he had just conducted and play a merry tune on his violin. Out here in Cincinnati, he was tried for heresy. He was a great lover of the poetry of Byron. Indeed, everything goes to-show that the Beechers were keenly alive people with active minds working to a purpose. Their house was a plain brick structure of simple plan, a hall through the centre with rooms on either side. At the back was a second story porch which Henry Ward, the future distinguished divine used to shin down at night for boyish sprees.. But in this house it was distinctly plain living and high thinking. The story is told that when .Dr. Beecher took one of his parishioners in to see his new rag carpet, she held up her hands and exclaimed. "All this and Heaven, too, Lyman !" The Beechers were so viriley alive that even a rag carpet meant pleasure to them in their austere home. And, "all this and Heaven, too," must be their portion now.. Bowler. Coming down Milcreek valley on a train, to the left as you approach the city, lie pleasant hills. Rising out of the greenery of them are castles standing in the silver sunshine of spring or the red-gold light of autumn. Two of them, in stone with towers and ivy-mantled porte-cochere, and the third, square-towered and like an Italian palace, are as alluring from across the valley as any castles of fairy tale. These are the Probasco, Schoenberger, and Bowler places. However, they are not easily to be reached by climbing up the hill, so you come around to them from the other side, out the beautiful shady Clifton arid then further out the winding and still shady Lafayette avenues. At the very end of the ridge where Lafayette avenue turns and dives down the hill like any country road, is a fence and a wonderfully beautiful gateway. The two huge gates' are hung open, the little ones at either side are closed. This is the gateway that took the prize' at the great Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia in 1876. Just within to the right is the lodge and the driveway goes skirting the hill on in to the house which stands at the very end and crest of the hill and, overlooks all of the Milcreek valley even down to where it spreads out into the city-populous valley of the Ohio. To the left of the road on a broad upland of grass near a fine oak stands a Greek summer-house. It is an exact copy of the Temple of Love in the Petite Trianon at Versailles and has a much finer position than that. The house itself is a two-storied brick plastered over and in architecture an adaptation of the Italian Renaissance. The little gallery running round the top is exactly like Italian houses; the large and short quoins at the corners, the Tuscan Doric pillars across the front on the porch, the brackets under the cornice are all good points in Italian architecture. The tower is square with round-headed windows—the Roman windows that were included in the Renaissance style. Indeed the architecture is exceptionally pure and perhaps as good as any to be found about Cincinnati. This architecture is repeated in the lodge at the front gate and in a second lodge down at the other end of the 438 - CINCINNATI—THE QUEEN CITY estate where the grounds open on Ludlow avenue at the canal. Mr. Bowler bought the ground in 1846, and the city is to be congratulated that it now owns this beautiful old estate for a park. The story is told that when the Prince of Wales—the Prince of Wales who was afterwards Edward VII of England,—visited America, a ball was given for him in the Bowler house. In a dance the prince awkwardly tripped and would have fallen but for the expert assistance and grace of his partner. To have tumbled down would have been a. dreadful thing for the 'heir to the British throne and he was eternally grateful to the young lady who saved him from this ignominy, and sent her a beautiful. jewel in thankfulness. Schoenberger. Across a ravine and on another jutting-out crest of the hill is the Schoenberger place. "Scarlet Oaks" is now 'a hospital where white-capped nurses run through the halls, but it can never be anything really but a castle. The road in through the gateway goes winding down through a dell between two lily-ponds and then up over the hill to the stone mansion which Mr. Schoenberger built in the sixties. The house bears the date of 1867 but was not finished till much later. It is of blue limestone with freestone trimmings. Of Gothic architecture very much mixed in its periods and not very pure anyway it is extremely imposing in effect, nevertheless. The gargoyles are not gargoyles at all, yet there is the ball-flower decoration round the edges of the cornice and other good points. The tower is beautiful and finely proportioned. Perhaps the best thing in the place is the porte-cochere which is pretty purely Gothic of the latest period and altogether both strong and charming. The main entrance leads into a hallway which is extended into another that goes straight through the building. To the right is the drawing-room which is not the least attempt at Gothic but flatly and openly in the white-and-gold extremely ornate decoration of the Renaissance. Behind this is a transverse hall in which is the grand staircase. And on this side of the house and back of the drawing-room is the picture gallery. It is used as a chapel now very appropriately for, with its heavy wood-work and semi-timbered ceiling it must always have looked more like a chapel than like a picture gallery even despite the skylight.. Six pictures have been left for the delectation of the nurses and convalescents. Great canvasses they are, one of them signed "Robbe," 1854; four of them represent respectively childhood, youth, manhood, and old age; and the sixth and biggest of them all evidently shows the marriage of Victoria to Prince Albert in St. George's chapel, the actors in the important scene all having their faces turned accomodatingly toward the spectator. To the left of the entrance hall is the library and behind that is the dining-room where an oaken sideboard in the wall has grinning masks of Bacchus carved on the doors of 'the little wine closets. All of the woodwork is very broad and heavy walnut or oak, and much of it is carved like the Bacchus heads, or the sedate owl at the foot of the grand staircase who is kept company by a line of bats going up the stairs. Probasco. It would be hard to say which of these places—the Bowler, Schoenberger, or Probasco—has the best view. It is the same country taken from different angles. CINCINNATI—THE QUEEN CITY - 439 A wide and long and glorious view it is, down over the canal and Milcreek, Spring Grove and the broad valley, away to the line of hills stretching to the north and south, whereon College Hill and Mount Healthy lie. All this you see spread out delightfully before you from the windows andnorth .porches of the old Probasco place, Oakwood, now the home of Mr. Llewellyn Reakirt. Oakwood is simple, consistent, and impressively handsome—all of that. It totally racks the pretentiousness and oppressiveness that many an American mansion wears like the, over-dress of a nouveau-riche woman. The grounds of hill and ravine, great trees and shrubbery, drives and stone steps, fountains and lakes, are ideal. Nothing seems set and pre-arranged, but to have grown that way naturally and been cared for. At the entrance are big billowy box-trees. The iron gates have oak-leaf design and the massive stone posts are carved in oak leaves and acorns. In the house the suggestion of the oak is carried out everywhere. All the wide heavy woodwork is oak—golden oak—much of it carved, with never a design repeated. Mr. Benn Pitman did this carving and it took him three years to do the grand staircase alone. The divisions of the house are perfectly proportioned and aid in producing its essentially baronial effect. From the stone portico you enter the great hall which extends back to a big fireplace. A transverse hall leads to the kitchens at one end, to the porte-cochere at the other and northeast end: In front of this hall and to the right as you enter, is the drawing-room and behind it and the transverse hall is the library. To the left is Mr. Reakirt's den, hung with trophies of his many hunts and with ,Indian curiosities. And behind is the great dining-room. The grand staircase goes. up to the left in this transverse- hall and the bedrooms all open into a central corridor with skylighted dome. The building is of limestone with freestone trimmings and the walls are of rubblework, the stone's face having been untouched by hammer and chisel. Architecturally the house is primarily Norman though it is not pure. Yet the effect is of almost grand simplicity and beauty—an effect that satisfies and pleases wholly. Shillito. The Probasco place was built during the Civil war when everything was at its highest price and about the same time Mr. Truman B. Handy erected a fine house on the corner of Highland avenue and Oak street. Around the place extends a beautiful stone wall such. as people no longer seem to have the good sense and good taste to build. The trees and charmingly clumped shrubbery remain the same that they Were in days gone by. The house, like most Of its time, is of limestone with trimmings of freestone. It is an adaptation of Elizabethan architecture: The woodwork is chiefly of walnut, heavily carved. In some of the rooms it is of oak or mahogany and always extremely beautiful. The floor of the main hall is in black and white marble. To the left, as you enter, is the library which is finished in black walnut heavily carved, the ceiling Of walnut, and the floor of marquetry in walnut and oak. Marble, walnut, ebony, crystal, give to the house all of the elegance of its. time. It was bought by John Shillito who moved in during the holidays of .i866 and gave a splendid ball as a house-warming. For years, after her husband's death Madame Shillitb lived - 439 - 440 - CINCINNATI—THE QUEEN CITY here and then the place became. the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, which it is likely to remain for Miss Baur has built one big addition and is adding another. These buildings are of brick but the architecture of the old house is continued in them. So that now young music students flit about the halls which were once the home of some of Cincinnati's great mercantile leaders, and millions of bewildering notes of music make gay the quiet old house. Goshorn. Out on Clifton avenue is a house which is as full of art treasures as the woods are full of leaves in autumn. It is called Glen Terrace but the name is com, pletely lost sight of in the personality of the man who built it, General A. T. Goshorn. Perhaps 'some people of the present generation have hardly heard of the great Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia in 1876. It was the pioneer of all the great world's fairs and the director of it was a Cincinnati man. For his whole-hearted services he was knighted by the British sovereign, Victoria,—the only instance we know of an American being so honored by a king or queen—was decorated with innumerable medals and honors from every country in the world, presented with wonderful gifts from monarchs and governments. Beside this General Goshorn was himself a connoisseur and collector of works of art. The stone house was built by him about twenty years ago. In the reception hall is a massive table whose top, the gift to him by .the Mexican government, was at the time the largest piece of Mexican onyx in the world. To the left of the hall is the reception room,. back of which goes up from the hall the main stairway, and on the light hand side of the main hall is the drawing-room from the side of which a spiral marble staircase ascends directly to the picture gallery. Here hang pictures by Kowalsky, Larolle, Ziem, Dieterle, one of Vibert's jolly cardinals, two by our own Farny and Meakin. This gallery has been left by the general to be given ultimately to the Cincinnati Museum of which for so many years be was the director. Downstairs behind the drawing-room are the library and the general's den. This library has a history of its own. For the furnishings and books—fifteen hundred volumes all splendidly bound—were presented to him by the citizens of Philadelphia in grateful acknowledgement of his work during the' Centennial,' and in each volume is the engraved book-plate of the presentation. The dining-room is beautiful in pure Chippendale furniture. In the hall is a great grotesque Chinese incense burner' and in the drawing-room is a tall dragon-haunted Japanese bronze lamp. Everywhere are beautiful pieces of Cloisonné and. Sevres and old Dutch Delft. The house is 'a treasure-house of rare and beautiful things in art. Pendleton. At the head of Liberty street, on the jutting point where one looks over the stone wall across .a busy arm of the city to picturesque Mt. Adams where Rookwood pottery and the monastery stand, is an unpretentious square house which has gone through the vicissitudes of keeping boarders and is almost a tenement. This was once the home of the Pendleton family and was built in the days when upper Broadway was the most aristocratic bit of the city. CINCINNATI—THE QUEEN CITY - 441 McGregor. Bigelow. There are two other houses on. Mount Auburn which, being the oldest on the hill are interesting enough for that reason merely, yet more because they are even yet very fair and picturesque. Mount Auburn was originally called Key's Hill and about the time of Key's residence, in 1819, Gorham. A. Worth built a country house which later became the residence of Robert McGregor and in 1870 was owned and occupied by Truman B. Handy. This pretty rambling old building still stands on McGregor avenue a square down from Auburn, and is the home of Mr. Guy Mallon. The other house was built by John Bigelow, who purchased the property in 1820. A rambling dear old frame house, too, it stands at the head of Bigelow street, in wide sloping grounds and commands the best city view to be found from any point on any hilltop round about. Chase Salmon P. Chase was perhaps too scrupulously honest and too deeply interested in the great concerns of the nation to give sufficient attention to his own private business. He could make money, of course, but was most of his lifetime encumbered with debt and owned four houses which he would not give up to clear himself. One of these, his last home in Cincinnati is at 506 Broadway. It is a plain brick city house, with a rather narrow frontage and nothing remarkable about it except the connection with its remarkable owner. It is large, extending far -back in the long narrow lot, the small yard is paved with stone flagging and a fine old iron fence separates it from the street. The house now bears the sign of rooms for rent. The once fashionable neighborhood in which it stands has fallen into the decay of junk-shops and cheap boarding houses. One cannot blame Cincinnatians for going to live in the beautiful suburbs, but it seems a pity that there is not enough loyalty to preserve the places our fathers and mothers loved from the greasy peddler and the lowest, laziest, Most vicious order of citizenship—one uses the word with protesting indignation - that can degrade any section of a fair city. Sometimes it is too evident that a little ancestor worship could be infused into the American spirit with excellent advantage. Lytle. In approaching the memory of the Lytle house one feels like saying "once upon a time." That proper fairy-tale beginning is altogether fitting in a description .of this house as old and mantled with romance as an ancient rooftree with soft moss. Away back in the days of Fort Washington Dr. Richard Allison, first surgeon general of the United States army, held the property from the Symmes family and lived in a little frame house in the southwest corner of the lot near the fort. This was called "Peach Grove" and the name appears again and again in the early history of the city. Dr Goforth lived here after Dr. Allison and this is the little house, mentioned before, in which young Daniel Drake "slept under the counter." General William Lytle bought the property in 18o6 and built the house in the summer of 1809, and it was he who planted many of the trees on the grounds 442 - CINCINNATI—THE QUEEN CITY —evergreens about the dooryard, including arborvitæry rare and prized arborvitae, and a large garden with fruit trees to the north of the house. The original description of it is paradoxically quaint in its old-time business phraseology, starting the number of "m" of bricks. in the main building and the number of "m" in the outhouses. The Third or Symmes street frontage was sold off early in the sixties and the iron veranda towards Lawrence street built in 1867, which thereafter constituted the front entrance. The place had been considered out of town back in 1812. When General Jackson made hig only visit to Cincinnati he was entertained by General Lytle and a reception was held for him in the south parlor of the stately old mansion. Many other guests of note were entertained here, Hiram Powers, the sculptor, and T. Buchanan Read the painter-poet, among them; and the house contained innumerable mementoes of these and of the owners who themselves were eminent men. The first William Lytle who lived there was a general and surveyor general for the Northwest Territory. He was succeeded by his son, Robert Todd Lytle, known as "Orator Bob," who also was a general and surveyor general of the Northwest Territory, and a member of the Twenty-third or "Panic Congress." After him came William Haines Lytle, poet and soldier who wrote "I am dying; Egypt, dying," fought in the Mexican war, was a member of the state legislature, and a candidate for lieutenant governor, a general in the Civil war, thrice wounded and finally killed at the battle of Chickamauga when he was still only thirty-seven years old. In the course of its century lifetime it has been the home of five generations of. Lytles. Their beds stood there, their books, their .swords hung there, and there was the marble bust of "Orator Bob" by Hiram Powers. Full to overflowing of all sorts of historic associations the old residence has not been, saved from American vandalism and it is gone from the face of the earth save for its airing personality in memory and story. Read. On the south side of Eighth street west of Walnut, is an ordinary city brick house with artistic iron balconies in front, used now for a boarding house and called "the Sheridan." Here during the Civil war lived the poet and painter, T. Buchanan Read. And here after the victory of Winchester, Mr. Read wrote "Sheridan's Ride." The story is told that his friend, James E. Murdoch, the great actor, called upon him the morning after news had come of the battle and said, "It is the subject for a poem, and if I could write I would put it into one." Read, felt the inspiration and that evening in the old Pike's Opera House at a public meeting of rejoicing over the victory,. Murdoch recited to vast applause the poem; "Sheridan's Ride," the ink scarce dry on the manuscript. McDonald. On Clifton avenue—that Clifton avenue which more than anything else has gained for Cincinnati her reputation as a city of beautiful suburbs—not very far from General Goshorn's house and on the other side of the street stands "beautiful Dalvay." It has no important historic or individual connection and is to be noted only because it is a splendid mansion, which in the eyes of the majority CINCINNATI—THE QUEEN CITY - 443 of people is quite sufficient reason for note. The house stands at the top of a long smooth lawn gently sloping up from the street to a point high enough to permit the upper windows to look out over the treetops and dells and even hilltops in the distance to the sunrise off in the east. It is a most graceful and gracious situation and gave rise to a comment from an Englishman who saw it : "But why don't these people enjoy their places ? If this were in England there would be a high stone wall around it and the family would have tea every afternoon out in the garden." h is quite true that Americans enjoy their lawns and gardens too much in. the way country people of the last generation delighted in their best front parlors—places to be cleaned and admired but never used. However, Mr. McDonald and his family did enjoy Dalvay and George R. Balch,. who has just purchased it and made many fine changes and additions, will undoubtedly use and enjoy all of it. The house is said to be the largest in Cincinnati. It is of fine stone, splendidly proportioned, imposing. It is noted especially for its conservatories and for its music-room, a large chamber in white and gold. Thompson. In College Hill on the exact site of his old beloved home Mr. Peter G. Thompson has built a house which is said by many architects to be the most beautiful one in this country. Up the curving Belmont avenue one comes to it, standing back among its trees. A gigantic' old oak sentinels the front and a patriarchal pine the side, and clumped in formal garden effect about the terrace and down the drive are innumerable shrubs and little arbor vita trees. The house is a perfect example of the Greek Renaissance built solidly of white marble from North Carolina. One notes the square windows, the enormously broad frontage, the faultless proportions of the building. The great fluted columns in front and the stone balustrade around the top are epic in their perfection. The' main entrance leads into a hall which extends transversely the length of the building. Immediately before one is the staircase ascending a few steps to a landing, which opens out into a court, the stairway dividing and going up to the right and to the left hand. Thus from the front door is a vista through the hall, over the landing and into the court. All of the house opens into this court whose glass top may be rolled back, and a cloister extends all about it and all manner of tropical plants grow there. On the east side of the front of the house is the music room, an exact copy of a room Mr. Thompson saw in a French palace except where that was white this is gold leaf laid on in triple plate. The lighting fixtures in this room are crystal. The dining-room is across the hall, and here the lighting fixtures are particularly beautiful, being of silver specially cast for this room. At the other end of the hall, to the west of the house, is the library, an apartment twenty-five by forty feet. Mr. Thompson has not an inconveniently huge number of books; there are about three thousand volumes, all of them very choice and for . the most part bound in Morocco. The room is ideal', a spacious, luxuriantly comfortable place sealed entirely in rosewood, where one would delight to "invite one's soul." On one book-case rests a jewelled patriarchal crown ; in a case some rare swords and scimiters that might have been used by Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves ; and in a strong box are some priceless decorated parchments and something to Cincinnatians even Vol. I-29 444 - CINCINNATI—THE QUEEN, CITY more precious and interesting, the original correspondence between John Cleves Symmes and Jonathan. Dayton—letters some of them of forty pages of foolscap. Verily we do not know how to Write letters today. Back of the library. is the billiard room, and upstairs 'are the sleeping apartments,each bedroom with its, complete white-tiled bath and dressing room. At the extreme east end of the house is a stone terrace where the family sit and have their afternoon tea. Beyond is the porte-cochere and beyond that a pergola and formal gardens. Behind are the conservatories and beyond them the stables; and the formal. garden dips down into an old-fashioned garden and grassy tangle where Mr. Thompson plans to have a meandering stream and waterfall. And still beyond, to the east, in his daughter's' grounds, he has built a little‘ log-cabin play-house for his grandchildren which is as perfect in its way as the marble mansion is in its. Mr. Thompson has, not been  lavish and indiscriminate collector. He. has rather few things but they are very' choice; some very old and lovely pieces of Satsuma, for instance, or a 'piece of Cloisonné which is the largest in the world, a vase on which sea-serpents coil in the exquisite blue water of an unfathomable, sea. The house is his own individual taste to which he gave four years of planning and ,selecting. .And it is delightful to see that while it is all as elegant as.a European ,palace, it is at the same time so bright, attractive, wholesome, livable. Taft. Down in the very oldest part of town in a spot where the bugle notes from Fort Washington would have sounded as if just over the picket fence in the neighboring yard, stands a house which as a home always vitally touching the most pregnant historic interests of the city, connects the past with the present. Over three quarters of a .century, well-nigh a century old, this house is perhaps the most individual, the most symbolic, of the deepest interest and significance of any in Cincinnati: The man who built it was Martin Baum, a German of good estate who married one of the, daughters of the Reverand Matthew Wallace, pastor of the old First ,Presbyterian church. Mr. Baum was one of the leading citizens and men of finance of, the city, and though a financial crisis compelled him to give up: the house he had just built, he was, by no means reduced to permanent poverty. He was a very, swarthy man, as were Major Ziegler, and Judge Burnet, and the major was ;accustomed to refer to the other two as his "Black Brothers." Martin Baum built his house in 1825 or earlier, but was not able to live in it long. In the summer of 1825 he gave a large afternoon party which was perhaps the beginning, and end of all social. functions in it while he was master of the manor. He was compelled to relinquish the property to the United. States. Bank in which he had trusted too far and the place was occupied as a girls' school until. Nicholas Longworth bought it and moved in in 1829. Here the peculiar old capitalist and patron of art lived till his death in 1863. His son, Joseph Longworth, continued in the house till he sold it to David Sinton in 1869. Mr. Sinton then lived there death when it became the property of his daughter, Mrs. Charles P. Taft, and Mr. and Mrs. Taft expect to make it their home, says Mr. Taft, as long as they live. CINCINNATI—THE QUEEN CITY - 445 It stands ow Pike street about the centre of the square between Third and Fourth. There is a broad cheerful garden in front and on a warm May morning the grass is as fresh and green there as in any country lane.        low stone wall with high old-fashioned iron fence extends along the street. Here even, before the portal of the place, the word “old-fashioned" pleasantly intrudes and You realize that it will go with you an omnipresent and picturesque lackey through every corridor and corner of the place. There are three sets of great stone gate-posts and you enter the middle one, turning the silver knob of its lock, and walk up the path of stone flagging to the stone steps of the portico with its sets of pillars on either side. The poetically old-fashioned house is wooden, the boards. laid on flat, of a basement and one story, with a prodigally broad frontage toward Pike street. The front door opens to a comfortable hall carpeted in deep red. This hall leads to a transverse one wandering off to either end of the building. To the left of the front hall is the reception room, to the right is the library, and beyond them in front and opening into the transverse hall, are bed-rooms, a wing of living apartments extending back on the east side of the building. The woodwork furnishings of the library are wonderful black Flemish oak carvings. Opposite the front door and opening into the transverse hall is, the ballroom, a huge, airy old' room with six great windows giving on a porch which overlooks the back garden. A real garden it is, down amid the lusty city with factories close by and trains trailing in from the sea-coast hundreds of miles away—a real garden with grass, and flowers and a fountain in its wide shallow cemented pond wherein goldfish play. At the side of the ballroom with an opening, too, upon the garden, where they may look out upon leaves and flowers as they eat their breakfast orange, is the dining-room. The house neither in its architecture, furnishings, nor decoration, makes any pretense to any particular style, nor is there in it the least trace of that wretched thing so incompatable with the sense of home, the trail of the collector. Yet the architecture is predominantly colonial and there is a notable and noted .collection of pictures numbering some seventy-five canvases hanging properly here and there upon the walls in all the rooms. Everything is elegant but everything is fitting and the beautiful sense of home is, never lost despite gilt chairs, inlaid. cabinets, and marvellous products of ceramic art. You look up. quite naturally from lovely Turkish rugs to a sombre Socialistic Millet, a meltingly bright and beautiful Turner, a golden autumnal Corot, or a well-known Gainsborough. Sitting, upon the floor, waiting to be removed to an exhibit, is the great Sorrolla's famous and vivid portrait of Mr. Taft's brother, the President of the United States. It is impossible to characterize this house in a word, its ‘meaning is too deep. It has presence and gives a blending of satisfying, impressions as a person of strong character does. There is the sense of great' wealth spent lavishly but quietly for comfort and beauty. There is perfect harmony. And there is in it 'that best quality of all in human life or art; suggestion. One thinks not only of all the lovely and rare things that, stand before one's eyes now, pictures and frail vases which will so far outlast the living eyes' beholding them, but the quiet beautiful, old home calls to mind vanished days when former owners lived there. 446 - CINCINNATI—THE QUEEN CITY David Sinton, the man of vast wealth, Nicholas Longworth, himself a judge and collector of fine things, and even back to Martin Baum, who built the house when peach trees bloomed near by where the oily wheels of factories buzz today. Probably Cincinnki's first president, William Henry Harrison, mounted the wide stone steps and entered the airy halls just as Cincinnati's second president, William Howard Taft, has done, so recently. Besides the many splendid social functions that have been held here, the old place is notable for the noted men who have passed in and out of its portals, not only in the present but in the past —and not only in the past but in the present. For the, soul of the house is not a flimsy wooden affair built upon ugly foundations, but a strong and beautiful thing built upon a foundation of the past to be proud of ; nor is it a decaying and forlorn thing, once grand but now deserted and inept. But as it represented the best of the city in its early days so does it now, and in this is it symbolical of the city, a corner of the country that could send a president to Washington as ably in 1840 as in 1908—a city that is neither new and uncouth and ugly, nor old, worn out and living only upon the virtues of its past—but, rather, a city that is healthy, developing, beautiful, built upon honest foundations and growing gracefully to more perfect excellence. THEATRES. Mary Mac Millan. Our acquaintance with village life is rather limited to those little straws of civilization caught in some detaining eddy of the great river of progress. From one of this kind it is difficult to conjecture the life of a village that fully intends to be a great city. Our little ancient old-fashioned village has been sapped of all its vitality. It is pleasing, picturesque, quiet, unproductive like a sweet little old lady, while the other is lusty and full of possibilities like a young boy. Cincinnati in 1805, a little wilderness hamlet of something more than nine hundred inhabitants, had a confidence and a gusto in its undertakings that are as delicious as they are surprising. The citizens fully intended to start a university immediately. And Arthur St. Clair, Jr., the son of the governor said that it was quite customary for people of taste to frequent the theatre on play nights. To be sure the "theatre" was a stable, the best available large building, but Arthur St. Clair and the other young gallants lent it grace just as those others did to the rude play-houses of Elizabeth's time. Young St. Clair has mentioned three performances in Vattier's stable but Griffin Yeatman's seems to have been the most popular place, and one scents the air of pleasant good-humour, good accommodation, good times about Yeatman's corner that is borne out by all historical references to it. Leading men of the village took part in these plays and Major Ziegler 'in cocked hat and sword in hand acted as door-keeper, while General Findley delivered an address. In the hay-perfumed stable, a place always of a queer homely enchantment all its own related perhaps distantly to night and coaches and highway-men, where dwell horses who are so used to the vargaries of men, commenced the theatrical life of Cincinnati, seemingly much after the manner of the pranks of boys which usually occur in stables. But there was earnest in the trifling of these men and the plays they chose were the CINCINNATI—THE QUEEN CITY - 447 best of their time. And beside, if the stage was in a stable, we wrap our garments of superiority about us and say with haughty disapproval to modern maligners, "stone walls do not a prison make nor do gilded vaudeville palaces, on Broadway make art." Mr. Longworth described a play in which he himself took .part, but we have reason to believe that the reportorial word of old Nicholas is not so good authority as it might be, certainly not_ as that of the good Judge. Burnet and the careful. Dr. Drake. In June of 1808 the Thespians, a society of the histrionically-inclined, give a special performance for the benefit of the fire company. The Harmonical society, a musical organization, also gave entertainments. In a few years the drama advanced to the estate of ownership and in 1814 the Shellbark Theatre, a circus enclosure, stood on Main street below Fourth. Prominent gentlemen took part in entertainments here, among them Benjamin Drake; the doctor's brother, and that peculiar and earliest artistic temperament of Cincinnati, Peyton Symmes, relative of the old judge. On the north side of Columbia (Second) street between Main and Sycamore a little ,frame theatre was built in 1814 where later stood. the Columbia Street Theatre. Here the Thespians held ,sway, devoting the financial result of their labour to charity. The Reverend Joshua L. Wilson, minister at the First Presbyterian church, opposed with his utmost vehemence all this histrionic activity as of• devilish character. The actors resented his attitude and intimated that they did not for a moment believe that all the virtue in the world was mortgaged to the reverend doctor. The young gentlemen who had organized themselves into the Thespian Society, carried on a sharp ,fencing bout of words with him through the columns of the Western Spy onthe part of the clergyman and Liberty Hall —appropriate names for both—for his adversaries. At a 4th of July celebration a player-wit who knew, his Bible only too well, gave a toast to the Cincinnati Theatre: "The Cincinnati Theatre—may it not like the walls of Jericho, fall at the sound of -Joshua's horn." Dr. Drake in "Picture of Cincinnati" published in 1815 states with evident unction that there are "as yet no epidemic amusements among us." Cards had been confined to the vulgar grog-shops and nocturnal gaming room. Dancing —for which we suspect the doctor of a little weakness—was not carried to excess: Theatrical exhibitions both by amateurs, and itinerants had occurred for a dozen years—that ,would be from 1803. He goes on to mention the Thespians, though not dignifying them with a name, and says that they and their temporary wooden play-house had been so deprecated by the more religious portion of the community that they would likely relinquish their pursuit. There was no sleigh, riding, no skating to speak of, no riding or driving. The "rational" and perhaps not too exhilarating amusements were a few select parties in the winter and evening walks in the summer.. But even as he was saying this, the Pittsburgh company of players stopped here. in April and gave several performances under the auspices of the Thespians and with the Harmonical society furnishing music. They presented the "Poor, Gentleman," "Love Laughs at Locksmiths," "The Stranger or Misanthropy and Repentance," "The School for Scandal," "The Wags of Windsor," "Hamlet," "Macbeth," "Romeo and Juliet," and many others. It was a perfect festival of drama, and we can •easily believe that the hearts of 448 - CINCINNATI—THE QUEEN CITY the poor Thespians were warmed and delighted. Advertisements of the plays praised the family life of the players, especially of the ladies, and with wily intent, assured the public that the boxes at the theatre would display the beauty and fashion of the town. This visit seems to have inspired the Thespians with new verve. In the following summer they themselves acted in a number of plays. They were eager enough to eradicate rowdyism from the theatre, for, with that on the one hand and the disdainful disapproval of the good folk on the other, they found themselves between the devil and the deep sea. However, love of the theatre is a vital and forceful thing not to be eradicated by any opposition or influence whatever. The Thespians kept at their business determinedly and in 1819, the year that saw the dawning of Cincinnati as a city, the beginning of the Ohio Medical College, and a general breaking into flower of a great many branches of human improvement, when there were still fewer than ten thou sand inhabitants, the Cincinnati Theatre was built on Columbia (Second) street between Main and Sycamore. It was called the Columbia Street Theatre. and sometimes the Globe—a name That seems strangely unused nowadays and with the memory of it comes the wonder why builders of modern play-houses should not christen them for, the older ones or for dramatists, such as the Shakespeare, the Sheridan, the Pinero. The lot was fifty by one hundred feet and the building itself was forty feet wide by one hundred feet deep, and had a pit and tiers of boxes, gallery, lobbies, a punch room, and could accommodate eight hundred people. In front was an Ionic portico, the stage was of a generous size and had foot-lights fed, by sperm-oil. There was also a chandelier of lamps and lamps running around the second balustrade of boxes. There was: a green drop-curtain with the motto, "To Hold, as 'Twere, The Mirror Up To Nature," the quotation from Shakespeare which so pleasantly adorns our own Grand Opera House curtain today. Another curtain was used later and very deeply admired, on which was painted a view of Cincinnati from Covington. The Columbia Street Theatre lived fifteen years, was considered the best playhouse in the west, and went down in fire in 1834. Here some great old actors trod the boards. Booth, the elder, acted his wonderful Richard III, and Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Drake, who came from Pittsburgh with the Pittsburgh company, remained and acted in a sort of stock for some time. .They took all sorts of parts as the skimpiness of their company and resources demanded, though Drake's forte was in the broadest comedy while hers lay in the highest tragedy, says Mrs. Trollope who admired them both to the utmost." Alexander Drake's comedy was like that of the 'French, she says, and Mrs. Drake as a tragedienne was not excelled by any one Mrs. Trollope had ever seen unless it we're ,Mrs. Siddons. These two were English and there is just the possibility that they found favor in the eyes of Mrs. Trollope -because of that worthy qualification, for she had never a fair word to say of the young American star, Edwin Forrest, who was most popular with American audiences. Forrest had come down the river in a flatboat from Pittsburgh with his bride, Amelia Seymour, in 1823, six or seven years before Mrs. Trollope's "advent. In the upper city the theatre had leaked so badly on rainy nights that the audience had been compelled toAraise their umbrellas.. In Cincinnati Forrest met adversity CINCINNATI-THE QUEEN CITY - 449 and went upon a veritable barn-storming expedition, with two decrepit ancient wagons and two sympathetically decrepit ancient horses into outlying towns. Mrs. Trollope, the undismayed, writes that the theatre itself was small and not very brilliant in decoration, that the audiences were unappreciative of art and atrociously bad-mannered. It is to be feared that they were, for in 1830 was printed a poster for the benefit of the theatre. The audience was requested not to crack nuts while the curtain was up and persons in the upper boxes were asked to avoid the uncourteous habit of throwing shells, apples, and other articles into the pit. Gentlemen in the boxes were requested not to wear their hats, nor to stand or sit on the railing because of preventing the view of others during the performance. And persons in the gallery were politely begged to refrain from loud talk, beating the railing with their sticks and other disturbances. Yet, says Mrs. Trollope, for lack of other amusement, her young men went to the theatre, and "in the bright clear nights of autumn and winter, the mile and a half of distance was not enough to prevent the less enterprising members of the family from sometimes accompanying them." We know perfectly well that the lively little lady enjoyed those cool night jauntings even though it was not the custom for Cincinnati's femininely elite to attend the theatre, and probably, feeling good the morning after, she wrote, "the theatre is really not a bad one." Benjamin Drake, who seems to have been an enthusiastic Thespian and patron of the stage whether his brother the good doctor, believed in it or not, and Edward Mansfield wrote in their book of Cincinnati in 1826, that the managers of the theatre would "doubtless soon be able to count upon sufficient patronage to justify them in frequently alluring to the west the most distinguished actors of the seaboard." Three years before this the Columbia had been opened as a summer theatre and the glorification of its drop-curtain, with the view from Covington, installed. And it was this summer, in June—audiences and actors seemed not to mind the heat in those days—that Forrest acted in Othello, a part that was thought not to be quite so fine as his Richard. The prices at that time were 75 cents in the Pit and first tier of boxes, 5o cents for the second tier, and 25 cents for the gallery. In July, 1822, there was an advertisement of the Pavilion Theatre where Messrs. Dumilier and Charles announced feats in natural philosophy and necromancy. Plays were given here later, among them the French comedy, "Matrimony or the Mutual Surprise." In 1832 the Third Street Theatre was built and was extremely pretentious—we wish Mrs. Trollope could have staved here long enough to see it—being the finest house of its time. The stage was adorned with the most beautiful scenery in the country and there was a lovely blue cloth curtain trimmed with gold. The theatre was opened with an address by Mrs. Hentz for which a prize of $50 had been offered and an essay in support of the drama by Isaac A. Jewett for which $200 had been paid. This, as far as we can learn, was the beginning of the pleasant custom of opening theatres with prize addresses. The new theatre and the Columbia having both been destroyed by fire, Cincinnati found herself in a deplorable condition theatrically for a short time until the building of the National. That name is still to be read on the building which still stands on Sycamore street between Third and Fourth. The front of