Cincinnati
Cincinnati, colloquially nicknamed Cincy, is the most populous city in Hamilton County, Ohio, United States, and its county seat. Settled in 1788, the city is located on the northern side of the confluence of the Licking and Ohio rivers, the latter of which marks the state line with Kentucky. The third-most populous city in Ohio with a population of 309,317 at the 2020 census, Cincinnati serves as the economic and cultural hub of the tri-state Cincinnati metropolitan area, Ohio's most populous metropolitan area and the nation's 30th-largest at over 2.3 million residents.
Throughout much of the 19th century, Cincinnati was among the top 10 U.S. cities by population. The city developed as an inland port for cargo shipping by steamboats, located at the crossroads of the Northern and Southern United States, with fewer immigrants and less influence from Europe than East Coast cities in the same period. However, it received a significant number of German-speaking immigrants, who founded many of the city's cultural institutions. It later developed an industrialized economy in manufacturing. Many structures in the urban core have remained intact for 200 years; in the late 1800s, Cincinnati was commonly referred to as the "Paris of America" due mainly to ambitious architectural projects such as the Music Hall, Cincinnatian Hotel, and the Roebling Suspension Bridge.
Greater Cincinnati has the 28th-largest economy in the U.S. and the fifth-largest in the Midwest, home to Fortune 500 companies Kroger, Procter & Gamble, Western & Southern, Fifth Third Bank, Cintas and American Financial Group. The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is based in the city. Institutions of higher education in Cincinnati include Xavier University and the University of Cincinnati, which is among the largest universities in the nation by enrollment. The city's major league professional sports teams include the Cincinnati Bengals, Cincinnati Reds and FC Cincinnati.
History
Etymology
Two years after the founding of the settlement then known as "Losantiville", Arthur St. Clair, the governor of the Northwest Territory, changed its name to "Cincinnati", possibly at the suggestion of the surveyor Israel Ludlow, in honor of the Society of the Cincinnati. St. Clair was at the time president of the Society, made up of Continental Army officers of the Revolutionary War. The club was named for Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a dictator of the early Roman Republic who saved Rome from a crisis and then retired to farming because he did not want to remain in power, becoming a symbol of Roman civic virtue.Early history
Cincinnati began in 1788 when Mathias Denman, Colonel Robert Patterson, and Israel Ludlow landed at a spot at the northern bank of the Ohio opposite the mouth of the Licking River and decided to settle there. The original surveyor, John Filson, named it "Losantiville", a combination of syllables drawn from French and Latin words, intended to mean "town opposite the mouth of the Licking". On January 4, 1790, St. Clair changed the name of the settlement to honor the Society of the Cincinnati.In 1811, the introduction of steamboats on the Ohio River opened up the city's trade to more rapid shipping, and the city established commercial ties with St. Louis, Missouri, and New Orleans downriver. Cincinnati was incorporated as a city on March 1, 1819. Exporting pork products and hay, it became a center of pork processing in the region. From 1810 to 1830, the city's population nearly tripled, from 9,642 to 24,831.
Construction on the Miami and Erie Canal began on July 21, 1825, when it was called the Miami Canal, related to its origin at the Great Miami River. The first section of the canal was opened for business in 1827. In 1827, the canal connected Cincinnati to nearby Middletown; by 1840, it had reached Toledo. Railroads were the next major form of commercial transportation to come to Cincinnati. In 1836, the Little Miami Railroad was chartered. Construction began soon after, to connect Cincinnati with the Mad River and Lake Erie Railroad, and provide access to the ports of the Sandusky Bay on Lake Erie.
Residents of Cincinnati played a major role in abolitionism. Many fugitive slaves used the Ohio River at Cincinnati to escape to the North. Cincinnati had numerous stations on the Underground Railroad, but there were also runaway slave catchers active in the city, who put escaping slaves at risk of recapture. Given its southern Ohio location, Cincinnati had also attracted settlers from the Upper South, who traveled along the Ohio River into the territory. Tensions between abolitionists and slavery supporters broke out in repeated violence, with whites attacking black people in 1829. Anti-abolitionists attacked black people in the city in a wave of destruction that resulted in 1,200 black people leaving the city and the country; they resettled in Canada. The riot and its refugees were topics of discussion throughout the country, and black people organized the first Negro Convention in 1830 in Philadelphia to discuss these events.
White riots against black people took place again in Cincinnati in 1836 and in 1842. In 1836 a mob of 700 pro-slavery men attacked black neighborhoods, as well as a press run by James M. Birney, publisher of the anti-slavery weekly The Philanthropist. Tensions increased after congressional passage in 1850 of the Fugitive Slave Act, which required cooperation by citizens in free states and increased penalties for failing to try to recapture escaped slaves. Levi Coffin made the Cincinnati area the center of his anti-slavery efforts in 1847. Harriet Beecher Stowe lived in Cincinnati for a time, met escaped slaves and used their stories as a basis for her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.
The city had a labor shortage until large waves of immigration by Irish and Germans in the late 1840s. The city grew rapidly over the next two decades, reaching 115,000 people by 1850. During this period of rapid expansion and prominence, residents of Cincinnati began referring to the city as the Queen City.
Industrial development and Gilded Age
Cincinnati's location, on the border between the free state of Ohio and the slave state of Kentucky, made it a prominent location for slaves to escape the slave-owning south. Many prominent abolitionists also called Cincinnati their home during this period, and made it a popular stop on the Underground Railroad. In 2004, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center was completed along Freedom Way in Downtown, honoring the city's involvement in the Underground Railroad.In 1859, Cincinnati laid out six streetcar lines. The cars were pulled by horses and the lines made it easier for people to get around the city. By 1872, Cincinnatians could travel on the streetcars within the city and transfer to rail cars for travel to the hill communities. The Cincinnati Inclined Plane Company began transporting people to the top of Mount Auburn that year. In 1889, the Cincinnati streetcar system began converting its horse-drawn cars to electric streetcars.
The Second Annual Meeting of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union was held in Cincinnati in November 1875.
In 1880, the city government completed the Cincinnati Southern Railway to Chattanooga, Tennessee. It was the only municipally owned interstate railway in the United States until its sale to Norfolk Southern in March 2024.
In 1884, outrage over a manslaughter verdict in what many observers thought was a clear case of murder triggered the Courthouse riots, one of the most destructive riots in American history. Over the course of three days, 56 people were killed and over 300 were injured. The riots ended the
regime of Republican boss Thomas C. Campbell.
20th century
At the beginning of the 20th century, Cincinnati had a population of 325,902. The city completed many ambitious projects in the 20th century starting with the Ingalls Building which was completed in 1903. An early rejuvenation of downtown began into the 1920s and continued into the next decade with the construction of Cincinnati Union Terminal, the United States Courthouse and Post Office, the Cincinnati Subway, and the 49-story Carew Tower, which was the city's tallest building upon its completion. Cincinnati weathered the Great Depression better than most American cities of its size, largely due to a resurgence in river trade, which was less expensive than transporting goods by rail. The Ohio River flood of 1937 was one of the worst in the nation's history and destroyed many areas along the Ohio valley. Afterward the city built protective flood walls.After World War II, Cincinnati unveiled a master plan for urban renewal that resulted in modernization of the inner city. During the 1950s, Cincinnati's population peaked at 509,998. Since the 1950s, $250 million has been spent on improving neighborhoods, building clean and safe low- and moderate-income housing, providing jobs and stimulating economic growth. Predominantly white, working-class families who constituted the urban core during the European immigration boom in the 19th and early 20th centuries moved to newly constructed suburbs before and after World War II. Black people, fleeing the oppression of the Jim Crow South in hopes of better socioeconomic opportunity, had moved to these older city neighborhoods in their Great Migration to the industrial North. The downturn in industry in the late 20th century caused a loss of many jobs, leaving many people in poverty and homeless.
The Avondale riot of 1967 followed years of police abuse and deteriorating living conditions in the poor black community of Avondale. The riots followed the disputed June 1967 conviction of Posteal Laskey Jr., accused of being the Cincinnati Strangler. Crowds filled the streets and threw bottles and firebombs at businesses. The Avondale riot of 1968 broke out after the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in April. A mob smashed store windows and looted the stores or burned the merchandise. One person died and 404 were arrested following the 1967 riot. Two people were killed, at least 220 injured and 260 arrested during the 1968 riot. Later in 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson's Commission on Civil Disorders issued a report that blamed the riots on the poverty of the segregated neighborhoods in Cincinnati and the practice of police officers in "stopping Negroes on foot or in cars without obvious basis" and using loitering laws disproportionately against minorities.