Our previous post looked at the Abraham Lincoln monument in Avondale, both today and when it was constructed in 1902. The most famous incident at the monument in living memory came in the summer of 1967, beginning on June 11. The site was the center of the revolt or civil unrest on the part of[…]
Tag Archives: Black History
Scene near Walnut Hills: Abraham Lincoln Monument
Venturing on a walk from Walnut Hills to our neighbors in Avondale, I passed the Abraham Lincoln Memorial at the corner of Rockdale and Reading, outside South Avondale School. The scene was colorful, solemn, appropriate, and extremely moving to me. A monument and a corner that has seen much controversy over the years, it has[…]
Sadie Samuels: What Success Looked Like for a Black Woman in the early Twentieth Century
Sadie Samuels was born in 1892 in Cincinnati’s West End. In the 1900 census the household included the eight-year-old Sadie, an African-American girl; her grandfather Thomas Young, a wounded veteran of the US Colored Troops during the Civil War; her father James who worked on the railroad; her mother Margaret and her baby brother James,[…]
Baseball venues in Walnut Hills
The Deer Creek Commons, built over a large culvert down the valley between Gilbert Avenue and Reading Road, included the greatest amateur baseball venue in Cincinnati during the first half of the twentieth century. Deer Creek Commons was the home field for the Cincinnati Eclipse Black baseball team in the late 1920s and ‘30s, a[…]
Baseball venues: Walnut Hills Ashland Park
The parks plans of the progressive era not only resulted in the construction of large facilities like the Deer Creek Commons considered in the last post; Cincinnati also set about building a number of small neighborhood parks. In 1911 the new Park Board spent more than $10,000 for an acre of land in Walnut Hills[…]
Jennie Jackson DeHart and the Fisk Jubilee Singers
Jennie Jackson sang in the original Fish Jubilee Singers beginning in 1871. In 1885 she married the Nashville preacher Andrew J. DeHart, and the couple promptly returned to DeHart’s hometown of Cincinnati. Jennie Jackson Dehart continued her concert career with variations on the Jubilee Singers as her husband took over as principal at the Colored[…]
DeHart Hubbard and Baseball in Cincinnati
William DeHart Hubbard was born in Walnut Hills in 1903, named after the well-respected principal A. J. DeHart at the segregated Frederick Douglass School in the neighborhood. Hubbard went on to the original Walnut Hills High School at Ashland and Burdette, just three a three block walk from Douglass. At both schools he was a[…]
Andrew J. DeHart: Education and Sports at Frederick Douglass School
Andrew J. DeHart was born in Mississippi in 1855. His early biography is obscure, but by in 1870 he was in Cincinnati, enrolled in the new segregated Gaines Colored High School in the West end. DeHart earned a place on the list of meritorious students for all four of his high school years and graduated[…]
Granville T. Woods, Electrical Engineer
Black engineer Granville T Woods spent a crucial decade in Cincinnati beginning in the early 1880’s, devising and patenting inventions mostly at the intersection of electricity and railroads. To dispense quickly with the Walnut Hills connection, Woods never lived in our neighborhood; for a while, he made his home on Fulton Avenue near the foot[…]
A brief history of the Frederick Douglass School buildings
1855: Dangerfield Earley’s School Before the Civil War many African Americans settled in Cincinnati. The city had a separate system of Colored Public Schools for their children. The suburb of Walnut Hills also had a private African American school run by Dangerfield Earley, minister of the First Church founded in 1856. The Rev. Earley held[…]
