24 May 2019 The Building From the late-1800s, the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County (PLCH) was beginning to search for solutions to their over-crowded building, downtown. This led them to seek funds from Andrew Carnegie’s foundation. They didn’t get a new main library building, as they wished, but their inquiry led to the[…]
Tag Archives: Culture
Eden Park after Reconstruction: Presidents, Politics and Forestry
The 1882 Arbor Day celebration intersected with other history around the end of Reconstruction. It was as much an occasion for forgetting as for remembering – forgetting the Civil War and remembering a longer shared American history, reintegrating the states of the southern rebellion into the Union. The chance meeting of Col. A. E. Jones[…]
Baldwin Piano
D.H. Baldwin, a music teacher in Cincinnati, began selling pianos in about 1862; his stock included Chickering and Steinway products. In 1865, he hired a Civil War veteran name Lucien Wulsin as a clerk. Their success as dealers grew, and Baldwin and Wulsin, partners from 1873, opened showrooms in other cities. They lost their Steinway[…]
Frances Jones Poetker
Frances Jones Poetker, of “Jones the Florist,” was born in Walnut Hills in 1913. The family had moved the floral business from Northern Kentucky to McMillan Street around 1900, and lived on Park Avenue, immediately around the corner from the shop. In the late 1920’s they constructed an elegant new building with a three-story atrium[…]
Mary Emery
Mary Emery, one of the founders of what became Children’s Hospital, moved with her husband into a mansion they built in Walnut Hills in 1881. They called their house “Edgecliffe;” just east of Eden Park, it shared the same sweeping view of the Ohio River. When her husband died in 1906, Mary inherited a guided[…]
Cincinnati Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs
African American Cincinnatians fared better than their sisters and brothers in the South during the years of Jim Crow beginning in the 1880’s, but even in this northern city they suffered tremendous radical prejudice and found themselves excluded from social services extended to the white population. African American women often took the lead in programs[…]
