Frederick Alms, a native Cincinnatian born in 1839, graduated from Woodward High School and began to work for an uncle in the dry goods business. He heard Abraham Lincoln’s “bugle blast” in 1861 and enlisted in the Union Army, along with his cousin William Doepke. Their regiment, the Sixth Ohio Volunteers, saw hard service in[…]
Tag Archives: Philanthropy
Low Cost Housing: Gordon Hotel
Jacob Schmidlapp (see a recent low-cost housing post) continued his mission to produce affordable, decent housing in Walnut Hills from 1911 until his death in 1919. Another project called the Gordon Hotel, provided an alternative to the rooming houses in the neighborhood. Schmidlapp himself provided an excellent summary of the building in his short book[…]
Low Cost Housing History – Jacob Schmidlapp
Jacob Schmidlapp moved from his native Piqua, Ohio, to Memphis, Tennessee shortly after the civil war, where he went in to the tobacco and cigar business. In 1874, he moved to Cincinnati and made his fortune in distilling. He was a self-made man whose fortune rivaled those of established families like the Emerys and the[…]
Dow Drugs
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw an explosion of consumer products, and produced a revolution in retail sales. Where were the new economic actors going to buy and sell all that stuff? Drug stores stepped into the breach, expanding from pharmaceutical products and hard candy to a plethora of new products, including bathing[…]
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[…]
Children’s Hospital founders
In 1883, three Episcopalian women determined to open a new hospital in Cincinnati to care for sick children. The idea originated with a Mrs. Robert Dayton, herself left nameless in standard histories of the hospital. Mrs. Dayton wanted to save sick children from the frightening and dangerous environments in adult hospitals at the time. She[…]
