Cincinnati historical timeline

Cincinnati was the first great city of the American west and then stopped being the west.

Founding

Settled in 1788 and named for the Society of the Cincinnati, an association of Revolutionary War officers named in turn for a Roman general who returned to his plough. Its position on the Ohio made it the gateway for settlement of the interior.

Queen City

By the 1840s it was the sixth-largest city in the United States and the largest west of the Appalachians, processing so much pork that it was known as Porkopolis — the disassembly lines of its slaughterhouses were studied by Henry Ford’s engineers. Steamboat building, brewing and machine tools followed.

Germans and the river border

Enormous German immigration from the 1830s built Over-the-Rhine and the brewing industry. The city was also directly across the river from slave-holding Kentucky, which made it a crossing point on the Underground Railroad, and Harriet Beecher Stowe lived here and drew on what she saw.

Eclipse

Railways displaced river trade and Chicago took the west. Cincinnati stopped growing around 1900 and has been roughly the same size since.

The 1937 flood

In January 1937 the Ohio rose to nearly 80 feet at Cincinnati, about 25 feet above flood stage, putting much of the basin and the riverside industry under water for weeks and leaving a large part of the valley homeless. It remains the reference flood for the whole river, and the concrete flood walls and the raised approaches along both banks date from the federal works that followed it.

Twentieth century

Prohibition destroyed the breweries, Over-the-Rhine emptied, and highway building cut the basin. Restoration from the 2000s has reversed part of it.