Cincinnati ( SIN-sih-NAT-ee; 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 (after Columbus and Cleveland), 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 19th century, 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.
Timeline
Full History
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. 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. 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. 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 (1852). 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. 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. 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. |image2 = Over-the-rhine-canal.jpg |caption2 = Over-the-Rhine in 1914 }} 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. 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. 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. In April 2001, racially charged riots occurred after police fatally shot a young unarmed black man, Timothy Thomas, during a foot pursuit to arrest him, mostly for outstanding traffic warrants. After the 2001 riots, the ACLU, Cincinnati Black United Front, the city and its police union agreed upon a community-oriented policing strategy. The agreement has been used as a model across the country for building relationships between police and local communities. Subsequently, substantial transformations unfolded, particularly in the process of gentrification within the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood. In 2015, unarmed black motorist Samuel DuBose was fatally shot by white University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing after a routine traffic stop. The resulting legal proceedings in late 2016 became a recurring focus of national news media. Several protests involving the Black Lives Matter movement were carried out. In 2018, MLS announced the inclusion of FC Cincinnati, becoming the city's third professional sports team.
Source: Wikipedia