Founding
city in and seat of Hamilton County, Ohio, United States
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Cincinnati ( SIN-sin-AT-ee; colloquially nicknamed Cincy) is the most populous city in Hamilton County, Ohio, United States, and its county seat. It is located along the Ohio River across from its confluence with the Licking River in Kentucky. Cincinnati is the third-most populous city in Ohio (after Columbus and Cleveland), and the 66th-most populous city in the U.S., with a population of 309,317 at the 2020 census. The city 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.
Settled in 1788, Cincinnati was among the top 10 U.S. cities by population throughout much of the 19th century. Located at the crossroads of the Northern and Southern United States, the city developed as an inland port for cargo shipping by steamboats; this location also made it a hub of Underground Railroad activity. Although it had fewer immigrants and thus less influence from Europe than major East Coast cities in the same period, it received a significant number of German-speaking immigrants, who founded many of the city's early cultural institutions. Cincinnati later developed a manufacturing industrial economy as railroads displaced river traffic in the 20th century.
Greater Cincinnati has the 28th-largest economy in the U.S. and the fifth-largest in the Midwest, and is home to Fortune 500 companies Kroger, Procter & Gamble, GE Aerospace, Western & Southern, Fifth Third Bank, Cincinnati Financial, Cintas, and American Financial Group. The region's economy encompasses consumer goods, retail, aerospace, financial services, and business services. Its institutions of higher education include the University of Cincinnati and Xavier University. Cincinnati is also the seat of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
Cincinnati is home to a range of cultural institutions and historic landmarks. 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 Cincinnati Music Hall and the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge. Other landmarks include the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Cincinnati Museum Center housed within Union Terminal, and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. It is also known for Cincinnati chili. The city's major league professional sports teams include the Cincinnati Bengals (NFL), Cincinnati Reds (MLB), and FC Cincinnati (MLS).
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. The name was chosen in honor of the Society of the Cincinnati, made up of Continental Army officers of the Revolutionary War, of which St. Clair was then president. The society, in turn, 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 has many nicknames, including Cincy (or Cinci), the Queen City or Queen City of the West, the Blue Chip City, the City of Seven Hills, and Porkopolis. The traditional Queen City nickname is taken from an 1819 newspaper article and further immortalized by the 1854 poem "Catawba Wine". In it, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote of the city:
And this Song of the Vine, This greeting of mine, The winds and the birds shall deliver, To the Queen of the West, In her garlands dressed, On the banks of the Beautiful River.
For many years, Cincinnati was known as "Porkopolis" after the prominence of the pork processing and sales industry in the city. In 1988, the city built a park, Bicentennial Commons, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the city's founding and commissioned British artist Andrew Leicester to create a sculpture for the entrance. Leicester came up with four steamboat smokestacks, a nod to the city's riverboat history, each topped with a winged pig. Initial reaction was derision, but the city soon embraced the "Flying Pigs"; the city's Flying Pig Marathon was named after them, and the city's Big Pig Gig inspired by them. The city has used it as a symbol and a brand.
One nickname, the City of Seven Hills, stems from the June 1853 edition of the West American Review, "Article III—Cincinnati: Its Relations to the West and South", which described and named seven specific hills. The hills form a crescent around the city: Mount Adams, Walnut Hills, Mount Auburn, Vine Street Hill, College Hill, Fairmont (now rendered Fairmount), and Mount Harrison (now known as Price Hill). The name refers to the Seven hills of Rome. Newer nicknames such as "The 'Nati" are emerging and are attempted to be used in different cultural contexts. For example, the local Keep America Beautiful affiliate, Keep Cincinnati Beautiful, introduced the catchphrase "Don't Trash the 'Nati" in 1998 as part of a litter-prevention campaign.
Cincinnati was founded 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". In 1789, Fort Washington was established in the town and became the major staging place and conduit for settlers, troops and supplies during the settlement of the Northwest Territory. Governor Arthur St. Clair changed the name of the settlement to honor the Society of the Cincinnati on January 4, 1790.
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 the ports of St. Louis 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 on Lake Erie. 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.
Residents of Cincinnati played a major role in abolitionism. Many fugitive slaves used the Ohio River at Cincinnati to escape to the North. Cincinnati had numerous stations on the Underground Railroad, but there were also runaway slave catchers active in the city, who put escaping slaves at risk of recapture. Given its southern Ohio location, Cincinnati had also attracted settlers from the Upper South who traveled along the Ohio River into the territory. Tensions between abolitionists and supporters of slavery broke out in repeated violence, with whites attacking black people in 1829 in a wave of destruction that resulted in 1,200 black people leaving for Canada. The riot and its refugees became 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. In 1836 a mob of 700 pro-slavery men attacked black neighborhoods and a press run by James M. Birney, publisher of the anti-slavery weekly The Philanthropist. 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. Abolitionist Levi Coffin made the Cincinnati area the center of his anti-slavery efforts in 1847. Harriet Beecher Stowe lived in Cincinnati for a time, where she met escaped slaves and used their stories as a basis for her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), which was crucial in galvanizing public support for the abolitionist cause.
The city had a labor shortage until large waves of immigration from Ireland and Germany in the late 1840s. The city grew rapidly over the next two decades, reaching 115,000 people by 1850. During this period of rapid expansion and prominence, residents of Cincinnati began referring to the city as the Queen City.
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 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 Cincinnati, honoring the city's involvement in the Underground Railroad.
In 1859, Cincinnati laid out six horsecar lines. By 1872, Cincinnatians could travel on the streetcars within the city and transfer to rail cars for travel to the hill communities. The Cincinnati Inclined Plane Company began transporting people to the top of Mount Auburn via funicular that year. In 1889, the Cincinnati streetcar system began converting its horse-drawn cars to electric streetcars.
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 dominance of Republican political boss Thomas C. Campbell.
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, and the Carew Tower, which was the city's tallest building upon its completion. A subway system was planned but abandoned fairly early in its delayed construction due to shortages caused by World War I, escalating costs, and the onset of the Great Depression. Cincinnati managed through the 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 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 quickly 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. Crowds filled the streets and threw bottles and firebombs at businesses. 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. One person died and 404 were arrested following the 1967 riot. Two people were killed, at least 220 injured and 260 arrested during the 1968 riot. 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.
Paycor Stadium (home of the Cincinnati Bengals) opened in 2000, and Great American Ball Park (home of the Cincinnati Reds) opened in 2003, both funded by a sales tax increase in Hamilton County passed in 1996.
In April 2001, race riots occurred in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood 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 American Civil Liberties Union, Cincinnati Black United Front, the city and its police union agreed upon a more community-oriented policing strategy. The agreement has been used as a model across the country for building law enforcement-based relationships between local communities and police. Subsequently, substantial transformations unfolded, particularly the gentrification of Over-the-Rhine.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Cincinnati”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.