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The United States’ declaration of war on Germany in April 1917 resulted in a tragic display of hysteria directed against everything and anything German. In Cincinnati, German teachers were dismissed from public schools, German professors were censored, German collections and publications were removed from circulation at the Public Library, businesses with German names had their names “Americanized” and, by police order, only English language public meetings could be held. (Continued on other side)
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In 1749, the French in North America perceived a threat by British expansion west of the Allegheny Mountains to the Ohio River Valley and beyond. The French commander, Pierre Joseph Celeron, sieur de Blainville, with 250 men, left Montreal, New France, to establish French claims. They buried inscribed lead plates at the mouths of six important tributaries to the Ohio River. Three lead plates have been recovered, one was sent to England, and two are in American historical societies. The final plate was buried just west of here at the mouth of the Great Miami River, before the detachment turned north. However, after the British captured Montreal in 1760, French claims east of the Mississippi River were ceded to Britain by the 1793 Treaty of Paris. British Parliament annexed to Quebec (now Canada) and controlled all lands north of the Ohio River until 1776.(Continued on other side)
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A group of concerned Cincinnati women organized, in 1855, The Protestant Home for the Friendless and Female Guardian Society as a private, not-for-profit maternity home for destitute women and children. These public minded social leaders were aware that Cincinnati had grown beyond the time when the poor or unfortunate were cared for by their neighbors. The Home, which was funded through bequests and personal donations, was founded to care for poor mothers and babies, unmarried pregnant women, wanderers and strangers in the city, and to promote adoptions. (Continued on other side)
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In memory of the Irish people who left a country where only their rivers run free. The Irish came to Cincinnati where they contributed to housing, education, employment, religious freedom, medical care and recreation, and embraced all aspects of life in the city. The descendants of Irish immigrants hope that our hands will ever be extended in friendship and never in want.
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Considered a bold experiment in community planning, Greenhills was intended to relieve an acute housing shortage and to provide jobs during the Great Depression. In 1935, the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the construction of three greenbelt communities: Greendale, Wisconsin; Greenbelt, Maryland; and Greenhills, Ohio. The construction of Greenhills began on December 16, 1935. The project generated thousands of jobs and, ultimately, 676 units of housing for working people. On April 1, 1938, the first Greenhills “Pioneers” moved into homes on Avenell Lane. Greenhills reflects the town planning principles of the English “garden city” movement. Planners clustered homes around a common green space and a community shopping area was within easy walking distance. Like the original greenbelt of forests and farms, today Winton Woods Park serves as a buffer for the Village. The original federally built center of Greenhills was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1989.
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A school has stood on this site almost continuously since the late 1840s. The first school here was the Newell School, a white-frame, one-room school in use from approximately 1847 to 1939. The building was a part of the Newell Rural School District, which extended from the north border of Greenhills to present-day Interstate 275. Area schools consolidated in 1939 and the Newell district was absorbed into the Science Hall Rural School District and then into the Greenhills Rural School District (later renamed the Greenhills/Forest Park School District). The site of the old Newell School is now a part of the Winton Woods City Schools. The building directly behind this marker opened in 1968 as Forest Park High School and later became Winton Woods High School.
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The United Society of Believers (or “Shakers,” as they are commonly known) established White Water, the last of four Ohio Shaker villages, in 1824. White Water flourished throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At its peak during the 1850s, 150 Believers living in three semi-autonomous Shaker “families” farmed 1,300 acres of land in Crosby and adjacent Morgan townships. The Shakers were among the most successful religious societies in the United States. Belief in the equality of men and women, separation of the sexes, celibacy, communal ownership of property, and a distinctive style of worship — characterized by rhythmic movements and shaking — helped define the Shaker lifestyle. (Continued on other side)
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In 1862, less than a mile upriver from this marker, the John Lithoberry Shipyard in Cincinnati constructed the Sultana, a 260-foot, wooden steam transport. At the end of the Civil War, the U.S. Government contracted the Sultana to transport recently freed Federal prisoners north from Confederate stockades. During the night of April 27, 1865, while carrying over 2,300 Union soldiers – over six times its capacity of 376 passengers – a steam boiler aboard the Sultana exploded. The ship erupted in a massive fireball and sank in the cold, flood-swollen Mississippi River ten miles north of Memphis, Tennessee. Over 1,700 individuals died – some 200 more than those lost aboard the Titanic in 1912 – in what remains the worst maritime disaster in American history. Of the total casualties, Ohio lost the most of any state, with 791 dead. Indiana lost 491 persons, with Kentucky suffering 194 dead. It is estimated that, of the Ohio casualties, over fifty were Cincinnatians.
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