A Tour of College Hill
College Hill Realtor Tour Notes
These are Ed Loyd's notes for a Realtor Tour of College Hill on April 1, 2009.
Start at College Hill Coffee Company heading north on Hamilton Avenue
Many of you may recall Schuler’s Wigwam that was formerly on this site and Kroger’s that was across the street but what you may not know about was the Car Barn and Linden Park Hotel that were also on this corner. The hotel lent its name to the mixed use development we expect to see when the economy rebounds.
Right on Hollywood
This is the northeastern part of College Hill, which was primarily developed from farmland after World War II by the developers Jack Wittekind and Thomas Wood, who are the namesakes for Wittekind Terrace and Thomwood Avenue here. No doubt our next street, Edwood was named for another relative.
Right on Edwood
Now I want to tell you about house we’re going to get a sneak peak at when we get to the intersection at North Bend. You’ll see over to our left a large white frame house and that was the residence of Coleman Avery.
Ohio Supreme Court Justice Coleman Avery, who raised horses and Irish terriers on a 42 acre farm on North Bend Road. In 1938, distraught over substantial financial losses in the market (a situation none of us could possibly identify with today) and already having suffered from a nervous breakdown, he shot his wife in the back of the head, as she was preparing strawberries for breakfast and then he shot himself.
They were both found lying on the floor of the kitchen; he fully dressed with an overcoat on, when the police burst into the home after having been called by the caretaker. Avery’s first wife had died and his second marriage to Sara Loving was one of the “social events of the season” in 1934. While their marriage appeared a happy one, with his failing health, he didn’t want his new wife to inherit any of his money, some say. Regardless, it was a great tragedy.
A year later, a large auction was held at the home that was attended by more than 500 people. They started in the barn selling rolls of wire fence, hay and other tools and then adjourned to the yard where a library of 2,000 volumes and antiques, including a number of Chippendale pieces, American and old English glassware, Chinese brasses, bronzes, oil paintings, four poster beds, numerous furnishings and 12 canes from around the world decorated in gold and agate. There were even seven Irish terriers among the 700 lots of items. Perhaps, if they had just held more auctions in the first place, there wouldn’t have been any need of a murder-suicide.
Right on North Bend Road
So there is the Avery house….
On the right you see the Northern Hills Branch of the Cincinnati Library and the Pleasant Hill School.
Previously on this site was the Crawford’s Old Men’s Home, which was established in 1888 specifically for the benefit of black men. John Crawford had left his home and estate for this purpose in gratitude and thanks to all the slaves who had helped him to escape Libby Prison and return to Ohio during the Civil War. The Crawford home later merged to form the Lincoln-Crawford Home in Walnut Hills.
Left on Argus
Now in the earliest days of College Hill…back in 1796, Aaron Waggoner built a log cabin near North Bend and Argus. He afterwards became our first neighborhood lunatic and wandered harmlessly from house to house clad in an Indian blanket and terrorized children. He built a cave in the side of the hill and lived their alone much of the time to an advanced age. This area later became the Pierson farm, where 120 homes were built in the early 1900s by Newbold Pierson around from Kenneth, Cedar and Argus and encompassing all of Leffingwell, Homeside and Atwell.
Right on Cedar Avenue
Newly constructed home
There are a couple of Sears catalogue houses on Cedar and we will pass one in a minute I will point out to you…
And we also have St. Clare Catholic Church here, though we aren’t going to go by it, which for 25 years met in an unfinished basement of the building before the sanctuary was built in the 1950s…like many parishes they built the school first and then had to put the rest on hold with the Great Depression.
The Post Office is just beyond that.
Left on Lantana Avenue
Now, if we had turned the other way on Lantana we would have run into a street called Elkton, and that’s where a girl in the 1930s lived by the name of Doris Kappelhoff. She got a great break from College Hill neighbor Powel Crosley Jr., who invited her to perform on a WLW radio program and she did a great job. So, what was to be done with a name like that. Rename her Doris Day, of course!
Right on Groesbeck Road
College Hill Railroad…house garage at an angle…
Jacob Tuckerman House, mathametics professor and president of Farmers’ College…
The next home was built by Sarah Brooks, a teacher at the Ohio Female College and it was once a boarding house and a school for girls. It later was owned by the Gray family, who gave their name to Gray Road, and were the first to start all the horticultural businesses down Gray Road in back of Spring Grove Cemetery, which are still there today.
Right on Hamilton Avenue
College Hill Presbyterian Church
New firehouse under construction
You can also see that many of the Store fronts in the business district have recently been renovated
Left on Cedar Avenue
Here at the corner in the Dow building there used to be a soda fountain shop in the 1910s and one of the school kids who worked there, jerks as they we called, was a young Tyrone Power who went on in the 1920s to be one of the first heartthrob sensations in Hollywood.
The College Hill Elementary School on the left was modeled after Jefferson’s University of Virginia. It was dedicated May 21, 1927 by Dr. Randall Condon, Superintendent of Schools. Walter Aiken, Director of Music. William Shroeder, President of the Board of Education, and one of the keynote speakers was Dr. Withrow. Today, four Cincinnati public schools are named for these gentlemen - Aiken, Shroeder, Withrow and Condon.
The large Victorian home here at the top of the hill, known at “Tree Knoll,” belonged to William Simpson, who was president of American Rolling Mills in Hamilton. The Simpsons were a large family and of the four brothers, each was the president of his own manufacturing or insurance company.
Straight on Lathrop
Left on Llainfair
Now, when College Hill was annexed to Cincinnati in 1911 there were a number of streets that had to change their names since there were already other Maple avenues in the city, for example. Llainfair is one of those and it was named for a town in Wales…but this only the first part of the name…it’s actually 58 letters long.
Llanfair pwll gwyngyll gogery chwyrnd rob wllllanty siliogog ogoch
The locals called it Llainfair P.G.
The translation of all that from Welsh is: "St. Mary's Church in the hollow of white hazel near a rapid whirlpool and the Church of St. Tysilio near the red cave."
Llainfair Retirement Community
Right on Davey
This is Davey Avenue and though the house is now gone, this street was the birthplace of the Crosley Radios. Powel Crosley Jr. was a native of College Hill…
Left on Larch Avenue
In addition to being the home of inventors like Crosley, on Larch is the home of famed Cincinnati artist Caroline Williams, whose pen and ink sketches recorded Cincinnati before so many remarkable building were lost to the “progress of the 1950s and 60s. The current owner actually found one of her early drawings on the wall in the attic …
She did 55 sketches alone on College Hill homes and buildings so it’s quite a remarkable treasure trove.
Right on Hamilton Avenue
On the right you see a beautifully maintained frame house that dates to the 1820s. It was in this home in 1833 that the first four students of the Pleasant Hill Academy came to take their lessons from Freeman Cary, which was the genesis of his educational career and the school that later became Farmers’ College, which I’ll talk more about in a few minutes. The home was later the residence of a series of College Hill physicians, including Drs. Johnson, McChesney and Kilgour.
Left into Children’s Hospital
Our next stop is the grounds of the Ohio Female College, which was established in 1848.
In the 25 years of its history, until it doors were closed in 1873, the Ohio Female College was one of the few institutions of its era where women could seek an advanced education. In fact, it was one of just five in the 1850s!
Naturally, this was also a place of interest for the young gentlemen of nearby Farmers’ College. The two groups were carefully chaperoned, their only common appearance being at the Presbyterian Church services on Sunday mornings.
There also was a healthy exchange of witty barbs between the newspapers of the Female College, which was The Dew Drop and The Thunderbolt of Farmers’ College.
As a sample of these exchanges let me offer this. Said The Thunderbolt: “The Dew Drop speaks very frequently of flats! The flattest things we have been able to discover are its pages.”
Retorted The Dew Drop: “Why are certain classic students of Farmers’ College more favored than Enoch? Because he had but one translation, while they have many.”
Following the closure on the Female College, the property became the campus of the Cincinnati Sanitarium, which was renamed in 1954 as Emerson A North Hospital. Today, the main building was constructed in 1988 and continues to be a place of reflection and healing.
Stop to point out Wilson House and Underground Railroad designation
Left on Hamilton Avenue
On the right here you see the Grace Episcopal Church, which was started in 1866 on the grounds of one of the previous buildings of Farmers’ College.
Now a College Hill girl, Olivia Avery, married a guy in this church named Phillip Hubert Frohman. He was from 1921 until his death in 1972 the architect of the Washington National Cathedral and is responsible for the realization of that remarkable space in our nation’s capitol. Frohman wasn’t a stranger to College Hill. In fact, he donated plans for a new vestry at Grace Church in 1916 that were not used due to their expense. He was a great grandson of General Doisy, who’ll mention when we go up Belmont Avenue.
He was also the nephew of the famous Broadway producer, Charles Frohman, who sank with the Lusitania, allegedly saying “Why fear death? It is the greatest adventure in life.”
Left on Hillcrest Road & Lanius Lane
Now our next stop is going to be at the LaBoiteaux Woods Nature Center, which was a gift to the city from Charles Louis LaBoiteaux in 1939.
LaBoiteaux grounds, were filled with native oak, maple, hickory, chestnut, walnut, cherry, hackberry, ironwood and even pawpaw trees. In particular, there was a towering oak grove on the property, with a number of them still standing. One mighty oak was more than 96 feet tall and its colossal trunk was determined in 1931 to be one of the largest in the county. The trunk circumference, measured 17 feet!
Now, while we are here I went you to note the deep ravine between here and Hamilton Avenue. This was one of the principal routes for fleeing slaves along the Underground Railroad.
Retrace Lanius Lane
Now Lanius Lane was named after on of College Hill’s characters Len Lanius, who had careers in wrestling, the martial arts, agriculture and optometry. Much like the young Theodore Roosevelt, he became interested in athletics in his youth after doctors said he was unlikely to live to the age of 20. Building up his strength, Lanius became an avid wrestler and won 70 straight “combats without losing a fall.” By the early 1890s he had become the light-weight wrestling champion of the world—at least that was his lifelong claim.
During the 1890s the story goes, a friend gave him two hens and told Lanius to fatten them up ant the invite him to dinner. While waiting for the hens to fatten he went out of town to full several engagements, and when he returned, Lanius’ wife Minnie asked him not to kill the birds but to keep them for the eggs they were laying. From this start he began to build up a business, which soon became one of the largest poultry yards in Ohio: the College Hill Poultry Farm. It was headquartered at his farm on the present day Lanius Lane for more than 30 years.
Left on Hillcrest Road
Pierson Simpson House…ghost story (if time)
Left on Hamilton Avenue
Note on the left some of the Strong, Avery, Aiken homes.
Left into Hammond North
The Hammond North, which was built in 1965 and today contains 181 condos. This was built near the site of the LaBoiteaux octagonal home that once proudly stood on the ridge.
It was a fanciful home built by Isaac Newton LaBoiteaux, a successful Cincinnati jeweler, whose family lived atop their bluff for more than 80 years. However, they built a second more practical home in which later generations lived and used the octagonal house for storage and a curiosity site for family guests. You might be interested to know that the house had eight gables, each with a balcony and support column, and the porch, which wrapped around the entire house, measured 232 feet.
The panoramic view you can enjoy here embraces much of the Mill Creek Valley and Montgomery, Pleasant Ridge, Bond Hill, Madisonville, Mt. Lookout, Avondale, Walnut Hills, Mt. Auburn, Clifton, the West End, Westwood and Cheviot.
Samuel Hannaford donated the architectural plans for the original building, of what was called the Methodist Home until 1982 when it was renamed Twin Towers. Today, the campus has been significantly remodeled and modernized with a health center and other facilities and complemented by new apartment and independent patio homes.
Right on Hamilton Avenue
Left on S. Ridge Drive (Twin Towers)
Our next stop is Twin Towers, which began in 1903 with the donation of the home and surrounding land by Obed Wilson, which had been his family’s summer residence. Unlike those Cincinnatians who run off to Michigan in the summer today, Wilson was content to leave what he termed the “social whirl” of Clifton for College Hill. He was a partner in the firm of Wilson & Hinkle, the publishing company that we recall by its later name, The American Book Company.
Left on Hamilton Avenue
Obed Wilson and Sam Cary house sites, Glenwood Apartments
Left on Belmont Avenue
· Stop at Recreation Center 5545 Belmont Ave (drive through circular parking lot)
We owe to Freeman Cary’s vision and work the very name of our community. For without him we may never have come to be known by anything other than Pleasant Hill.
This is the site of the main building of Farmers’ College, Cary Hall, which in 1846 fulfilled Cary’s vision of an institution of higher learning with the object “to direct and cultivate the minds of students in a thorough and scientific course of studies, particularly adapted to agricultural pursuits.” It was the first such institution of its kind in the county, predating the land grant colleges and any public assistance by more than 15 years.
An entire afternoon could be devoted to the College, its history and its famous teachers and students. Among the “old boys” can be even counted a President of the United States, who began to court his future First Lady here in College Hill. This college crowded a significant amount of educational achievement in its first decades.
the bursting cannons of the Civil War decreased the enrollment so significantly it led to financial strains and the school was forced to sell its model farm, and within a few years even to admit women! Even so in 1890 the board determined to abandon the work of a college and they formed a college preparatory school, the Ohio Military Institute, which operated until 1958.
There are still a number of longtime residents of College Hill who can remember the cannon firing at 6 a.m. each day, and the students drilling in their uniforms on the campus or around the Town Hall.
In 2007 we celebrated the dedication of an Ohio Historical Marker here that commemorates the history of all the colleges through which we earned our name.
Dr. Bishop’s Scottish Mound
Continue up Belmont
Sayre House—College Hill Hotel
Upson house
Aiken High School
Town Hall by Hannaford
The first home on the left actually started life as the rectory for Grace Church but it was moved to this site in 1953. An earlier home here had been built here by Major Adelbert Jacques Doisy de Villargennes, aka “the General,”
…who was the first senior warden of Grace church, who in addition to speaking seven languages, fought with Napoleon, was imprisoned in Scotland befriending Sir Walter Scott, became a professor of French in Ireland and eventually landed in Cincinnati where he was also the consul general of Italy and Ireland. In addition to the architect great-grandson Hubert Frohman I mentioned, he had another descendant who won a Nobel Prize for isolating vitamin K.
Lewis Crosley House brother of Powel Jr.
Charles & General Cist
Flamm’s grocery
Poundsford property
Underground Railroad house
Left on Glenview
With the exception of the Church building and a carriage house I’ll explain, every home on Glenview predates 1910, some were built as early as the 1830s.
The Huntington/Simpson house was originally a stage stop for travelers.
Poundsford carriage house has a Flemish gables rising above a green tile roof. The family had planned to build a similarly styled mansion but Mrs. P wouldn’t allow them to tear down the old Victorian home, which finally gave way in 1968 when the property was sold to a church group.
The Italianate Henshaw house was built in 1870 but a rear wing is believed to date back to the 1830s. The next three homes were all built by a local builder named Andrew Forbes.
Of these, is the Coy-Crowley House. First built for the author of a Latin textbook, it later became the home of a UC professor and naturalist who raised goats…and they were invited to roam around on the first floor of the home. To this day the house is known as “Goat Manor.”
Now up on the corner, the Swiss chalet home we passed was built by the Rammelsburg family, which owned Mitchell-Rammelburg Furniture Co. and Mrs. Rammelsburg was a sister of Peter Thomson who built Laurel Court.
Right on Glenview
The Oaks
Right on Belmont
Before I wrap up, you know today is April Fool’s Day so I may have slipped in a bit of made up history on you….can anyone tell me which of the following was NOT true:
· Powel Crosley began his radio empire in a College Hill attic
· Doris Day grew up in the neighborhood.
· Actor Tyrone Powers was a soda jerk on Hamilton Avenue
· Len Lanius was heavy-weight champion of the world
· There was a Coleman Avery murder-suicide
· Farmers’ College was the first agricultural school in the nation
· There was a Scottish burial mound behind the school for Dr. Bishop
· The Underground Railroad came through College Hill
· There was street car service to College Hill
· There is a connection between Grace Church, College Hill and the Washington National Cathedral.
· General Doisy fought with Napoleon and befriended Sir Walter Scott in prison.
· President Benjamin Harrison started courting future First Lady Lucy Scott Harrison in College Hill.
They are all true!!!
Don’t be fooled. College Hill has an exciting and vibrant history…and all of us at the College Hill Historical Soceity are glad to help you or any of your clients to find out more about the history of their home or the community.
