Ohio Counties
Adams
Historical
Collections of Ohio
By Henry Howe
Vol. I
©1888
HAMILTON COUNTY
Page 738
(By courtesy of Publishers of the New
England Magazine.)
THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE.
Page 739
Hamilton was the established in the Northwestern Territory.
It was formed January 2, 1790, by proclamation of Governor St CLAIR named from Gen.
Alexander HAMILTON. Its original boundaries were thus defined: Beginning on the
Ohio river, at the confluence of the little Miami, and down the said Ohio to
the mouth of the Big Miami; and up said Miami to the standing stone forks or
branch of said river and thence with a line to be drawn due cast to the Little
Miami, and down said Little Miami river to the place of
beginning.’’ The surface is generally rolling; the lands clay, and
in the valleys deep alluvion, with a substratum of sand. Its agriculture
includes a great variety of fruits and vegetables for the Cincinnati market.
Area about 400 square miles. In 1887 the acres cultivated
were 68,458; in pasture, 19,468; woodland, 10,774; lying waste, 5,619; produced
in wheat, 163,251 bushels; rye, 34,390; buckwheat, 110; oats, 116,500; barley;
34,390; corn, 468,501; broom corn, 2,345 pounds brush; meadow hay, 16,573 tons;
clover hay, 3,915; potatoes 190,398 bushels; tobacco, 25,460 pounds;
butter,7,413; cheese, 9,950; sorghum, 15 gallons; maple syrup, 454; honey,
7,413 pounds; eggs, 327,650 dozen; grapes, 235,235 pounds; wine, 3,091 gallons;
Sweet potatoes 11,314 bushels; apples, 1,910; peaches, 2,327; pears 1,195;
wool, 9,405 pounds; milch cows owned, 9,714; milk, 3,779,048 gallons. School
census, 1888, 99,049; teachers, 1,031; miles of railroad track, 545.
|
Township And Census |
1840 |
1880 |
|
Township And Census |
1840 |
1880 |
|
Anderson, |
2,311 |
4,154 |
|
Miami, |
2,189 |
2,317 |
|
Colerain, |
2,272 |
3,722 |
|
Mill Creek, |
6,249 |
11,286 |
|
Columbia, |
3,022 |
5,306 |
|
Spencer, |
|
996 |
|
Crosby, |
1,875 |
1,043 |
|
Springfield, |
3,092 |
7,975 |
|
Cincinnati (city), |
46,382 |
355,139 |
|
Storrs, |
740 |
|
|
Delhi, |
1,466 |
4,738 |
|
Sycamore, |
3,207 |
6,369 |
|
Fulton, |
1,505 |
|
|
Symmes, |
1,033 |
1,626 |
|
Green, |
2,939 |
4,851 |
|
Whitewater, |
1,883 |
1,575 |
|
Harrison, |
|
2,277 |
|
|
|
|
Population of Hamilton, in 1820, was 31,764; 1830, 52,380;
1840, 80,165; 1860, 216,410; 1880; 313,374; of whom 191,509 were born in Ohio;
10,586; Kentucky; 6,468; Indiana; 4,362; New York; 4,185; Pennsylvania; 2,361;
Virginia; 53,252; German Empire; 16,991; Ireland; 4,099; England and Wales;
1,787, France; 1,308, British America; 796, Scotland. Census, 1890, 374,573.
Before
the war much attention was given to the cultivation of vineyards upon the hills
of the Ohio for the manufacture of wine, and it promised to be a great business
when the change in climate resulted disastrously.
Page740
Antiquities.
The Great Dam at
Cincinnati in the Ice Age.
The country in the vicinity of Cincinnati owes its
unsurpassed beauty to the operations of Nature during the glacial era. It was
the ice movements that gave it those fine terraces along the valleys and
graceful contours of formation on summits of the hills that were so attractive
to the pioneers. Here it was that great ice movement from the north ended. As
has been remarked, “Those where the days of the beautiful lake rather
than the beautiful river.”
No single cause has done more to diversify the surface of
the country, to add the attractiveness of the scenery and to furnish the key by
which the conditions of the Ice Age can be reproduced to the mind’s eye
than glacial dam. To them we own the present existence of nearly all the
waterfalls in North America, as well as nearly all the lakes.
A glacial dam across the Ohio river is suppose to have
existed at the site of Cincinnati during the Ice Age, and the evidence
supporting the theory is so full and conclusive that its existence can almost
be assumed as an absolute certainty.
The evidences of the former existence of this dam and the
lake caused thereby were first discovered and the attention of the scientific
world attracted thereto, in the summer of 1882, by Prof. Frederick
Wright’s recently published volume, “The Ice Age in North
America,” a work scientific, but plain to the commonest understanding,
intensely interesting and in inestimably valuable contribution to the sum of
knowledge.
“The ice came down through the
trough of the Ohio, and meeting with an obstruction crossed it so as to
completely choke the channel, and form a glacial dam high enough to raise the
level of the water five hundred and fifty feet—this being the height of
the water shed to the south. The consequences following are interesting to
trace.
“The bottom of the Ohio river at
Cincinnati is 447 feet above the sea-level. A dam of 553 feet would raise the
water in its rear to a height of 1,000 feet above the tide. This would produce
a long narrow lake, of the width of the eroded trough of the Ohio, submerge the
site of Pittsburg to a depth of 300 feet, and make slack-water up the
Monongahela nearly to nearly to Grafton, W. Va., and up the Allegheny as far as
Oil City. All the tributaries of the Ohio would likewise be filled to
this level with the back-water. The length of this slack-water in the main
valley, to its termination up either the Allegheny or the Monongahela, was not
far from one thousand miles. The conditions were also peculiar in this, that
all the northern tributaries head within the southern margin of the ice-front,
which lay at varying distances to the north. Down these northern tributaries
there must have poured during the summer months immense torrents of water to
strand bowlder-laden icebergs on the summits of such high hills as were lower
than the level of the dam.”
“Prof. E. W. Claypole, in an article
read before the Geological Society of Edinburgh, and published in their
“Transactions,’’ has given a very vivid description of the
scenes connected with the final breaking away of the ice-barrier at Cincinnati.
He estimates that the body of water held in check by the dam occupied 20,000
square miles, and during the summer months, when the ice most rapidly melting
away, it was supplied with water at a rate that would be equivalent to a
rainfall of 160 feet in a year. This conclusion he arrives at by estimating
that feet of ice would annually melt from the portion of the State which was
glaciated, which is about twice the extent of the glaciated portion. Ten feet
over the glaciated portion is equal to twenty feet of water the unglaciated. To
this must be added an equal amount from the area farther back whose drainage
was then into the upper Ohio. This makes forty feet per year water so
contributed to this lake-basin. Furthermore, this supply would all be furnished
in the six months of warm weather and to a large degree in the daytime, which
gives the rate above mentioned.
The breaking away of the barrier to such
body of water is no simple affair. As this writer remarks:
“The Ohio of to-day in flood is a terrible danger to the
valley, but the Ohio then must have been a much more formidable river to the
dwellers on its banks. The muddy waters rolled along, fed by innumerable rills
of glacier-milk, and often charged with ice and stones. The first warm days of
spring were the harbinger of the coming flood, which grew swifter and deeper as
the summer came, and only subsided as the falling temperature of autumn locked
up with frost the glacier fountains. The ancient Ohio river system was in its
higher part a multitude of
Page 741
From Wright’s Ice Age in North
America; by courtesy of D. Appleton & Co. Publishers;
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Page 742