CHAPTER XII.

THE CITY FROM 1860.

ACTIVITIES OF THE PEOPLE IN SHOPS AND MILLS, HOMES AND CHURCHES THE BIBLE AND THE SCHOOLS-THE SOUTHERN RAILROAD THE UNIVERSITY-A CRITICAL DECADE.

If the foregoing narrative has created an impression that during the war there were no other activities in the city than those of the camp, the misunderstanding must be corrected.

It is a characteristic of human life that no single phase of it can completely exclude or absorb all others for any considerable length of time. The Romans danced while the Barbarians were pounding at their gates. The Parisians attended their theaters and wildly applauded their idols of the stage while, at one time, the Revolutionists were fighting in the streets, and, at another, the German army was tightening its coils around their barricades. Within a few days after the earthquake, San Francisco had resumed her gayeties as well as her industries. The vine dressers and sheep herders on the slopes of Vesuvius pursue their peaceful occupations even when streams of lava pour threateningly down the mountain side. In a great city, the needs, the desires, the volitions of the people are too numerous, too varied and too insistent to be permanently repressed. However rude the shock may be which bewilders and distracts them for a single instant, no sooner has it passed than they plunge back into the old accustomed round. They laugh and dance; they work and play; they marry and are given in marriage; they die and are buried, just the same.

It is as necessary, therefore, to know and comprehend the activities of the people in their shops and mills; their homes and churches, as on the tented field. It is as necessary, but it is not so diverting and it is not so easy. Indeed we have arrived at the period when it begins to seem a hopeless task to try and comprehend the complete organism whose evolution we are studying. To keep an eye on all the bewildering details; to let no important event escape us; to be acquainted with all the leading men and women; to follow all the significant movements in the life of a city of almost 200,000 people, is something difficult indeed. To an even greater degree than ever we are now forced by the superabundance of our material (as well as by our resolute purpose) to a process of selection. From now on, more carefully even than before, we must exclude all minor matters and deal only with those which have helped to mould the character and shape the destiny of Cincinnati.

It was in "war times" or thereabouts that some of our greatest eleemosynary institutions were founded, possibly as an outcome of the deepened sense of human suffering engendered by the mighty tragedy.

Vol. 1-15

The Workhouse.

The workhouse, located on Colerain avenue (upon the grounds of old Camp Washington) was built between 1866 and 1869 at a cost of about a half a million dollars.

The Hospital-Long View.

The Cincinnati hospital had its feeble birth in 1821 as "The Commercial Hospital and Lunatic Asylum;" but later on was known as the Commercial hospital; then in 1861 as the Cincinnati hospital. The old buildings were in use for forty years or more; but in 1867 gave way to those it at present occupies on the block between Central avenue and Plum and Twelfth and Ann. At the present moment its new quarters are being erected on Burnet avenue, Avondale, and it is confidently believed that they will be the equal of any of the world.

Longview Asylum for the Insane (at Carthage) was first occupied in 1860.

The Y. W. C. A.

The Young Women's Christian Association was incorporated in 1868.

Suspension Bridge.

It was also in the '60s that the great achievement of bridging the Ohio river was accomplished. While this river had always been the one most important factor in the city's growth, it had also been an obstacle to its progress because it made trade with the South so difficult. The banks were steep and the channel wide and the transportation across it of freight and passengers by ferry boats, a difficulty and a nuisance. Dr. Daniel Drake had clearly foreseen the necessity and the feasibility of a bridge to connect Kentucky with Ohio, early in the century; but, as usual, he was so far in advance of his fellows that this idea (like so many others which he cherished) seemed to them utterly chimerical.

In 1845, however, a determined and hopeful agitation in favor of an attempt to bridge the river was begun and John Robling, who had just accomplished a similar feat in engineering at Monongahela, proposed a plan which, after a lap-e of about a decade, the citizens of Covington attempted to carry out. The financial depression which came on soon after put a stop to the project, however, and it was not until the exigencies of the war disclosed the absolute necessity of closer communication, that Cincinnati capital was offered to complete the scheme. In 1863 the abandoned work was resumed and the bridge was opened for traffic on the first day of January, 1867. At the time of its completion it had the largest span in the world and seemed capable of carrying all the merchandise and all the people who could ever need to go across, and yet it was not long before it was absolutely outgrown and the four others which followed it are now crowded with traffic.

Easy communication and rapid transit was already beginning to be numbered among the supreme necessities for municipal expansion and the new bridge was generally regarded as one of the principal promoters of the wonderful growth which took place after the war closed.

That the life of a city is marvelously manifold and needs a thousand stimuli to develop it, and a thousand influences to maintain it, received a wonderful illustration at about this time. If anybody had told the builders of the bridge