How the streets got their names: Springfield Pike

Roads have histories too!

If you are headed north on Springfield Pike, and look to your left, while you are waiting at the Wyoming Avenue stoplight, you will notice this little monument, in Centennial Park. It is a plaque attached to a mile marker from the Hamilton, Springfield and Carthage Turnpike.

Native Americans had trails extending from the Ohio River up the Mill Creek valley long before Europeans settled the area. With American settlement, one path was widened, first called the “Great Road” or “Old Wayne Road” after General Anthony Wayne. Later, a straight “shortcut” road was established from Carthage to what is now Glendale; in 1817 logs were laid side by side along this way to form a corduroy road http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corduroy_road .

To enable further road improvements, the General Assembly of the State of Ohio incorporated the “Hamilton, Springfield and Carthage Turnpike Company,” per the request of Thomas Smith, Henry Morse, Anthony Huts, John Gaston, John McGilliard, Hatfield Williams, Jacob A. Riddle, Alexander Pendery, Andrew Smalley, Archibald Burns, Jonathan Foreman and Thomas Wright, of Hamilton County, and Obadiah Schenck and Wilkinson Beaty of Butler County. They were to issue stock shares for the company. As you can guess from its name, the road extended from Carthage, north to what was then called Springfield, but is now named Springdale, and then on to Hamilton, Ohio.

The state also gave the company the right to lay out the road and improve the road bed, compensating the adjacent landowners for any damages. The road was to be no more than 80 feet wide, with at least 25 feet of width improved with stone, gravel, wood, or other materials to create a firm and even road, with grade of no more than 4.5 degrees. Every five miles along the road was to be a gate where toll fees were collected at the following rates, as enumerated in the state act:

Source: Files of the Wyoming Historical Society.

As you can see from the toll schedule, the turnpike was used for farmers to bring produce, and cattle, sheep, and hogs, to market in Cincinnati.

At the turn of the century there were two new kinds of traffic on Springfield Pike. In 1901 a streetcar line, the Cincinnati, Glendale, and Hamilton Electric Railway, laid its tracks on the Pike through Wyoming. It provided service until 1932.

But it was the automobile that quickly became the vehicle most used on Springfield Pike. As early as 1905, there were efforts to keep traffic going through Wyoming on the Pike at a reasonable speed – 12 miles per hour.

Source: Cincinnati Enquirer September 14, 1905.

In 1915 Springfield Pike was designated as part of the Dixie Highway , a route to get motorists from Michigan to Florida, established by the Dixie Highway Association, a group of individuals, businessmen, and local government with the goal of facilitating automobile travel. Here is a link to a great webpage about the Dixie Highway in Ohio.

My Own Old House (part 2) The Golden Family

Click here if you would like to read part 1, about my house in the 1870s.

It is difficult to discover for certain who lived in my house through the 1870s and 1880s. House numbers had not yet been assigned in Wyoming, so I can only make educated guesses (by process of elimination) about who likely lived in the house, when looking at U.S. Census records and City/County directories. I know its owner, Joseph Jewett was living on Springfield Pike and rented out this home.

The earliest residents I can document living in my house on East Mills Ave. (originally Wiley Ave.),  are the family of William Franklin Golden (1853-1882), his wife Anna Herbert Hickman Golden (1852-1889), and sons Clifford Clark Golden (1879-1915) and William Franklin Golden, Jr. (1882-1918), based on the 1880 Census. (I found record of the Fay family living across the street later in the decade, and am assuming they didn't move).

1880 U.S. Census Form

William was the son of Isaac Golden a grocer/baker who lived and had a shop on Elm Street in Cincinnati as early as the 1840s. However, he died when William was only nine, so William spent his youth living with relatives, including with his older, married sister’s family in Green Township.

Anna’s father was a Cincinnati-based wholesale tobacco merchant, Henry "H.J." Hickman, who moved from Kentucky to Cincinnati and then to Avondale. Anna demonstrated a lot a bravery as a young woman, when a burglar invaded her father's home (see article below).

Source: Cincinnati Enquirer February 27, 1877.

Anna and William were married in January, 1879. On the 1880 Census, instead of having an occupation, William was listed as living “on income.” This may have been due to illness—William died in 1882 (in Wyoming, probably at home) of tuberculosis, just a month before his second son, William, Jr., was born. He was buried in his father’s family plot in Spring Grove Cemetery, in Cincinnati. I wonder where the family's income came from, as on the 1870 U.S. Census he was a 16-year-old farm laborer. Maybe Anna’s father helped them out—in 1880 he was living in Avondale with two servants in his household, or maybe it was their siblings.

Anna Hickman Golden, William Franklin Golden, Jr., and Clifford Clark Golden.
Source: Bruce Black

The family likely moved out of Wyoming soon after William's death. Sadly, Anna died in 1889 in Wooster, Ohio of pneumonia, leaving her sons, aged 10 and 7, orphans. Anna was buried in her father’s family plot in Spring Grove Cemetery.

Source: Cincinnati Enquirer March 30, 1889.

As of the 1900 Census, the two boys, now young men (21 and 18), lived with Anna’s sister, Grace Hickman, in College Hill. They both served in Company C, First Infantry, Ohio National Guard in the first decade of the 20th century. Census and death records indicate that later Clifford was a teamster and William was a driver for a rag collector.

Ultimately, like their father, both Clifford and William died of tuberculosis, both at age 35. Each spent the last weeks of their lives in the Cincinnati Tuberculosis Sanatorium in Price Hill, which is now the Dunham Recreation Center.

A video about the Tuberculosis Sanatorium:

A newspaper article about the sanatorium: http://www.examiner.com/article/day-26-price-hill-s-dunham-from-tuberculosis-hospital-to-recreation-center.  And another link to its current use as a recreation center http://cincyrec.org/search/facility.aspx?id=44.

Clifford was buried with his mother in his maternal grandfather’s plot in Spring Grove Cemetery in 1915. However, at his death in 1918 William, Jr., was buried in Cincinnati’s Potters’ Field in Price Hill—the cemetery for the poor and indigent, located near the Tuberculosis Sanatorium. Which makes me wonder why? Did he have no family around to facilitate his burial in Spring Grove? Or had he in some way alienated them? Or did he not want to be buried there? Or did no one from the Sanatorium even bother ask?

An article in City Beat about Potters' Field: http://citybeat.com/cincinnati/article-21868-price_hill_potters_field.html

Coming up next in my house's history -- a family of artists...

Wyoming's Early "Leaf Picker-Upper"

Wyoming must have been an early innovator in leaf collection. In 1941 the Milwuakee Journal published a photo of this "leaf picker-upper" developed by Fred Gedge, at the time Wyoming's public service inspector, and who later became city manager. From the house in the background, it looks like this picture was taken on Wilmuth Avenue. I wonder if they were making compost with them back then, too?

Source: Milwaukee Journal November 5, 1941
via Google News.