Jewett Drive -- How the Streets Got Their Names

Jewett Drive is named after the family that for almost sixty years owned and lived on the property that was divided into the lots that line the street. Four generations of Joseph Franklin Jewetts lived in Wyoming, along with their wives, brothers, sisters, and cousins.

Joseph Franklin Jewett (1835-1922), the family patriarch, was born in Granby, Connecticut. He moved to Cleveland, where in 1858 he got into the sack manufacturing business as a partner in the Jewett & Adams Company. Just a few years later the company opened a branch in Cincinnati, and Joseph moved to the city to manage it, brining his wife, Cecelia Child (1842-1914), and family to the Queen City with him.

Source: The Railway Agent and Station Agent, vol. 17, 1897.

In the nineteenth century, grain, coffee, sugar, and many other goods were put in cloth sacks and, later, paper sacks, as part of the bulk shipping process. Manufacturing sacks in Cincinnati made a lot of sense—Cincinnati was a busy port on the Ohio River. Farmers brought their goods to the city and needed to bag them before they were loaded onto riverboats or railroad cars and shipped to distant markets.  In the mid-1880s Adams, Jewett & Co.'s place of business, which included manufacturing of the bags, was located on the southwest corner of Water and Vine streets, right on Cincinnati’s waterfront. Back in the nineteenth century railroad sidings also were located on Water Street. This land is now part of Smale Riverfront Park--the Digging Cincinnati History blog includes a great post about the area. 

Source: Cincinnati Illustrated Business Directory, 1883.

In August 1865, Joseph and Cecelia Jewett purchased slightly more than eight acres of land fronting on the west side of Springfield Pike, in the area that was to become Wyoming (it was Lot 1 of the Isaac B. Riddle Subdivision, which I hope to blog about in the future). 

Joseph and Cecelia had eight children, six girls and two boys. The oldest daughter, Laura (1861-1938) did not marry and lived in Wyoming and nearby Hartwell for most of her life. Second daughter Jennie (1862-1865) died just after her third birthday. Three of the Jewett girls married and moved away from the Cincinnati area. Helen (1865-1935) married Frank B. DeCamp and moved with him to St. Louis, Missouri; Carrie (1866-1955) married Albert Pfau and moved to Terra Haute, Indiana; and Grace (1870-1956) married Brandon Millikin and moved to Hamilton, Ohio. Youngest daughter, Cecelia (1874-1967) lived at home until she was in her 40s when she married Agustus T. Welsh and moved to Burns Ave. in Hartwell, returning to Wyoming to live on Stout Ave. near the end of her life.

Jewett Family, about 1895, on porch of family homestead built before 1870 and demolished in 1923.
Front Row: Joseph F. Jewett, Sr., Cecelia Child Jewett, Laura Jewett, Grace Jewett Millikin;
Second Row: Cecelia Jewett Welsh, Max Jewett, Carrie Jewett Pfau, Joseph F. Jewett, Jr., Helen Jewett DeCamp.
Source: Wyoming Historical Society/Gene Ann Cordes.

Joseph F. Jewett, Sr. was involved in the Wyoming community. He served as a founding representative on the Wyoming Board of Education in the early 1880s. He was also one of the investors that owned the Wyoming Land and Building Company Subdivision (Burns Farm).

The Jewett sons stayed close to home and became involved with family businesses. Both Jewett sons began their careers with the bag company. In the 1890s, Joseph Jewett, Sr. started a new venture—the Cincinnati Carriage Goods Company. Many “carriage” companies at the turn of the century were straddling the change from horse-drawn to horse-less carriages. I don’t know the full details of what the Cincinnati Carriage Goods Company sold, but I did find documentation that they were dealers of rubber tires.  Additionally, Joseph Jewett was also reported to be a “cotton dealer” in some publications in the 1910s.

Joseph and Cecelia’s son, Maxwell Jewett (1872-1960) worked with the Cincinanti Carriage Goods Company, and then in the 1920s managed The Jewett Company, which bought and sold cotton goods. Max lived with his parents until he married Jennie Kane (1882-1951); they had one daughter, Jane E. Jewett (1908-2002). After Max and Jennie's marriage, Joseph Sr. and Cecelia sold or gave them a 100 foot by 590 foot lot cut out of the southeast corner of the Jewett homestead property. In 1919 they deeded this land back to Joseph, Sr. and moved into Cincinnati. Census records show Max and Jennie were living in San Diego, California in 1940, but city directories place them back in Cincinnati by 1951.

After initially working in the family sack business, sometime before 1905 Joseph F. Jewett, Jr. (1868-1947) established a pulley manufacturing company, The Standard Pulley Company. In 1893 he married Elizabeth “Betty” Haven (1868-1939). For a time they lived in Covington, Kentucky, where son Joseph F. Jewett, III (1893-1976) was born. But they were back in Wyoming, Ohio for the birth of daughter Eleanor “Haven” Jewett (1898-1928). At the time of the 1900 Census they were living on Walnut Ave. in Wyoming, and in 1907 they purchased and moved their family to the house at 507 Springfield Pike, where they lived until 1924. They stayed in Wyoming the rest of their lives; the 1930 Census records them living on Wentworth Ave., along with son Joseph, III.

507 Springfield Pike, Home of Joseph F. Jewett Jr. from 1907 to 1924.

Joseph F. Jewett, III studied engineering at the University of Cincinnati and then served in WWI, from 1917 to 1919. He began service as a Second Lieutenant and by the end of the war had been promoted to Captain. For part of his enlistment he was stationed in Maine, but then spent most of 1918 in France. Upon returning to the United States, he married Helen Gardner in Portland, Maine in 1919. They came to Wyoming, and in the 1920 Census are listed as living at 701 Springfield Pike--on the Jewett homestead property, possibly in a home on the southeast portion of the lot, recently vacated by his uncle Max. Joseph III and Helen had two children, Dorothy Jewett (b. 1921) and Joseph F. Jewett, IV (1924-2011). However, the couple divorced and Helen moved to Los Angeles with the children. Joseph IV was a military pilot in both WWII and the Korean War.

In 1919 Haven Jewett, daughter of Joseph Jr. and Betty, married Stanley Duttenohfer, of the family that owned Cincinnati’s Duttenhofer shoes, and they had one son, Stanley, Jr. Unfortunately Haven died in 1928 of tuberculosis. 

In the 1920s, the Jewett homestead land was sold to Marion and C. Dean Poage. Joseph, Sr. sold the bulk of the land to them in 1921. The lot at the southeast corner was sold to the Poages by Joseph, Sr.'s children in 1924; they had inherited it at his death in 1922. C. Dean Poage was a builder-developer-real estate agent who built many Cincinnati area subdivisions. He sold the first lot from the Jewett land in April, 1928 - the home at the northwest corner of Jewett Drive and Springfield Pike, the current 701 Springfield Pike.

701 Springfield Pike, first home sold from subdivision of Jewett homestead.

The 1928 deed for this property reveals one of the ugly realities of the early twentieth century housing market - racism. Covenants on the deed for this and the other lots Poage sold on Jewett Drive  limited development to single family homes, prohibited fences in the front yards, prescribed minimum house setbacks from the street, but also specified that:

"(5) Said premises or any part thereof or any buildings hereinafter constructed thereon shall not be sold, rented, leased, occupied or used by any person or persons other than of the white or Caucasian Race, except for servants living with families occupying said premises."

Racial covenants like these were commonly used in communities across the United States from the 1920s into the 1940s, but they were deemed judicially unenforceable by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1948, as violating the Fourteenth Amendment, and were subsequently removed from deeds as homes were resold. As communities adopted zoning ordinances (which Wyoming did in 1925), specifications about yard setbacks and permitted uses were also removed from most deeds.

In the 1940s Joseph Jewett III remarried, and he and his wife Emma moved to the house at 40 Jewett Drive. Joseph III lived out the rest of his life on part of the land where his grandfather had established his home in Wyoming a hundred years earlier. 

McNamara & Conner Subdivision

It was June 15, 1890 -- 125 years ago -- that this advertisement ran in the Cincinnati Enquirer:

Source: Cincinnati Enquirer, June 15, 1890.

It is interesting to see what they thought buyers would appreciate about the location. At the top of the list was good commuting with convenient passenger trains to downtown -- 40 a day! Also good schools and churches, streets and sidewalks, public electricity and water (soon to come).

Below is an image of the McNamara & Conner subdivision plat. It was actually the third time these blocks were subdivided into lots. There were two earlier subdivision plans including this area filed by the Lockland Wyoming Improvement Company, but apparently no lots from the first two platted subdivisions ever sold. Timothy E. McNamara and Oliver E. Conner purchased these 10.87 acres in April 1890, and had this plan prepared in June of that year.

Looking at the plan, you can see that the lots fronting on Burns Avenue are the largest, 70 feet wide, with those facing Grove slightly smaller, 60 feet wide, and the lots on Crescent Avenue yet even smaller, at 50 feet wide. The subdivision's designer appears to have planned in advance for larger homes on Burns, and smaller, more affordable homes next to the railroad tracks.

The 1890 advertisement stated that McNamara & Conner would build "a few elegant" residences on the lots, but save a handful of homes constructed in the 1890s, most homes in the subdivision weren't built until the early twentieth century, and are more modest dwellings.

Only home in McNamara & Conner Subdivision built in 1890 according to Hamilton County Auditor records.
Source: Hamilton County Auditor.

Today there are 35 houses in these three blocks. Based on information from the Hamilton County Auditor, only 6 homes were built in the subdivision in the 1890s--most of those on the corners adjacent to Cooper Avenue. Another 5 houses were built in the 1900s, all on Crescent Avenue. During the 1910s 6 houses were constructed. During the boom years of the 1920s, 11 homes were built, and 5 more in the 1930s. Only 2 homes have been added in these blocks since World War II.

Researching the lives of the men who financed and marketed the subdivision, Timothy E. McNamara and Oliver E. Conner, reveals that they were businessmen with a diversity of interests. In addition to a real estate partnership, McNamara and Conner also shared ownership of an 1885 patent for a hand fire extinguisher.

Source: Official Gazette of the U.S. Patent Office, vol. 31 no. 11, June 16, 1885.  

Oliver E. Conner (1847-1922) focused his career on real estate. Below is his obituary.

Source: Cincinnati Enquirer, October 4, 1922.

Real estate was a sidelight for Timothy E. McNamara (1846-1911), who was primarily in the distillery business. He spent part of his career managing the Millcreek Distilling Company, subsidiary of the Standard Distilling Company.

Know a Good Example of Historic Preservation in Wyoming?

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