Cincinnati

Two years after the founding of the settlement then known as "Losantiville", Arthur St. Clair, the governor of the Northwest Territory, changed its name to "Cincinnati", possibly at the suggestion of the surveyor Israel Ludlow, in honor of the Society of the Cincinnati. St. Clair was at the time president of the Society, made up of Continental Army officers of the Revolutionary War. The club was named for Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a dictator of the early Roman Republic who saved Rome from a crisis and then retired to farming because he did not want to remain in power, becoming a symbol of Roman civic virtue. Cincinnati began in 1788 when Mathias Denman, Colonel Robert Patterson, and Israel Ludlow landed at a spot at the northern bank of the Ohio opposite the mouth of the Licking River and decided to settle there. …

The city is undergoing significant changes due to new development and private investment. This includes buildings of the long-stalled Banks project that includes apartments, retail, restaurants, and offices, which will stretch from Great American Ball Park to Paycor Stadium. Phase 1A is already complete and 100 percent occupied as of early 2013. Smale Riverfront Park is being developed along with The Banks, and is Cincinnati's newest park. Nearly $3.5 billion have been invested in the urban core of Cincinnati (including Northern Kentucky). Much of this development has been undertaken by 3CDC. The Cincinnati Bell Connector began in September 2016. Cincinnati is midway by river between the cities of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Cairo, Illinois. The downtown lies near the mouth of the Licking, a confluence where the first settlement occurred. …

Cincinnati was platted and proliferated by American settlers, including Scotch Irish, frontiersmen, and keelboaters. For over a century and a half, Cincinnati went unchallenged as the most prominent of Ohio's cities, a role that earned it the nickname of "chief city of Ohio" in the 1879 New American Cyclopædia. In addition to this book, countless other books have documented the social history of both the city and its frontier people. The city fathers, of Anglo-American families of prominence, were Episcopalian. Inspired by its earlier horseback circuit preachers, early Methodism was also important. The first established Methodist class in the Northwest Territory came 1797 to nearby Milford. By 1879, there were 162 documented church edifices in the city. For this reason, from the beginning, Protestantism has played a formative role in the Cincinnati ethos. …