Cincinnati: A View from the Kentucky Hills

By the early eighteen fifties, Cincinnati had established itself as a center for the advancement of cultural pursuits. The city already boasted of a Mechanics Institute, an Academy of Natural Sciences, a Mercantile Library Association and a Young Men's Lyceum of Natural History. She had survived a ravaging plague of Cholera which depleted the population, but notwithstanding this dreadful turn of events, even by 1851, Cincinnati was expanding more rapidly than any other city in the United States other than New York and Philadelphia. The formation of its population was principally through emigration from Europe, the majority of these German, followed by the Irish and then those from the British Isles.

But the city's greatest asset in those times was, and still is, its location on the banks of the great Ohio River, the artery of access to the Mississippi River's network and the nation's heartland. The scene shows the view from the Kentucky hills prior to the construction of Roebling's famous suspension bridge. With a panorama of the city visible from the higher elevation, as a side wheel packet approaches the Public Landing, a farmer wends his way uphill to his home in rural Kentucky.

View Artist’s Biography