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02/27/21 03:53 PM #5583    

 

Paul Simons

To briefly touch on what Jerry and Ann are talking about- from what I hear America might lead the world in not only Covid deaths but also in variations of religious worship. Today I heard about a sect that believes Illuminati are determined to implant RFID chips in everyone’s head and must be stopped and yes, there is definitely worship of gold, of swine, and of golden swine. 


02/27/21 11:10 PM #5584    

 

Philip Spiess

Paul:  Oh, god!  The Illuminati!  Though of memorable existence in the 16th through the 18th centuries, presumptive heirs to the Rosicrucians (who once again exist, with headquarters in San Jose, California), they really are no longer with us -- unless you choose to count the Masonic Order as their successors (dubious).  How these myths prosper and increase!  One of the greatest myths of our day is the number of schools, public and private, that claim they are teaching "critical thinking."  Obviously, they are not.

Dale:  Speaking of Ionia, when I was teaching Middle School History and Geography -- ancient Greek history to the 5th Grade -- trying to establish mechanisms by which they might remember something or other (true, not necessarily "critical thinking") -- when covering the wars between Greece and Persia, I focused on the map of Asia Minor, constantly contested between the two countries, but known in those days as "Ionia."  As a mnemonic device, I'd tell my students (who, young as they were, understood my penchant for punning)) that the Greek colony of Ionia would be captured by the Persians, who'd then say, "I own ya!", only to be recaptured, in due course, by the Greeks, who'd say, "No, I own ya!" (etc., etc., etc.).

It will come as no surprise to any of you that we live in dire -- nay, dismal -- times.  Noting the neutrality of this Forum, I will pass on from politics to air travel (which I do not undertake under any of the current circumstances).  Time was when, in the halcyon days of the 1950s and 1960s, that TWA's "Royal Ambassador Flight" offered this menu for passengers aboard (Wilbur and Orville, could this be Wright?) (I'm quoting here from Lucius Beebe, journalist and gourmand extraordinaire):  "fresh Malossol caviar . . . a bewilderment of the best French hors d'oeuvre to accompany a choice of cocktails -- martinis, manhattans, vodka martinis, old-fashioneds, or gimlets. . . .  There was clear turtle soup with sherry . . . Maine lobster Thermidor, fillets of English sole ambassadeur, prime U. S. sirloin steak or chateaubriand, double-thick lamb chops, canard a l'orange au Grand Marnier, and a salmi of guinea fowl.  There were conventional vegetables and salads, there was a wide assortment of the best French, English, and Italian cheeses, a bombe glacee, fruit, and French pastry, all washed down with limitless quanities of Mumm's Cordon Rouge [i.e., great champagne].  Also, tucked away . . . for the benefit of returning Americans . . . were such items as a hamburger special, corned beef on rye, hot dogs, and malted milks."  I believe TWA no longer exists -- nor does such an airline menu.  Was it Dreamland?  And speaking of our Walnut Hills follies of yesteryear, do they even serve Peanuts on airlines any more?  Or anything?  (Maybe drinks?)  "O tempora!  O mores!"


02/28/21 07:35 AM #5585    

 

Paul Simons

Phil reading that TWA menu made me hungry for the Chateaubriand and also forces me to confess that I finally broke down and violated my year-long prohibition of fast food. Out of fear of Covid contamination of packaging or product - no McDonalds or Popeyes or Wendy’s etc. But yesterday in honor of vaccine shot #1 I had a BK Double Whopper and it was great! But to be realistic it will be healthier to have the staff put chateaubriand on both of my private jets (null set).

But to be serious as we’re all approaching our later years sound investments are important and what is more sound than gold? My broker Don Goldswine and Sons is offering these solid gold coins, valuable as both precious metal and as an indication of our indomitable spirit and love of Truth, Justice, and The American Way. (They are made in China.)


02/28/21 10:28 AM #5586    

 

Philip Spiess

Yeah, when pigs fly (or is that "swine flew"?).


02/28/21 11:38 AM #5587    

 

Paul Simons

Phil. In Cincinnati they do fly. Some fly in, some fly out, some just wind up at the Kahn’s plant.


02/28/21 11:54 PM #5588    

 

Philip Spiess

Pigasus?


03/01/21 06:00 AM #5589    

 

Paul Simons

You nailed it Mr. Philip Spiess.  Rules of etiquette and propriety prevent me from divulging the true depth, meaning, and import of the matter here but just Google "Swinette" and you will have solved the mystery! One caution - be sure to look for the Cincinnati Pork Association Certified (CPAC) logo on the tag and on the console if you're in the market for a swinette. There are a lot of counterfeits around. Be sure to get the real thing, because like a Stradivarius violin or a Steinway piano a fine swinette can run into some real money.


03/01/21 09:48 AM #5590    

 

Judy Holtzer (Knopf)

Paul - I have a hard time sometimes deciding whether you are serious or pulling our legs.... Was that for real about a broker named Goldswine? And is he Jewish? If you say yes to the latter question, then I call Bullshit to the former.


03/01/21 09:55 AM #5591    

 

Judy Holtzer (Knopf)

Again for Paul - Cincinnati Pork Association Certified?? Is that perchance the caterers for the Conservative Political Action Conference?

Wasn't that fun!?


03/01/21 04:29 PM #5592    

 

Paul Simons

Judy if you take a look at some of my past entries here you’ll see that I have posted Cincinnati flying pigs before along with Cincinnati Chili and Goetta. I know these things are not kosher and would be unavailable in Israel. Nor would Jim Dandy’s Bar-B-Que but I still like it and have posted about it.

I’m sure there are some Isrseli foods I’d be nuts about. I’ll get there someday. FYI the #1 restaurant in Philadelphia is an Israeli restaurant. You have to make a reservation months in advance. About the Pork Association or other organizations with similar names it’s councidence, I’m not a member of any of them. About Don Goldswine - I don’t think he’s religious at all, not in any church or synagogue or mosque, just a money man, a salesman who will tell you anything you want to hear. That's the successful salesman's gift - knowing intuitively what the customer wants to hear. Also as you know any investment involves risk so don’t invest in anything just because I recommended it!!


03/02/21 12:07 AM #5593    

 

Philip Spiess

And remember, the pigs, a product of the Ohio-Indiana Cornbelt (which also produced the good whiskey in Cincinnati and environs) were also the unofficial street-cleaners of the 1840s-1850s era of "Porkopolis," scavengers that they were, on their way to the slaughter house (hence the good citizens of Cincinnati having to watch out for trichinosis).  Those slaughter houses, comprising overhead rails with hooks on wheels, delivering the portions of pig to each separate pork-packing operation station in the slaughter house, have been described as "the disassembly line"; it was, in fact, the inspiration for Henry Ford's Detroit "assembly line" about fifty years later.  (Henry Ford originally was, in fact, going to build his Ford automotive plant in Cincinnati, but was discouraged from doing so by local businesses, which were doing a booming business in other arenas.  Thank god! otherwise Cincinnati now would be in the plight that Detroit is in!)  And, finally, those pigs also, by way of their skins, created Cincinnati's famed sporting goods enterprises (via footballs, baseballs, etc., and thus on to other sporting accoutrements).  ALL POWER TO THE PIG!


03/02/21 06:15 AM #5594    

 

Paul Simons

 

From what I've heard Cincinnati is better off to have escaped any deep association with Henry Ford for more than just economic reasons. In fact our fair city was home to part of his competition, the Fisher Body plant in Norwood which we probably all toured at some point. About this image notice that it names "Walnut Hill Family Farm"as part of the location. Don't forget that Neil and Christie are registered at Bed Bath and Beyond.

 


03/03/21 01:11 AM #5595    

 

Philip Spiess

MRS. TROLLOPE IN CINCINNATI I:  The Bizarre Bazaar

Mrs. Trollope Comes to Cincinnati:  “It seems hardly fair to quarrel with a place because its staple commodity is not pretty, but I am sure I should have liked Cincinnati much better if the people had not dealt so very largely in hogs.”  These delicate feelings were expressed by Mrs. Frances Trollope as she considered her three-year sojourn in Cincinnati.  Mother of the noted English novelist Anthony Trollope [he of the “Barsetshire Chronicles” – though I frankly prefer his novel The Way We Live Now (1874-1875), as being far more robust], Frances Trollope was a noted writer in her own day, as well as an inspiring conversationalist, giver of brilliant soirees, and untiring manager of her large and rather unstable family.

The family thus mentioned comprised, in addition to Madame, Thomas Anthony Trollope (neurotic and ulcer-ridden failure of a husband); Thomas Adolphus Trollope (eldest son and eventually a writer in his own right); Henry Trollope (a witty but sickly youth who died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-three); Cecilia Trollope (a charming but not overly intellectual girl); Anthony Trollope (the gawking youth who never quite forgave his mother for having deserted him during her travels in America); and Emily Trollope (who possessed all of her mother’s wit and charm, and most of her mother’s affection, but who also died from tuberculosis in her teens).  All of these odd members of an unusual family eventually found their way to Cincinnati during the years 1828-1831, when Mrs. Trollope was in residence – except for Anthony, who only visited Cincinnati many years later.

Can a forty-eight-year-old English housewife from Harrow-on-the-Hill with three sick children and an impoverished French artist in tow find lasting happiness in a small Midwestern American town of 20,000 inhabitants, most of them pork-packers and all of them accomplished spitters?” [see “Forum” Post #4519, “The Burnet House Hotel”].  This might have been the question Fanny Trollope asked herself as she stepped up the paved wharf at Cincinnati on February 10, 1828.  She was already weary from uncomfortable travel, unaccommodating Americans, and unaccountable finances, and so in Cincinnati she hoped to address these persistent problems and at last find some peace.

Concerning Family Issues:  Frances Milton Trollope had married an aspiring lawyer who had been a renowned classical scholar and who was heir to a large fortune, and thus she had had the highest hopes for settling down in London to become a beloved and admired hostess, catering to brilliant circles of British notables and having the world at her feet.  However, quite early in his law career it became evident that Thomas Anthony Trollope would never attain greatness, much less a suitable practice, for he had developed a persecution mania that caused him to create enemies and lose friends.  As a result, financial worries began to attach themselves to the family, which thereby moved to a farm outside of London in hopes of acquiring more invigorating surroundings.  For ten years the family managed to survive, but at last the farm failed, and Fanny Trollope sought new worlds to conquer in order to save the family from a dire plight.

The new world to conquer came in the guise of the New World itself.  Fanny fell under the spell of Miss Frances Wright, a devotee of the social reformer Robert Owen and a siren who could hypnotize with words (and who wore Turkish trousers to boot).  Miss Wright had devised a scheme to emancipate Negro slaves in the Mississippi River valley by founding, with her vast fortune, a free and ideal community, replete with teachers and with all working together for the common good (in other words, a proto-Socialist utopia).  Fanny Trollope thought she saw in this scheme the answer to her family’s woes, and so, in the autumn of 1827, she joined the expedition to the New World with her children Henry, Cecilia, and Emily, and set out for what she believed to be the Promised Land.

A Brief Nod at Nashoba:  Nashoba, as Frances Wright’s settlement in Mississippi was called, turned out to be a dismal failure, at least as far as the Trollope family was concerned.  After seven weeks of seasickness, the party arrived in Mississippi and, after escaping numerous dangers in its deep and primitive forests, finally arrived at Nashoba, which turned out to be a vast sea of mud on which a few miserable log huts were afloat.  One night in the place was too much for Fanny Trollope, and she decided to head north to try her luck in the up-and-coming town of Cincinnati.

First Impressions:  Perhaps unhappy with her experiences so far in America and disgusted by the habits of her fellow steamboat passengers, Mrs. Trollope began to criticize Cincinnati even before she got off the boat.  “It is,” she said, “by no means a city of striking appearance; it wants domes, towers, and steeples. . . .“  [Note:  The city was only just forty years old, having been carved out of the wilderness by New Jersey pioneers.]  She was to add her own domes and towers, if not steeples, before departing three years later, thereby disfiguring the Cincinnati skyline for some fifty years [as you can just see in the famous 1848 daguerreotype of the Cincinnati waterfront, a blow-up of which hangs in the main reading room of the Cincinnati Public Library] and providing a tourist attraction notable for its hideousness.

Mrs. Trollope, her children, and Auguste Hervieu, the French artist and political exile who was to have been the learned professor of art at Nashoba, but who had cast his lot with the Trollopes, first stayed in what Mrs. Trollope called the “Washington Hotel” (it was actually the Cincinnati Hotel); there she ordered tea to be delivered to their rooms.  At once the proprietor, a descendant of Cromwell, arrived on the scene and informed her that tea was not to be served in private.  Fanny pleaded ignorance of American manners, to which the proprietor replied, “Our manners are very good manners, and we don’t wish any changes from England.”  It was, no doubt, at this point that Mrs. Trollope began to have the first glimmerings of an idea – or at least of a title – for what became her famous book on America and the Americans [see below].

Plans and Rejections:  Mrs. Trollope’s stay in Cincinnati was planned with one thing in mind:  she hoped to make some sort of successful business venture in Cincinnati to build up her resources, and then to send for her husband and oldest son to come join the rest of the family in America (son Anthony, apparently, was to be left behind).  For a while she subsisted on her own amounts of money and those provided by the artist Hervieu.  She had also hoped to establish her soirees and thereby become the social center of an intellectual elite [!].  This she naturally expected to accomplish, as she represented (at least to herself) the successful product of a European upbringing and talent, one thrust suddenly into the midst of a barely nascent Midwestern demi-culture, to which she felt superior.  Because of this attitude, she was bound to fail on both accounts.

For things had not been going well for Fanny Trollope along the social lines she had planned out for herself.  With the coming of summer, the Trollopes had moved a mile and a half outside the city to the village of Mohawk, located at the foot of the northern hills that surround the downtown basin, where work was being done on the construction of the Miami & Erie Canal [see “Forum” Post #4476 on the building of the canal and the later Rapid Transit System], because this Englishwoman could not put up with the live hogs roaming the city streets on their way to the slaughterhouse and serving as the unofficial street-cleaners by eating all the refuse and offal on the way.  Time and time again Fanny had tried to establish her “enlightened circle” and to place culture (admittedly European culture) before the general populace of Cincinnati.  To this end, her family put on numerous plays, including Shakespeare; one performance featured son Henry as Falstaff, and, as he showed up drunk, the play was even funnier than usual.

But it was to no avail.  One Cincinnatian told Fanny that “Chaucer and Spenser were obsolete, Byron and Pope scandalous, Dryden outdated, and Shakespeare downright obscene!”  The reasons for Mrs. Trollope’s social ostracism by Cincinnatians are not hard to find.  In her excursions into town she would upbraid the local citizens for their lack of suitable dignity and failure to maintain “the proprieties,” all the while she herself was traveling without a husband, embarking on questionable commercial adventures (with the big one to come!), and living in a sort of communal “family” with a “French artist”!  And, on top of all that, these proud local citizens, bursting with American patriotic fervor, did not take kindly to an imperious unknown Englishwoman lecturing them on their failings and telling them what to do.  But worse was to follow.

“The Great Project”:  Mrs. Trollope’s new project was, she thought, guaranteed to bring European culture and fine manners to Cincinnati, at the same time ensuring the Trollope family a neat little income.  It would also, no doubt, provide the desired opening into Cincinnati high society (such as it was).  And so Fanny embarked on her “Great Project.”  This was to be the creation of an institution combining the special features of an Athenaeum, a lecture hall, a high-class café, and a “bazaar” (i.e., a high-toned merchandise mart, offering somewhat exotic goods – what today we would call a “department store”).  It would contain art galleries, a theater for dramatic performances and public readings and lectures (to be given by noted professors from the Eastern Seaboard), musicales, balls, and receptions.  (Needless to say, Cincinnati had nothing like this in 1828, except, perhaps, the balls occasionally given in the few mansions in town, which Fanny Trollope considered dreary affairs.)  All this culture was to be supported through the proceeds from the bazaar, which was to exhibit for sale fashionable garments and accessories imported straight from Europe!  To add tone to this commercial venture, young and stylish upper class society maidens would serve as clerks at the sales counters.   And to preside over this whole assemblage there was going to be witty Mrs. Trollope herself!

In the autumn Mr. Trollope arrived in Cincinnati with his eldest son, Thomas Adolphus.  He approved of the plan for the “Great Project,” as usual trusting everything to his ambitious wife.  Together they visited a transplanted Englishman, William Bullock, well known in London, who lived across the Ohio River in Kentucky at “Elmwood Hall.”  Mr. Bullock had retired from his work as a showman and exhibitor of curiosities, having been designer and proprietor of London’s “Egyptian Hall,” a neo-Egyptian pile that had served as his museum and theater, and so one suspects quite strongly that Mrs. Trollope received the ideas for her bazaar [and another project – see Part II] from Mr. Bullock.

In the spring of 1829 Mr. Trollope and son sailed back to England, Mrs. Trollope having given her husband detailed accounts of goods to be shipped back to Cincinnati to open “the Bazaar” (as it was being called).  Work had begun on the actual building, which was to stand on Third Street, a little east of Broadway and practically on the site of old Fort Washington.  The design, judging from illustrations in the journals of the day, was Moorish Oriental in style, leaning toward the Gothic.  The front façade, approached by three staircases, consisted primarily of three two-and-a-half-story windows, the top fourth of each window being Arabesque in style.  A ballroom, decorated in “the Egyptian style,” occupied the second story behind the Arabesque windows, and at the rear of the main hall was a Rotunda, intended as the exhibition space for M. Hervieu’s painting of the “Landing of Lafayette” (whether at Philadelphia in July, 1777, to fight in the Revolutionary War, or at Cincinnati in May, 1825, on his farewell visit to America, is not explained).

But construction of the “Bazaar” was going slowly.  Then suddenly the building was completed, and The Cincinnati Directory of 1829 described it as follows (excerpted here, as the description is long and flowery, and one can hardly doubt that it was written by Mrs. Trollope herself, as it comprises all of the plans for the Bazaar, many of which were never carried out, as well as chic literary phrases and artistic descriptions):

THE BAZAAR. – This exotic title carries the imagination directly to Constantinople, so celebrated for Mosques, Minarets, Caravanseras [sic] and Bazaars. . . .  The basement story, which is entered by three several flights of stone steps, contains divers neat and commodious apartments.  Those fronting the street are designed for an Exchange Coffee House, one of them to be fitted up and furnished as a Bar Room, the other to be appropriated . . . to the transaction of general Commercial Business.  Over the basement is a splendid compartment, 60 feet by 28, and ornamented by two rows of Columns passing through it. . . .  Here is to be held The Bazaar, where, it is presumeable [sic], every useful and useless article in dress, in stationary [sic], in light and ornamental household furniture, chinas and more pellucid porcelains, with every gewgaw that can contribute to the splendor and attractiveness of the exhibition, from the sparkling necklace of ‘Lady fair’ to the Exquisite’s safety-chain, will be displayed and vended.

In the rear of the Bazaar is an elegant Saloon, where Ices and other refreshments will lend their allurements to the fascinations of architectural novelty.  This Saloon opens to a spacious Balcony, which in its turn conducts to an Exhibition Gallery, that is at present occupied by Mr. Hervieu’s superb picture of Lafayette’s landing. . . .  Above the Bazaar is a magnificent Ball Room. . . .  The walls and the arched and lofty ceiling of this delectable apartment are to be decorated by the powerful pencil of Mr. Hervieu.  The rear of the room is occupied by an orchestral gallery. . . .

Behind the Ball Room is another superb Saloon, issuing also to a Balcony.  This division is assigned to the accommodation of gentlemen’s private parties, where the beau monde may regale themselves when and how they list.  Over this is a circular structure of exceedingly light and beautiful proportions, which is intended for Panoramic Exhibitions [these were the curved or fully circular giant paintings of the period; see the panorama painting of the Cincinnati Wharf in the Cincinnati History Museum at Union Terminal; or the cycloramas in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), at Gettysburg, Pa., or at Atlanta, Ga.]; and around it is constructed, in concentric circles, an airy Corridor, from whence the eye, . . . may recreate itself amid the varied beauties and blandishments of nature [this describes the ugly squat crenellated roof turret that can be seen in the daguerreotype of 1848, a harbinger of the design of the ironclad Navy vessel, the U. S. S. Monitor].

The rear of this unique and multifidous [?] edifice presents a noble Façade of Egyptian Columns, which will vie, in magnificence and novelty, with the Arabian windows that decorate its front.  The apartments are all to be lighted by Gas, furnished by Mr. Delany [this turned out to be a fiction (see below), as interior gas lighting, introduced in Baltimore in 1817 at Peale’s Museum, did not reach Cincinnati until 1837].  The whole arrangement and architectural device of this superb building reflects great credit upon the taste and skill of Mr. Palmer, the architect.”  All in all, if you read closely between the lines in the full Directory description, you will find that the building was hardly finished at the time of writing.

Aftermath:  This whole Byzantine extravaganza was a dismal failure, financial and otherwise.  Lecturers invited to speak at the Bazaar refused to come.  Young folks in Cincinnati invited to join the sales and management staffs as assistants to help run the Bazaar refused to accept positions.  And at this point, Fanny Trollope came down with malaria; her son Henry (who was sick every other week of his life) came down with it also.  The attending doctor informed Fanny that if Henry stayed in Cincinnati, he would not live another year. Therefore, she determined to sell the Bazaar, hoping to get what price she could.

Bur new distress awaited Fanny.  As she began making plans to leave Cincinnati, the bazaar goods that she had had her husband send from England arrived.  What her pathetic husband had been up to in England she did not know, but all of the miscellaneous wares he sent were of the shoddiest manufacture and design.  Not a single item was calculated to excite the imagination or admiration of the prospective Cincinnati buyers.  (Perhaps in his brief visit to the town he had taken them as country bumpkins.)  In addition, the Bazaar was not situated close to what was then the mainstream of business life in the city; the workmen were discovered to have been charging Fanny three times the market price on bricks; and the gas pipes (for that gas lighting), it was learned, were conducting nothing but a steady flow of hot air!  In short, the Americans had taken the Englishwoman who had mocked them for what is known as “a summer sleigh ride.”  Oh, and to conclude the matter, Mrs. Trollope was now trapped in Cincinnati for the winter by ice floes in the Ohio River.

Revenge:  “I cannot speculate and I cannot reason,” said Mrs. Trollope, “but I can see and hear.”  She spent all that winter recording her reminiscences of scenes and conversations of her several years in the city and began to write her scathing criticism of America and Americans – and particularly Cincinnati – namely, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832).  It was in this two-volume work that she saw her future glory, her financial salvation, and her ultimate revenge.

After leaving Cincinnati, the Trollopes, still accompanied by the artist Auguste Hervieu, who was doing the illustrations for Domestic Manners, quickly traveled over other parts of America in order to round out the scope of the book.  In speaking of Americans, Fanny wrote:  “I do not like them.  I do not like their principles, I do not like their manners, I do not like their opinions. . . .”  When her book was published shortly after her return to England, it was an instantaneous success with her English audience; it made her famous overnight.  The Americans, however, more likely said, “I do not like her opinions!”  But Mark Twain, years later, discussing English critics of 19th century America in some of the suppressed passages in his Life on the Mississippi, said, “I like Dame Trollope best. . . .  She found a civilization here which you, reader, could not have endured. . . .  Mrs. Trollope . . . dealt what the gamblers call a strictly ‘square game.’  She did not gild us; and neither did she whitewash us.”

Finale:  So what happened to the building known as “Trollope’s Bazaar”?  The building had been sold to pay the workmen’s liens.  It was purchased in 1839 by the Ohio Mechanics’ Institute [see “Forum” Post #5363; in the latter half of the 20th century, the Institute became the Ohio College of Applied Sciences, then merged with the University of Cincinnati] for $10,000, which used its halls for lectures, its saloons for a library, its coffee house for the Academy of Natural Sciences, and its ballroom for living quarters for the family of the Institute’s president.  But the Institute failed to pay the balance of purchase money and left the building.

When Anthony Trollope, the novelist and son of Mrs. Trollope, finally visited Cincinnati in 1861-1862, he stopped by “Trollope’s Folly” and found it “had become a Physico-medical institute . . . , under the dominion of a quack doctor on one side and of a college of rights-of-women female medical professors on the other.  ‘I believe, sir, no man or woman ever made a dollar in that building; and as for rent, I don’t even expect it.’”  So said the then proprietor to Anthony Trollope, but he was wrong.  It subsequently fell into the hands of some “Queen City” fancy women, who turned it into a house of ill repute.  The structure was torn down in March, 1881, as unwept in its disappearance from the Cincinnati scene as was the lady who created it.

As for that lady herself, Frances Trollope lived out her declining years in Paris, writing successful books about other countries, though none was as successful as Domestic Manners.  She loved Paris, although she did not seem to mind its filth-ridden streets and miasmic sewers as she had minded similar ones in Cincinnati.  But then she evidently preferred “frogs” to hogs.

In her book, Cincinnati:  Story of the Queen City, the Countess Clara Longworth de Chambrun, daughter of the prominent Longworth family and long-time resident of both Cincinnati and Paris herself, wrote:  “When I asked old Cincinnati ladies why Frances Trollope wrote of her sojourn with so much bitterness, the answer was invariably:  ‘My dear, she never could get in.  Her manners were bad and she had no refinement.  After seeing how she behaved in market no one could think of asking her inside a drawing room.’  What constitutes refinement is a matter more or less of opinion.”

[Coming soon:  “Mrs. Trollope in Cincinnati II:  ‘The Infernal Regions’”]


03/03/21 03:50 PM #5596    

 

Becky Payne (Shockley)

Phil: I quickly scanned your latest piece on Mrs. Trollope and it is astounding (and delightful!) Thanks for writing it. I will try to give it a more thorough reading (along with your other writings) and actually read somethinhgby Anthony Trollope (I'm overdue for that) but I do thoroughly enjoy the novels of Joanna Trollope, who is reportedtly a distant reliatve of that family.


03/03/21 05:58 PM #5597    

 

Dale Gieringer

 

     Let it be noted that Charles Dickens  (may I suggest: a superior writer to Mrs. Trollope)  had a much more favorable impression of Cincinnati upon visiting in 1842.  In  American Notes,  he reports:

"Cincinnati is a beautiful city;  cheerful, thriving, and animated.  I have not often seen a place that commends itself so favourably and pleasantly to a stranger at the first glance as this does: with its clean houses of red and white, its well-paved roads, and foot-ways of bright tile.  Nor does it become less prepossessing on a closer acquaintance.  The streets are broad and airy, the shops extremely good, the previate residences remakable for their elegance and neatness.  There is something of invention and fancy in the varying styles of these latter erections...The disposition to ornament these pretty villas and render them attractive, leads to the culture of trees and flowers, and the laying out of well-kept gardens, the sight of which, to those who walk along the streets, is inexpressibly refreshing and agreeable.  I was quite charmed with the appearance of the town, and its adjoining suburb of Mount Auburn: from which the city, lying in an amphitheatre of hills, form as picture of remarkable beauty...

"Cincinnati is honorably famous for its free schools, of which it has so many that no person's child among its population can, by possibility, want the means of education, which was extended, upon an average, to four thousand pupils annually...

"The society with which I mingled was intelligent, courteous, and agreable.  The inhabitants of Cincinnati are proud of their city as one of the most interesting in America: and with good reason: for beautiful and thriving as it is now, and containing, as it does, a population of fifty thousand souls, but two-and-fifty years have passed away since the ground on which it stands (bought at that time for a few dollars) was a a wild wood, and its citizens were but a handful of dwellers in scattered log huts upon the river's shore."

 

 

 


03/03/21 07:29 PM #5598    

 

Paul Simons

After reading these entries I got interested in our town, in particular where its name came from, and copied this from a simple easy-read website:

 

“Cincinnati , Ohio, is a creative, economic, and cultural Midwestern hub nestled along the Ohio River. Its name has a storied history, with Roman military roots and connections to the Revolutionary War and the founding of the United States. Delve into the history of Cincinnati’s name, and learn how the “Queen City of the West” acquired its moniker. 

Israel Ludlow, Robert Patterson, and Matthias Denman purchased the 800 acres that comprised Cincinnati’s humble beginnings in 1788. The land was located along the Ohio River and across from the mouth of the Licking River, which inspired the town’s original name: Losantiville. With Anglo-Saxon, Greek, and Latin origins, the town’s name literally meant “The Town Opposite the Mouth of the Licking.” The settlement kept this name for its first two years of existence.

Losantiville grew over the subsequent years as more settlers arrived. In 1790, the town was named the county seat of Hamilton County by Arthur St. Clair, the Northwestern Territory governor. St. Clair renamed Losantiville, bestowing upon the growing settlement the name of Cincinnati.

 

Cincinnati got its name from the 5th-century BC Roman soldier and hero, Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus. After leading the republic’s army to victory over invaders, he denied rewards, returning to a farm where he lived out the remainder of his days instead. For many people, and especially Revolutionary War-era Patriots, Cincinnatus embodied self-sacrifice, patriotic loyalty, integrity, and civic virtue. In particular, his history represented for new Americans the promise of democracy and the possibility of overcoming tyranny.

Cincinnatus’ bravery inspired both Governor St. Clair and the founders of the Society of the Cincinnati, also named after the same Roman “people’s hero.” The Society of the Cincinnati, to which the name of the city of Cincinnati was also a nod, was founded by Continental Army officers in Newburgh, New York, in 1783. The Society still exists today as a fraternal philanthropic and patriotic organization dedicated to what its members describe as the values and memory of the American Revolution.

In 1790, Governor St. Clair was the President of the State Society of the Cincinnati of Pennsylvania, explaining his deep connection to the name and its origins. Many members of the Society had settled throughout the territory he governed, making Cincinnati a particularly suitable name for the growing region.

Cincinnati was subsequently incorporated as a town in 1802 and officially recognized as a city in 1819. It would eventually become, for a time, the most densely populated city in the United States and a major center of industry and commerce.”

 

I’d have to say that there may be some today who would gain something by taking Cincinnatus’ example. That turn of events would benefit modern day Cincinnati and every other town in this place.

 

 


03/03/21 08:04 PM #5599    

 

Philip Spiess

Dale:  I quite agree with you on the matter of Dickens' writing; his bust sits on my bookshelf above his complete works, and I took my Master's oral exams in English at Indiana University in Dickens, George Eliot, and Jane Austen.  Dickens' view of the city in American Notes was written some twelve years after Mrs. Trollope had her say, and so the Foote mansion and Martin Baum's house (now the Taft Museum), as well as Shire's Garden, were but several of the elements of the city's burgeonng elegance that he would have seen.

My undergraduate thesis for Hanover College (for my Bachelor's degree in English, and for which I won the department's John Livingston Lowes Award for research) was on the visits to Cincinnati of Mrs. Trollope, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde (you can see that I've been cannibalizing it here for these vignettes).  According to Clara Longworth, Countess de Chambrun, while Dickens was in Cincinnati, her grandfather, Judge Timothy Walker, who became a good friend and correspondent of Dickens, told him the story of a Cincinnati girl of former times "who shut herself from the light of day and waited among the nuptial preparations for her bridegroom who never came."  This is, of course, the story that Dickens turned into the character of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, but I have never been able to find the original Cincinnati story on which it is based, or otherwise been able to verify it, so we'll have to take the Countess's word for its veracity.

When Dickens went north from Cincinnati to Lebanon, Ohio, he was not so well pleased, however.  He stopped at the Bradley House, long known to most of us now as the "Golden Lamb Inn," and, being in need of reviving spirits from his stagecoach ride along dusty Ohio turnpikes, was shocked to learn that the establishment he was stopping at was a temperance one.  Dickens thereby remarks, in American Notes, that the inn's tea and coffee were both very bad, and the water was worse [cf. W. C. Fields' comment on the drinking of water].  This has not stopped the present-day inn establishment from proudly advertising the fact that Dickens stayed there, as well as showing off his bedroom, in which you can spend the night (and, yes, the inn now serves alcohol, Gott sei dankt!).  

   


03/04/21 09:52 PM #5600    

 

Paul Simons

Jerry it looks like there are a lot in this country whose thinking hasn't changed much from that of their ancestors who engaged in that and similar manifestations of white supremacy. One hell of a lot of them. Confederate flag paraded around the halls of Congress. About 100 new laws enacted by various State legislatures with one aim - to prevent Black folks from voting. Country's got an evil past and a hell of a lot of U.S. citizens are looking for an evil future.


03/05/21 12:39 PM #5601    

 

Gail Weintraub (Stern)

           CLOSING NIGHT PERFORMANCE SATURDAY!

                            BUY YOUR TICKET NOW!!

"Songs For A New World" was positively outstanding! Please convey to all those who made it happen. What a gift to those of us fortunate to have seen this unique performance! Our gratitude to the Class of '64 who sponsored tonight's incredibly memorable event. 

Marlin Warner Feldman '62 and David Feldman

Ticket information on Post #5574. This is a live stream performance  viewable only on Friday and Saturday, March 5-6 at 7 PM EST.

 


03/05/21 04:08 PM #5602    

 

Dale Gieringer

    Jerry -  I'm not sure about the spit, but Dickens did write, "Public opinion has, within a few years, burned a slave alive at a slow fire in the city of St. Louis;  and public opinion has to this day maintained upon the bench that estimable judge who charged the jury, impanelled there to try his murderers, that their most horrid deed was an act of public opinion, and being so, must not be punished by the laws the public sentiment had made.  Public opinion hailed this doctrine with a howl of wild applause, and set the prisoners free..."

     Today, a google search for "runaway slave roast on spit" yields dozens of porn sites.

 

 

 

 


03/05/21 07:06 PM #5603    

 

Philip Spiess

I was not inclined, Dale, to look up the searing of human flesh on gridirons, spits, or other implements of outdoor cookery (although I have a book in my collection by Reay Tannahill, Flesh and Blood:  A History of the Cannibal Complex, 1975), so i guess I'm glad you did.

However, Jerry's question put into mind an incident I heard about during my years at Hanover College in southern Indiana. It was that back in the 1920s, when Indiana (not the "Old South") had the largest number of citizens belonging to the Ku Klux Klan, that an African American man had been roasted to death on a griddle by a mob in one of Indiana's southern counties that border the Ohio River, somewhere between Madison, Indiana, and Tell City.  The import of the story (which could have been folklore, but I tend to credit it) was that from that day in the 1920s to at least the late 1960s (when I heard the tale), no African American had deigned to live in that county since (and who could blame them?).

Our church has been having churchwide discussion groups since last summer on racial justice and the current situation, and, unfortunately, stories like this (and Dickens') need to be brought to light.


03/06/21 02:25 PM #5604    

 

David Buchholz

Didn't Jonathan Swift get the party started? From A Modest Proposal...

"I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasee, or a ragoust."


03/06/21 11:49 PM #5605    

 

Philip Spiess

MRS. TROLLOPE IN CINCINNATI II:  The “Infernal Regions”

The Dawning of Natural History in Cincinnati:  When we left Mrs. Trollope, or rather when she left us, heading east to London and Paris, she was determined to “tell the truth” about Cincinnati and its lack of culture.  But certain aspects of culture had been a-dawning in Cincinnati even before Mrs. Trollope got there.  The citizens may not have taken to Shakespeare initially – after all, founding a city in the wilderness of the Ohio Country took a lot of their time and attention – but one thing that they were surrounded with that would provide a productive use of time and study was natural history, exploring its productions and uses, and its economic and health benefits as well.

Accordingly, the Western Museum Society (a focus of this vignette) was founded in Cincinnati in 1818 and the Western Academy of Natural Sciences was founded in the same city in 1835.  Earlier societies of natural history had been founded along the Eastern seaboard as cities emerged from their settlement period into an era of financial prosperity, and newly wealthy gentlemen (and occasionally ladies) indulged in intellectual and cultural pursuits.  Thus, natural history societies were to be found in such cities as Charleston (S. C.), Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.  These natural history study groups organized collections (so-called “cabinets of curiosities”) of plants, rocks, minerals, fossils, birds, and animals; these all provided fuel for the speculations on the nature of the universe and “God’s plan for the world” in the 18th-century “Age of Reason.”

Of Dr. Daniel Drake and His Labors:  The instigator of Cincinnati’s Western Museum was Dr. Daniel Drake, sometimes called “the Benjamin Franklin of the West,” as he had a finger in many of the city’s organizational, intellectual, and cultural pies.  Drake was born in New Jersey in 1785, but shortly thereafter moved with his family to Kentucky.  At the age of 15, he began his study of medicine with one of Cincinnati’s earliest doctors, Dr. William Goforth; he became a partner in Goforth’s practice, Goforth granting him a diploma to practice medicine on his own.  This was the first medical diploma granted west of the Appalachian Mountains.  Drake then studied medicine in Philadelphia, graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with his medical degree.  Returning to the Ohio Valley in 1805, he opened a medical practice in Kentucky before returning to Cincinnati in 1807.  Thereafter he devoted the rest of his life to science and the cultural development of the “West” (at that time the term referred to the territory between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi River, i.e., the Old Northwest Territory).

Drake developed the program of the Western Museum in his “An Anniversary Discourse on the State and Prospects of the Western Museum Society,” delivered June 10, 1820:  “At the expiration of the two years which have been spent in the collection and arrangement of curiosities, when they are prepared for public inspection, and the doors of the Museum are about to be opened, it is important that we should review the design and labors of the Society, and inquire what benefits they are likely to produce.  As the arts and sciences have not hitherto been cultivated among us to any great extent, the influence they are capable of exerting on our happiness and dignity is not generally perceived. . . .”  He went on to note that the main objective of the museum was “the illustration of our Natural History,” and mentioned that Mr. John James Audubon, “one of the excellent artists connected with the museum, . . . has drawn from nature several hundred species of American birds. . . .”  (Audubon also served the museum as taxidermist.)  Drake further described a collection of Indian utensils, weapons, and trinkets, artifacts acquired from digging in the prehistoric Indian mounds of Ohio [see Forum Post #4930], and the acquisition by the museum of “several kinds of philosophical instruments,” [this was the term at the time for what we would call “scientific instruments”] “calculated to illustrate the principles of magnetism, electricity, galvanism, mechanics, hydrostatics, optics, and the mechanism of the solar system.  The whole of these can be fabricated by our ingenious Curator, Mr. Best.”

A Brief Note on Robert Best:  So Robert Best was Curator of the Western Museum.  It was advertised (1822) that he would “repair all kinds of Philosophical and Mathematical Instruments – all the highest order of Time Keepers, and in short, every species of delicate and Complicated Machinery.”  Born in England, Best was the Rev. Elijah Slack’s assistant during the first session of the Medical College of Ohio (founded by Dr. Daniel Drake) [also see Forum Post #4943], lecturing on chemistry, on which subject he authored a book.  He died, it is said, a “nervous wreck” in 1830 at the age of forty, possibly from all of the duties he performed at the Western Museum, Cincinnati College [see below], and the Medical College of Ohio.

The Lancaster Seminary and Cincinnati College:  Daniel Drake was also a founder of the Lancaster Seminary, so-called because it taught its students by the “Lancastrian Method.”  This method of conducting schools was begun by Anglican missionary schools in Madras, India (hence it is sometimes called the “Madras Method”).  Under this method, one teacher could supervise hundreds of students by dividing them into groups of about twenty each and putting them under the direct supervision of a class monitor, said monitor being a more advanced student, one selected for his deportment and his ability in his studies.  The system arrived in England from India in 1789 via Dr. Alexander Bell, who taught the method to Joseph Lancaster, a Quaker.  By 1805 Lancaster was conducting his own school in London by this method, having one thousand students enrolled under his and his hand-picked monitors’ direction.

An early and strong American advocate of the “Lancastrian Method” of education was the prominent Philadelphia physician, Dr. Benjamin Rush (a signer of the Declaration of Independence and known as the “American Hippocrates”), who wrote a treatise on A Plan for the Establishment of Public Schools. . . .  Daniel Drake undoubtedly studied medicine with Benjamin Rush during his Philadelphia years, and so no doubt learned of the “Lancastrian Method” from him.  Accordingly, Drake founded Cincinnati’s Lancaster Seminary, a private high school, in 1815.  By 1819 the seminary had become Cincinnati College, a forerunner of the University of Cincinnati; its first president was the prominent Cincinnatian Jacob Burnet.

Dr. Drake made sure that the Western Museum was housed in Cincinnati College, located at the corner of Walnut and Fourth Streets, noting that having a museum and a college under one roof was by choice and was planned to be permanent:  “[I]n some degree they are necessary to the success of one another. . .  They afford, in succession, all the aids that are essential to a liberal education.  The College is principally a school of literature, the Museum of science, and the arts.  The knowledge imparted by one is elementary, by the other practical. . . .  [B]y the help of both, [our sons] may become scholars and philosophers.”

Enter Joseph Dorfeuille:  The Western Museum, which was at first limited to the natural and ethnological specimens mentioned above, as well as to some of the scientific instruments available (art was to come later), was left by Dr. Drake to the care of Robert Best until 1823, when Robert Best left town, and the operation of the museum was turned over to one Joseph Dorfeuille.  By his own admission, Joseph Dorfeuille had been collecting natural history specimens in Louisiana as early as 1808, acquiring collections of plants, animals, and native American artifacts, and hoping to set up a museum to house his collections.  He and his collections arrived in Cincinnati about 1820, just at the time that the Western Museum was opening.

Associating himself with the naturalists and artists (such as Audubon) working at Drake’s Western Museum, eventually Dorfeuille donated his own collections to the museum.  When he took over as curator in 1823, he began to enlarge the holdings.  By 1827 the museum owned 100 mammoth and mastodon bones; 50 giant sloth bones; 33 stuffed quadrupeds; 500 stuffed birds; 200 stuffed fishes; 5000 invertebrates; 1000 fossils; 3500 minerals; 325 botanical specimens; 3125 medals, coins, and tokens; 150 Egyptian and 215 Indian artifacts; 112 microscopic pictures [presumably slides]; views of American scenery and buildings; around 500 specimens of fine art; an elephant penis; and a “preserved and beautifully tattooed” head of a South Sea Island Chieftain.

However, by 1827 a number of significant changes had occurred.  The trustees of the Western Museum, no longer being able to financially support the museum, tried to sell the collections, but to no avail, so they gave them to Dorfeuille, stipulating that their families (who had been stockholders in the Museum) continue to have free access to the museum.  In 1825 the Cincinnati College had failed also, so Dorfeuille moved the Western Museum and its collections to the northwest corner of Second and Main Streets by the Public Landing, and then to rooms on the 3rd, 4th, and attic floors of a building on the southwest corner of Main and Pearl Streets.

The status of the Western Museum by 1824 is indicated by a poem [excerpted here] published in the Cincinnati Literary Gazette:    

                                “Wend hither, ye members of polished society –

                                 Ye who the bright phantoms of pleasure pursue --

                                 To see of strange objects the endless variety, 

                                 Monsieur Dorfeuille will expose to your view.

                                 For this fine collection, which courts your inspection

                                 Was brought to perfection by his skill and lore,

                                 When those who projected and should have protected

                                 Its Interests, neglected to care for it more.”

For Dorfeuille had learned that the public, having seen a given natural history exhibit once, didn’t need to see it again, even if it included two-headed pigs, eight-legged lambs, and other “things unnatural.”  Therefore he now introduced a collection of wax figures of historical personages (a la London’s Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks), which were sculpted by a then young and unknown Cincinnati sculptor, Hiram Powers (he had begun his career working in a grocery, but was fired for having opened butter firkins and sculpted the butter into lizards and hissing snakes), a pump organ, and a “Chamber of Horrors” depicting famous murders, including what supposedly were blood-soaked murder weapons and the head of one Hoover, a real-life murderer, “swollen and distorted in a huge glass of alcohol” (said head no doubt paired with that of the South Sea Islander).  Scientific study, it appears, had transmogrified into flagrant crass commercialism.

Mrs. Trollope Inserts Herself:  We have seen [in Part I] that Mrs. Frances Trollope’s sojourn in Cincinnati was, she hoped, to benefit her and her family financially as well as socially.  Accordingly, she cast about for some such project to latch onto, an “intellectual” one being most desirable.  Thus her first venture began when she connected herself to Joseph Dorfeuille and his Western Museum and introduced him to her artist friend Auguste Hervieu.  (Audubon, Dorfeuille’s artist, had left the Western Museum by this time.)  You will recall [see Part I] that Mrs. Trollope was friends with the former museum exhibitor extraordinaire, William Bullock, of London’s “Egyptian Hall” fame, who now lived just across the Ohio River at Ludlow, Kentucky.  There is little doubt that she conversed with him to come up with her grand plan for the Western Museum.

Mrs. Trollope’s plan was this:  to reproduce on the second floor of the Western Museum a moving model of a scene from Dante’s Inferno.  This, she thought, would certainly inspire culture in the Cincinnatians!  So Fanny Trollope designed the tableau, Hervieu painted the backdrops, Hiram Powers (who was later to become the most celebrated American sculptor of the 19th century, especially for his sculpture of “The Greek Slave,” with a studio in Italy and equally acclaimed in Europe as in America) sculpted the waxwork figures, and, as he had studied with Cincinnati’s celebrated clockmaker, Luman Watson, worked with Dorfeuille to invent and make the clockwork mechanisms and gas machinery that moved the life-sized figures – some thirty in all – and illuminated them.

The “Infernal Regions”:  This exhibit of “Hell,” or “Infernal Regions,” as it came to be called, was an immense success:  it contained such effects as a “central, grand colossal figure of Minos, the Judge of Hell [Mrs. Trollope apparently mixed Greek mythology with Dante], holding a two-pronged scepter.  On his right appeared a frozen lake from which emerged the heads of doomed earthlings, including Ugolino, pictured ‘eternally gnawing the head of his enemy’ [in actual history, it was the bodies of his sons; see the statue in the Metropolitan Museum of Art].  A ‘BLACK IMP’ was ‘seated on a rock dandling a young monster.’  Throngs of condemned spirits ‘in all varieties of suffering’ crowded about a fountain of flame in the midst of the frozen lake, and birds and animals of hideous form and evil omen fluttered over the heads of the sufferers.  On the left of Minos a skeleton ascended a column of icicles, the bright surface of which glared red with the reflection of hell-fire, and held aloft a standard with these lines, prepared for the occasion by Mrs. Trollope herself:    

                                “To this grim form our cherished limbs have come,

                                 And thus lie mouldering in their earthly home.

                                 In turf-bound hillock or in sculptured shrine

                                 The worms alike their cold caresses twine.

                                 So far we all are equal:  but once left

                                 Our mortal weeds, of vital spark bereft,

                                 Asunder farther than the poles we’re driven –

                                 Some sunk to deepest Hell, some raised to highest Heaven.”

It was also advertised that, true or not, all of the skeletons in the exhibit were “those of Malefactors Executed in Ohio within the past 20 years for their criminal offenses” (how these were acquired by the Museum is not explained).  Behind the view of “Inferno” gleamed Hervieu’s transparencies of “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso,” bright with symbols of hope and moral progress upward.  These included a boat guided by an Angel [not dissimilar from Thomas Cole‘s paintings of “The Voyage of Life,” the large set of which hung in George K. Schoenberger’s home, “Scarlet Oaks,” in Clifton, until it was transferred to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C., in the early 1970s], Virgil and Beatrice, pilgrims ascending the Holy Mountain, and a golden Heaven in the distance.

Further terrors included mechanical dwarfs that grew into giants as one watched them, “ebony imps with fire darting from their eyeballs, huge snakes in the act of swallowing beautiful maidens,” and “unearthly sounds, horrid groans, and terrible shrieks. . . .  At a moment when utter darkness prevails all the sufferers, imps, and monsters are heard shrieking together till the light returns.”  To add his share of amusements, young Henry Trollope (Mrs. Trollope’s son) would dress up in a long black robe, with a lobster claw on his nose, and stand at the entrance greeting visitors as they prepared to leave by inquiring, “Do you smell sulfur?”

In order to protect the delicate waxwork figures of the display from abuse by the often untutored country bumpkin visitors to the exhibit, Dorfeuille rigged up, in front of the “Inferno,” a “massive iron grating cunningly connected by wires with an electrical machine [a hand-cranked dynamo] in the background.  Any spectator (and few could resist the impulse) who put hand or foot between the bars received a smart shock which often passed from one to another of the crowd causing shrieks of terror.”

Early Public Relations:  To properly put this exhibit – and, indeed the entire Western Museum – before the public, Mrs. Trollope wrote a verse for the Cincinnati Mirror, which included such lines [abridged here] as:

                                    “Come hither, come hither, by night or by day.

                                     There’s plenty to look at and little to pay;

                                     You may stroll through the rooms and at every turn

                                     There’s something to please you and something to learn.

                                               *          *          *          *          *

                                     And further, a secret I still have to tell,

                                     You may ramble upstairs, and on earth be in H-ll!”

The Western Museum’s “Infernal Regions,” on the Museum’s top floor, opened every night at 7:15 p.m., and a showing lasted for one-half to three-quarters of an hour [which suggests that there was probably more than one showing a night]; the admission price was 50 cents.  Once the “Hell” was open, however, it advertised itself.  Probably the subterfuge used, that of the “moral and religious” purposes of the display – as well as inviting the clergy to attend for free – helped the financial success of the exhibit.  People came from far and wide to view this miraculous spectacle, certain Christian ministers describing it as a great and glorious revival of faith in Cincinnati, and preaching sermons on the subject.

The "End Times":  Dorfeuille departed for New York in 1839, hoping to regroup his fortunes, which had been dwindling:  in 1829 he had tried to sell portions of the fossil collections to the Academy of Natural Sciences, then to the American Philosophical Society, both in Philadelphia; in 1833 he was forced to mortgage the entire contents of the museum (including “The Infernal Regions”) to one Henry Avery for $3500.  (His effort to sell the museum’s natural history collections, along with a large collection of scientific books, to the newly formed Western Academy of Sciences in Cincinnati evidently failed.)  Dorfeuille’s museum was ultimately acquired by one Frederick Franks, who had been running a competing establishment since 1828 on Front Street in Cincinnati between Sycamore Street and Broadway.  Franks and his son continued to operate the Western Museum and its “Infernal Regions” for at least another twenty-five years.  The noted American humorist, Artemus Ward, who first saw the “Regions” in 1861, declared it “the best show in Cincinnati.”  

In short, Cincinnati’s Western Museum, the forerunner of today’s venerable Cincinnati Museum of Natural History (currently housed in Cincinnati Union Terminal), was an early Cincinnati showplace, and its “Infernal Regions” was undoubtedly the most famous museum exhibit in all of America in the Victorian era (even including those in P. T. Barnum’s American Museum in New York City, which preceded his famed circus), the "Infernal Regions"'s popularity, even if it had become dowdy and well-worn (as we are told), lasting well into the 1860s.


03/07/21 04:21 AM #5606    

 

Gene Stern

I had the pleasure of seeing "Songs for a new World", our Class sponsored live-stream event, and  felt a sense of pride that our Class of 64 Performing Arts Fund is really making an impact. Thanks to all who have supported this Fund-it is making a genuine and everlasting contribution to the betterment of current and future WHHS classes. Rick Steiner would have been ecstatic at the unique and entertaining performance of this production.


03/09/21 12:52 AM #5607    

 

Philip Spiess

Jerry:  It's not hard to find the reasons why (deplorable as they might be) that Cincinnati didn't like freed slaves:

(1) Cincinnati was at the southern border of the free states; Kentucky, just across the river was a slave state.  Of course, any freed slave wanted to get into Ohio; hence the Ohio legislature refused to allow the completion of the Cincinnati Suspension Bridge until after the Civil War -- it would make it too easy for slaves to cross!  (We're not accounting for Eliza in Uncle Tom's Cabin waiting for the river to freeze -- which it did in those days -- to cross on the ice.).

(2) Freed slaves, looking for work, competed with the poorer white citizens of Cincinnati, it being easier to pay poor blacks less for the same work than poor whites.  (It was also easier to trick -- or sell -- freed slaves back into slavery, human chicanery being what it is.)

(3) The Hamilton County courts began to be filled up with presumed "freed slave" cases, particularly after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.  Naturally, this impeded other types of legal cases, to the extreme irritation of Cincinnati businessmen, nor were they particularly sympathetic to these cases to begin with.

(4) The presence of freed slaves in town certainly activated the already active Abolitionist crowd and its newspapers, thus coming up against the more conservative elements of Cincinnati society (cf., the present day scuttles between far-right political elements and those accused of being "Progressives" -- or worse).

(5) I'm sure the government powers-that-were, in city, in county, and in state, frankly did not know what to do with an influx of freed slaves -- did not want even to deal with the matter -- so they made it as difficult as possible for freed slaves to exist in Cincinnati (cf., the recent voting restrictions being passed in certain state legislatures).

To review details:  see my eight Forum articles on "African Americans in Cincinnati," particularly Part I on "Black Laws and Race Riots" [Post #4528, 2-19-2020] and Part V on the "Cincinnati Schools" [Post #4674, 4-7-2020].  You may also wish to see Jim Nathan's post on the 1967 Cincinnati race riots [6-15-2020] and Ann Rueve's post on the 2001 Cincinnati race riots [6-13-2020].


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