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Philip Spiess
STONE LIONS, STONE EAGLES: Petrified Creatures from Cincinnati’s Past
Two Academic Lions: Although many of us did not attend the University of Cincinnati, almost all of us are surely familiar with the two guardian marble lions of McMicken Hall at the University: “Mick and Mack.” Once they faced each other, but now they face away (did they argue?). Most people are aware that the one on the left, as you face McMicken Hall, is “Mick,” and the one on the right is “Mack.” And everyone is pretty sure that “Mick” is named after Charles McMicken, who left a large portion of his fortune to found a college for white students [!], which was chartered as the University of Cincinnati in 1870, and for whom McMicken Hall is named. But they’re not so sure about the naming of “Mack.” (I posit that “Mack” is named after William McMillan, one of the first settlers and surveyors of Cincinnati and Delegate from the Old Northwest Territory’s at-large district to the U. S. House of Representatives in the Sixth U. S. Congress. Further, McMillan Street in Clifton Heights, which borders the University on the south, is named for him.) The lions are copies of larger versions carved in 1600 by Flaminio Vacca in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, Italy, which in turn were copies of a lion sculpture from ancient Rome. Because the lions’ tails have been broken off and replaced numerous times, the university keeps molds of the tails in order to re-create them as needed. There is no truth to the legend that the pair roars whenever a virgin walks by – at least, the lions have never roared.
The lions originally were part of the extensive collection of classical statuary that graced the gardens of Jacob Hoffner’s estate in Cumminsville. He was a real estate and business speculator who often traveled in Europe and had copies made of sculptures which he saw there. He died in 1894 at the age of 96, leaving everything to his wife Maria, but stipulating that his statuary was to be donated to the city of Cincinnati. When Maria died in 1904, the statuary passed to the city, and the city placed the lions at the original McMicken Hall (1895-late 1940s), the first university building built on the Burnet Woods campus. More recently, the lions have been a prominent feature of the current McMicken Hall, built on the site of the old one in 1950. They have been adopted as the official mascots of the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences Alumni Association.
Two Hopped-Up Lions: For many years, as we were growing up, if you rode west on Central Parkway past the main YMCA at Elm Street, you came up abruptly on a gigantic 5-story brick building and had to turn north to continue on the Parkway. This giant was the old Windisch-Muhlhauser Brewing Company, better known as the “Lion Brewery,” founded in 1866 on the Miami & Erie Canal by the brothers-in-law Conrad Windisch and Gottlieb Muhlhauser, who emigrated from Bavaria and who operated the brewery until 1922, when Prohibition shut it down. (After Prohibition ended in 1933, the Burger Brewing Company set up shop in the old brewery in 1934 and operated there until 1973.) Called the “Lion Brewery” because of two giant stone lions that could be seen way atop the twin gables of the brewery building, Windisch-Muhlhauser was Cincinnati’s second-largest brewery. Each sandstone lion weighed 10,000 pounds and neither (it was found when they were taken down) actually was attached to the building – they were just sitting up there on concrete slabs! The two lions, much later to be named “Leo” and “Leona,” were brought from Germany to grace the brewery and are calculated to be about 150 years old; each is about 10 feet long, 3 feet wide, and 6 feet high. Removed from the building for safety reasons by the Doran Transfer & Rigging Company circa 1952, the lions ended up guarding the entrance to the Doran family’s property in the 4800 block of North Bend Road in Western Hills, where they could be seen for many years. The brewery building itself was first repurposed after Burger Brewing closed in 1973; since then, the building has been razed in sections over the last fifty years.
However, for the lions it’s been a different story. Dan Doran of the Doran Transfer & Rigging Co. family, and Dale Rack of the V & G Rack Co., recall playing around the lions in the 1950s and 1960s, often sitting on them. It is believed that the lions were separated in the 1980s, when the Dorans moved one lion (“Leo”) with them as they moved around; the Rack family got the other lion (“Leona,” once called “Kitty Cat” by Dale Rack’s father). At present, the Racks’ lion can be seen in the 5000 block of North Bend Road in front of the family business; it is practically across the street from where it and its partner once stood. It is painted yellow and brown and sits on a custom-built stone pedestal. As for the Dorans’ lion, “Leo” (which they do not wish to move with them to Florida) has just gotten a new home. In the 19th century, the Muhlhauser and Christian Moerlein families owned and operated farms in Butler County, Ohio, where they grew grains for the brewing of beer; they also had summer homes there. In 1881, a timber-frame barn was constructed for the storing of grain on the Muhlhauser farm on Seward Road in Fairfield. In 2002, this barn was donated to West Chester Township; moved, rebuilt, and restored, the Muhlhauser Barn now stands at 8558 Beckett Road in West Chester Township’s Beckett Park. And it is there that the Windisch-Muhlhauser lion “Leo” will sit on a path outside the Muhlhauser Barn – and where children can sit on the old stone lion once more.
Two Eagles of Commerce (and Two More): The Melan Arch Bridge (named after the Austrian Josef Melan, designer of the bridge’s reinforcing system), the oldest reinforced concrete bridge in Ohio (1894) and the second-oldest reinforced concrete bridge in the United States [see "Forum" Post #2531 (12-15-2016): "Early Concrete Architecture in Cincinnati: The Ingalls Building and the Melan Arch Bridge"], spans Eden Park Drive near where it joins Victory Parkway at the northeastern entrance to Eden Park, close by the Twin Lakes Overlook. Prominent as part of the overall appearance of the bridge today (but not part of its original design) are four 5-foot tall elegant stone eagles, which stand on pedestals at the base of the bridge’s arch, one at each of the four corners of the bridge. These eagles were part of the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce and Merchants’ Exchange building (1889-1911), designed by the renowned American architect Henry Hobson Richardson, and which stood on the southwest corner of Fourth and Vine Streets downtown. The eagles, of pink Milford (Worcester) granite (as was the rest of the building), flanked the peaks of the two large dormer windows which stood at the roofline of the north and south sides of the building, crowning glories of this massive and turreted carved stone building in the Romanesque style.
But alas! The famed architect had planned not wisely but too well: in order to make the main trading floor completely open, he had suspended the two main floors from truss girders at the top of the building. Thus, when a grease fire broke out in the restaurant on the evening of January 10, 1911, the girders, weakened by the fire, could not sustain the weight of the building’s interior, and the whole building collapsed inward, crashing down on itself. Because the building’s stones were massive and some beautifully carved, there was an effort made to save them. The Cincinnati Astronomical Society salvaged 3,000 tons of the stones to build a new observatory in Cleves, Ohio, to replace the one in Hyde Park, but it ran out of funds and nothing came of the project, the stones languishing in a field off of Buffalo Ridge Road in Cleves for nearly sixty years – all except for the dormer eagles, which were donated to the Cincinnati Park Board shortly after 1911. (Some of the more attractive stones became part of the UC College of Design, Art and Architecture’s student-led H. H. Richardson Memorial in 1972; it stands at the southern edge of Burnet Woods park, adjacent to the College of Design, Art and Architecture classrooms.) In 2016 a car hit one of the pylons in Eden Park and the eagle fell off and cracked, but it has now been repaired and put back in place.
Two Garden Gateway Eagles: Jacob Hoffner and his Cumminsville (some persist in calling it Northside) estate (corner of Hamilton Avenue and Blue Rock Street) are summarized above in the second paragraph of “Two Academic Lions.” A late 19th-century photograph of the entrance to the Hoffner estate and its house has been published on the Internet; it shows two stone gateposts with what look like bedraggled stone eagles on top of them (are they really eagles?). Numerous articles on the Internet and elsewhere copy each other in stating that these are “the eagles that were placed in Eden Park.” Nonsense! They look nothing like the Eden Park eagles [see above, “Two Eagles of Commerce.”]. However, they must have come to the city of Cincinnati in 1904 under Hoffner’s will with his other statuary (the Chamber of Commerce eagles were still on the Chamber of Commerce building at that time); I don’t know what became of them. Hoffner’s estate in Cumminsville (minus the house and statuary) became the Northside Playground, and then eventually Jacob Hoffner Park.
Two Lions at Rest: High on a hill in Section 57 of Spring Grove Cemetery is the Jacob Hoffner family burial plot and monument. The monument is a tall, narrow, open Gothic spire with a lady (angel?) inside; she looks to the south. The hill this monument is on, on the cemetery’s eastern border near Winton Road, is steep; a steep set of stone stairs descends the hill from the spire’s eastern side – but the steps descend only part way down the hill (there was once an iron fence along this boundary of the burial plot); you cannot reach them easily from the bottom of the hill (I know; I’ve tried). If you take the drive around the hill to its western and more level end, you can approach the monument on foot through Section 57A. This monument is singular in itself, but the pleasing part of the monument (if you can reach it!) is at the foot of the stone stairs: on either side a large pair of stone lions recline on pedestals, looking as if they are sleeping – or perhaps they are in their eternal sleep. And there they can stay, for they do not need to guard the steps or the monument – you cannot get to either easily!
Two Metal Eagles: In our youth, when one went west on Hopple Street from Central Parkway, one immediately passed, on the north side of the street, the great Haffner Brothers “Eagle” Tannery. Over its entrance, surmounting the tannery, was what proposed to be a sculpture of a great wing-spread eagle, but which frankly looked more like a ruptured goose from the street below. When the tannery went out of business after 102 years in 1959, this 85-year-old hollow zinc sculpture eventually ended up in the backyard of Louis Haffner’s daughter, Mrs. James Headley, at her residence at 8280 Kugler Mill Road in Indian Hill. (It’s since gone from there, I don’t know where; the tannery itself was torn down to make way for the Mill Creek Expressway, now part of I-75.) A much more modern-styled eagle is “The American Eagle” (a.k.a. “Victory Eagle”) on the John Weld Peck Federal Building at 550 Main Street downtown. Made of cast aluminum and sculpted by Marshall Maynard Fredericks (1908-1998), this rapidly descending “neo-Art Deco” eagle is 21 feet high and has adorned the Federal Building two stories above its entrance since 1964.
One Lone Stone Eagle: So far our eagles have been more or less in pairs. But there is one lone eagle we should mention; it stands atop a designedly broken fluted column, just inside Spring Grove Cemetery after you pass under the Railway Arch, in Section 20. The eagle is bowed in grief with a laurel garland in its beak, mourning a life cut short, for it is the monument and grave of Mexican War and Civil War General William Haines Lytle, the last descendant of Cincinnati's Lytle family, for whom Lytle Park is named. General Lytle was something of an anomaly: he was more famed as a poet than he was as a military man. Among many turgid and sentimental verses was his most famous poem, often set to music in the Victorian era -- "Antony and Cleopatra" (1857), also known as "I Am Dying, Egypt, Dying!" and "Listen to the Great Heart Secrets." Here is a sample from its first and last verses: "I am dying, Egypt, dying! / Ebbs the crimson life-tide fast, / And the dark Plutonian shadows / Gather on the evening blast; / ... / Ah, no more amid the battle / Shall my heart exulting swell; / Isis and Osiris guard thee, -- / Cleopatra, Rome, farewell!" General Lytle never married; he died in 1863, mortally wounded at the Battle of Chickamauga, Georgia, while leading a counterattack on horseback. Confederates, knowing his poetry well, placed a guard over his body and recited his poetry over their evening campfires.
Lytle's funeral cortege in Cincinnati was so long -- from Christ Church on Fourth Street to Spring Grove Cemetery in Winton Place -- that it did not reach the cemetery until dusk. His monument there (1865), formerly of Italian Carrara marble and carved by sculptor Louis Verhagen, by 1915 had suffered such severe damage from the weather and acid rain that a copy was made (the present one) in Vermont granite. At that time, a bronze plaque in relief by famed Cincinnati sculptor Clement J. Barnhorn was added; it depicts Lytle leading his troops, the 10th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, into battle. Lytle is one of forty Civil War Union generals buried in Spring Grove Cemetery.
And a Sphinx!: Yes, there is a sphinx in Spring Grove Cemetery, a bluestone one on a granite base. Davis Bevan Lawler, one of the founders of the cemetery, erected a rather Greek sphinx (although in an Egyptian headdress) on his family’s plot in 1850. (No, it does not ask riddles, as in antiquity; you have to go to Riddle Road in Clifton for those). The monument created a controversy at the time: it was not a good Christian symbol, you see – but neither were all of those Egyptian obelisks and Greek Revival mausoleums. Lawler (1786-1869), whose father was a mayor of Philadelphia and a sugar refiner, is buried with his wife (Augusta Kreutz Lawler), parents (Matthew Lawler and Ann Bevan Lawler), and other relatives. The Sphinx is located in Section 45, Lot 49, Space 5.
"Mick" and "Mack" at McMicken Hall, UC.
Windisch-Muhlhauser "Lion" Brewery, Miami & Erie Canal (Central Parkway), lions on top of gables.
"Leo" the Brewery Lion being loaded to be removed to Beckett Park.
One of H. H. Richardson's Chamber of Commerce eagles in Eden Park.
Jacob Hoffner's estate in Cumminsville, droopy eagles on pedestals beyond the gate.
The Jacob Hoffner monument, Spring Grove Cemetery, sleeping lions at foot of staircase.
One of the sleeping lions at the Hoffner family gravesite, Spring Grove Cemetery.
The Haffner "Eagle" Tannery eagle being removed, 1959.
"The American Eagle" on the Federal Building, downtown Cincinnati.
 
(1) General William Haines Lytle. [During my first summer at the Cincinnati Historical Society (1965), I, being more lithe in those days, dressed in Gen. Lytle's uniform -- this very one -- and the secretary announced me to the Director, "General Lytle to see you, sir!" You can imagine his reaction.] (2) Gen. Lytle's monument in Spring Grove Cemetery, eagle atop.
AND . . . The Sphinx on the Lawler family burial plot, Spring Grove Cemetery.
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I only did this with engines already in need of repair while keeping the rest of the Lionel engines and cars in good condition.
