City of Springdale History On-Line

Progress always followed Luke Foster. This energetic pioneer helped found Cincinnati, protected its first residents from lawlessness as one of the settlement's early sheriffs, and then left it when it became too populated for his tastes. Foster, who loved the beauty and challenge of the wilderness, moved north to Springfield Township. There he helped establish Pleasant Valley Station. He made his home two miles south of Springdale in present-day Woodlawn. He attended, and became a pillar of, the Springfield Presbyterian Church and a force within the Springdale community.

In this and many other ways he and his family presided over the area's transformation from forest to rich farmland and prosperous villages. Despite his own contributions to the process, Foster lamented the loss of the buffalo and woodlands as they gave way to the guns and the plows of the settlers. How ironic that a man with such ambivalent feelings toward "progress" should contribute so much to taming the frontier. By 1856 the ninety-seven-year-old Foster battled old age as fiercely as he had once fought the Indians and the lawbreakers. This still energetic man continued his normal activities. But one morning, as he turned to wave good-bye to his wife, he drove his wagon directly into the path of an oncoming CH&D locomotive. Luke Foster finally fell prey to progress.

Did the same kind of thing happen to Springdale? The two decades following the Civil Was were ones of decline in Springdale's history. Many believed that the decline had started as early as 1851, when the Cincinnati, Hamilton, and Dayton (CH&D) railroad directed its proposed route away from the village. Glendale, plotted in five-acre lots by the same railroad's officials, soon became a railroad suburb, rapidly growing beyond Springdale in both population and prestige. Folklore has it that the railroad bypassed Springdale because local housewives feared smoke from the trains would soil their wash, and that a farmer between Jones Station and Springdale refused to sell the CH&D the necessary right-of-way because he thought a railroad would disturb the peace of his sheep. Yet the reasons for Springdale's decline were much more complex.

One argument was that without a railroad station Springdale lost its importance as an agricultural retail center. Farmers could now stop and shop at a half-dozen new villages up and down the tracks. Certainly the railroad meant the end of Springdale as a post town, which translated into the closing of many of its taverns and inns. Yet according to census figures, Springdale's population actual grew in the twenty years after the war. In 1851, four individuals listed themselves as merchants and two others declared themselves clerks. By 1870 the number of merchants has risen to five and by 1880 to seven with four clerks listed.

Other sources suggest that the members of the professions abandoned Springdale for more prestigious Glendale and other centers on the transportation line. Professionals in Springdale included teachers, physicians, pastors and lawyers. Collectively they numbered nine in 1850 and 1860, eight in 1870, six in 1880 and six in 1900. These numbers are deceiving. Physicians and lawyers, the higher paid professions, did move away, and an increase in the number of lower-paid, lower-status teachers made up the difference.

Still, the village was clearly changing and the railroad was as much a symbol as a cause of what happened to Springdale. Before 1850 Springdale was an example of a successful, pre-industrial village based on servicing the needs of the neighboring farmers. Springdale had skilled artisans such as weavers, cabinetmakers, saddlers and tailors who manufactured items by hand and sold them directly to their customers and could thus be considered either craftsmen or merchants. So, in that sense, the figures regarding the number of Springdale merchants may be misleading since the census enumerators listed the artisans by specific craft rather than as merchants. But even so, artisan occupations, so prevalent in the census of 1850, virtually disappeared by 1880. Two tailors and a weaver, a cabinetmaker, three lighting-rod makers, and a clock maker lived and worked in Springdale in 1850. None of those crafts was represented in the census of 1880 and Springdale's three shoemakers had been reduced to one. This represented the loss of ten occupational slots, possibly of ten heads-of-household, who had to find other means of supporting their families. If all of them moved away, this fact alone could represent a loss of fifty people, based on the Springdale average household size of five. Quite clearly Springdale failed to make the transition to the industrial age.

For a brief time in the 1870s such a transition appeared possible. One industry in particular showed promise. Anthony Hilts, Jr., began to manufacture mechanized farm implements, including a reaper. Hilts' enterprise reflected the times as mechanization began to revolutionize American agriculture in terms of "time and power." In 1840, more than three hours of human work time was required to produce a bushel of wheat. Fifty years later, with mechanization, that time had been cut to ten minutes. Hilts certainly did not invent the reaper. In fact, the question of just who did has long been debated, but clearly Cyrus Hall McCormick invented the first successful reaping machine in Virginia in 1834. McCormick opened his Chicago factory, the McCormick Harvester Works, in the 1840s. For years he toured the fairs and agricultural shows in the Midwest demonstrating the powers of his machine. Numerous mechanics and blacksmiths who saw the reaper were convinced they could make a better one. Anthony Hilts, Jr., mechanic and blacksmith, was one of many of these men.

In 1867 Hilts registered his own invention, a tongue attachment for the reaper, with the United States Patent Office. He claimed the attachment increased the amount "of leverage by operating it in advance of the reaper, and thus saving both time and power in harvesting a field of grain." Two men had to operate the Hilts reaper, one drove while the other stood on the platform behind the reaper to rake off the mown hay or grain.

The 1870 Census of Manufacturers for Springfield Township listed Hilts's Reapers and Mowers as a business with an annual production of goods valued at five hundred dollars or more. Information taken from the 1870 survey explains why Hilts could not compete with McCormick in the new industrial age. After the Civil War, machine manufacturing moved from the shop into steam-powered factories where workers produced units of durable, rust-proof steel. While the factory system required considerable capital investment, increased productivity and the economies of scale allowed manufacturers to lower their prices and still increase their profits.

Hilts, however, adopted none of these innovations. He continued to operate his business as an old-fashioned workshop. What else could he do on a capital investment of only eight hundred dollars? A saw and a planer comprised his list of equipment. In the age of steam and steel Hilts manufactured his iron reapers with horsepower. Three employees produced fifteen reapers a year worth a total value of two thousand dollars. With a payroll of eighteen hundred dollars a year and material costs of seven hundred and twenty dollars, even an additional nine hundred dollars in repair work could not make Hilts Reapers and Mowers a profitable enterprise.

The firm stood little chance of increasing volume and profitability as long as it remained small-scale and labor-intensive. Notwithstanding the quality of the reaper it produced, the company could not compete with large, heavily-capitalized corporations using the new industrial techniques. Local legend suggests McCormick purchased Hilts's Reapers in order to eliminate the competition. While McCormick followed that course with a number of smaller firms, in this instance it would hardly seem worth the trouble. In any event, the patent office recorded no transfer of patent to McCormick.

If only for a brief period, Hilts manufactured a solid product. Farmers around Springdale continued to use his reapers and rollers until the turn of the century. At least one former Springdale resident who lived on a nearby farm as a small boy remembers seeing the name Hilts stamped on old farm machinery.

For a village like Springdale, mechanization could be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, a market existed for Hilts's product. On the other, the mechanization of agriculture meant a marked decrease in the number of farmers and farm laborers needed to produce the same amount of food. A decline in their numbers could destroy a village dependent on a farming community.

Manufacturing in Springdale reached a peak in the 1870s. Jeremiah Gross produced carriages, plows, wagons and harrows. Peter Peterson manufactured plows. William Boerner made and repaired wagons. John Stolz represented the boot and shoemaking industry.

In latter years Anthony Hilts, Jr., claimed that he began Springdale's shoemaking industry. Originally farmers tanned their own leather and once a year an itinerant shoemaker used it to made shoes for the entire family. Hilts decided to try shoemaking himself. He succeeded so well that neighbors came to him asking him to make shoes for their families. But the same problem that hampered the success of Hilts's harvester venture affected shoemaking. Springdale industries, based as they were on artisan handicraft, could not survive unless they mechanized. More than any other factor, including the loss of the railroad, the failure of its industries to mechanize led to Springdale's decline.

By 1880 with the demise of shoemaking and agricultural machinery manufacturing, the unemployed were moving away in search of job opportunities. As Springdale lost its vitality, even long-established families severed their ties with the village.

Johnny Hilts moved to Anthony, Kansas in February 1878. A decade later, in 1889, his brother R.D. Hilts, Jr., and his wife Alice McLean Hilts followed to nearby Mead Center, Kansas. The James Peterson family moved to Kentland, Indiana in 1871; William McGilliard, Josephine Baldwin and Margaret Hilts Coombe and the H. B. Mayhew family journeyed to California, Archibald and Mary Brown and Lucretia Naylor to Illinois and Eliza Bernhart, Mary Miller and Allen Moore relocated in Iowa. Some of the oldest family names in Springdale disappeared from the directories and census lists and from the rolls of the Springdale Presbyterian Church.

Although the population declined dramatically, in 1887 Springdale still supported three blacksmith shops, three grocery stores, operated by G.V. McCormick, Perry Colburn and W.F. Winters respectively, a general store, Arthur Hough's open-air market and one saloon operated by Edward Mandeville. The saloon was new according to the Sharonville section of the Miami Valley News. "Springdale has no Saloons," an 1885 headline read, and "the morals of Sharonville have often been subject to comment from its virtuous neighbors." Springdale residents had no right to crow. The mid-eighties were one of the few times in Springdale's long history when the village did not have at least one watering hole.

II

Despite the overall decline, a few newcomers settled in Springdale. In the late 1860s one of these new residents, Moses Tandy, moved into a house adjacent to the gate of old St. Mary's Cemetery. This twenty-two-year-old man migrated to Springdale from Kentucky with his eighteen-year-old brother James. Tandy began as a teamster but later established a plastering and construction business. His wife, the former Jennie Buckner, joined the Springdale Presbyterian Church. Tandy, who spent the rest of his life in Springdale, became one of its best-known residents.

Tandy was the most successful of a number of black Kentuckians, most likely freedmen, who located in Springdale after the Civil War. Because of its proximity to the slave state of Kentucky, the Cincinnati area attracted many black migrants during and immediately after the war.

A few blacks had lived in Springdale for decades. In 1870, however, twenty-seven blacks lived in Springdale comprising 7 percent of the population. Most of them did not enjoy Tandy's level of success. All other black male heads-of-household worked as farm laborers in low-paying, seasonal jobs. Only two of the married black women listed themselves as housewives. The rest worked as laundresses and housekeepers. The single women usually worked as live-in domestic servants.

Ten years later only Tandy and a Civil War veteran named Wesley Baker headed black households. Blacks labored on the bottom rung of the ladder of economic opportunity, experiencing intense competition from whites for even their low-paying jobs. But Moses Tandy hung on. In 1910 the Hamilton County Auditors valued his home at nine hundred dollars, a sum comparable, or somewhat higher than the average Springdale dwelling. He had also purchased additional property outside of Springdale.

If only we knew more about these black Springdale residents. We can only speculate about their past. Why had they chosen Springdale? Did they all come from the same area in Kentucky? Just how difficult was their adjustment to freedom?

The possibility exists that they received assistance. The records of the Springdale Presbyterian Church indicate that the congregation donated funds for the "freedmen" but they do not indicate the specific uses of these funds.

III

By 1900 only 197 people resided in the village. Springdale was a sleepy village with none of the excitement of its post-days and no new enterprises gave hope for future growth as the manufacturing concerns had done in the 1870s. But people continued to live in the old houses fronting the dusty Pike and in many ways the traditional pattern of their lives continued.

The Presbyterian church still served as the community's religious and social center, owing much of its vitality to the leadership of Reverend William H. James. James, a young Princeton Theological Seminary graduate and a Civil War Captain in the 6th Army Corp arrived in Springdale in 1866. He ministered to the Springdale congregation for almost forty-seven years. When he died on February 17, 1903 the entire area mourned this gentle, compassionate and active man. During his tenure the congregation built a new church. Reverend James established a Christian Endeavor Society, helped organize the Springdale YMCA in 1869, operated a model Sunday School and in 1877 developed a Ladies Foreign Missionary Society.

James's influence increased shortly after his arrival in Springdale when he presided over the wedding of Dr. Hunt's daughter Leigh to Isaac Wetherby of New Jersey. To the surprise of everyone, the young minister stayed on at the wedding reception even after the dancing began! The gossips may have wagged their tongues about the decline in the morals of the clergy, but the attraction was not the dancing. The Reverend James had his eye on the beautiful Lizzie Cochran whose father had been a principal figure in the old turnpike company, and whose siblings included a poet and a judge. In 1871 Miss Eliza Wilson Cochran wed the Reverend James. The family was an integral part of the community for many years. Son William became a lawyer and a Springfield Township Trustee. Howard, the younger son, became a physician and served the area from his Glendale office.

One of Springdale's few remaining landmarks dates from this era. In 1882 the Presbyterians decided to replace their old church with a new and larger building. After three years they finally raised sufficient funds to begin. The James family contributed generously as did the Mulhausers, a Cincinnati brewing family. In 1885 workmen dismantled the white brick church that dated from 1833 and on June 16 they laid the cornerstone for the new building. Over a fourteen-month period the new brick structure with square bell tower gradually took shape. Margaret Hilts Coombe gave the church a new organ as a memorial to the Anthony Hilts, Sr., family. J.S. Crawford, Dr. Benjamin Perlee, Dr. E.S. Close, Mrs. S.E. McCormick and Judge Samuel F. Hunt , in honor of his father, donated the large stained glass window that dominates the church. Other families contributed as they could and church-sponsored fund-raisers were well attended.

During construction of the new church, Springdale suffered a drought in the summer of 1885. Providing the workmen with the water they needed for laying the brick, or even for drinking, depleted even further the already depleted wells of the neighbors. But the Springdale tradition of sharing prevailed. On May 16, 1886 the congregation dedicated its new church with speeches that reflected the enormous pride both members and non-members felt in its long history. It seemed fitting that the church that towered over the other buildings in the village was the first sight encountered upon entering Springdale.

Despite the successful opening, the following years were difficult ones for the church. Membership declined along with the population of the village. The minister's salary, installing a new furnace, even the coal that heated the building in winter, taxed its resources. Reverend James, who was always trying to help Springdale's poor with food, fuel or money, was hard pressed to request assistance from his congregation.

Legacies left by the Hunt and Riddle families helped with the "mowing and grubbing" in the old cemetery. Despite hard times, the church endured as a "people's church, supported by voluntary contributions, free pews, [and] no distinctions between rich and poor."

IV

Regardless of its size, importance or wealth, Springdale always enjoyed a full social life. People in this isolated little community largely created their own recreation. Socializing in the local tavern was a favorite pastime. Springdale usually had at least one such establishment. Whether lifting a beer in friendship, discussing the price of crops or talking endlessly about politics, the men of Springdale considered the local bar to be their social club. Saloonkeepers did everything possible to encourage this conviviality. The longer the customers sat, of course, the more they drank. For a time, other enticements included free food of platters of sausages and bread for their customers to eat with their beer. By the late 19th century, this practice stopped for economic reasons. "Local saloon keepers have decided to abolish the free lunch counter" wrote the Springdale correspondent in early 1897, "hard times are upon us." If eating and drinking and talking failed to lift the spirits, or if one tired of listening to "Uncle" Jim Roll re fighting the Civil War, one could always take a turn at the slot machines in the corner of the room, that is until Springfield Township outlawed them in 1905.

Every local politician worth his salt worked the saloons looking for votes. In Springdale the barflies played the candidates like violins, agreeing with every utterance, at least until the free drinks ended. Springdale's location so close to the Butler County line at times allowed these old codgers to string along free-spending politicians from both Butler and Hamilton counties. On one occasion a Butler County politician spent a couple of hours and several dollars in a Springdale saloon. As he left, one of the patrons drawled, "you be in the county that belong to George B. Cox and Butler's trocha begins just a half mile above." He referred, of course, to Cincinnati's famed Boss Cox.

Springdale residents also engaged in more refined activities. Mrs. J.S. Chalfant spent July of 1885 enjoying the pleasures of Chautauqua. A lake resort famous for its lectures, sports and artistic activities. Sarah Western, the local school teacher, organized literary teas for the ladies of the village.

The YMCA, organized in Springdale in 1869, also offered a distinctly different form of social club. The building, formerly Springdale's temperance hall, still served as a type of community center. When an ice cream craze swept the nation in the 1890s, Springdale, which had no ice cream parlor, turned the YMCA into a temporary one for the season. In June, when the weather turned warm and the strawberries ripened, young people picked the berries and their parents donated the rich cream. The hall was spruced up and the ice cream maker brought out from storage. Originally, the sponsors, usually one of the church's organizations, "let one eat as much as a free lunch habitue and pay as much as a worm-eaten conscience dictated," but they soon discovered that some Springdale youth lacked any conscience at all! After 1897, patrons paid the set price of a quarter which purchased as much ice cream as they could eat. In the winters, oyster dinners took the place of strawberry ice cream. Springdale's passion for oysters remained as strong as it had been in the 1840s.

Other events also retained their appeal. Springdale residents still packed the annual Hamilton County Fair. In 1905 the Hamilton County Board of Agriculture announced it was moving from Carthage to Oakley. The Springdale farmers and others agreed to hold their own fair in Carthage. In 1911 the 57th Fair held in Carthage drew a record crowd of twenty-five thousand. The crowd enjoyed "Smittie's famous military band, Professor Harris' Hippodrome starring educated horses, a trotting ostrich and a dancing dog; the six Gangeis, a novel aerial act, and a good program of trotting and pacing races." Proud parents entered five hundred babies in the baby contest and Springdale farmers again paraded their prize livestock around the ring.

Entertainment closer to home included the local roller rink. Springdale parents disapproved of the establishment because it threw boys and girls together without proper chaperone. The parents succeeded in having it shut down for a few months but youth prevailed and it reopened.

By the end of the century the village population was clearly aging and it became questionable whether Springdale could support any form of entertainment for young people. In 1860, the village's population of 355 had an average age of 23.8 with an average household size of 4.9. Only 18 percent of the population had been over forty. By 1900 that population had dwindled to 198 and the average age had increased by more than nine years to thirty-three. Thirty-nine percent of the population was over forty. Families were smaller, now averaging only 3.6 persons. In 1860 the average household consisted of the nuclear family--parents and children--with an occasional live-in servant. In 1900 many elderly single people lived together to compose a household.

The numbers tell the tale of a dying community. Since very few jobs existed in the village, working people moved away to be near their employment or closer to public transportation. Many of the old houses on the Pike stood empty and boarded up. As one-by-one lifelong residents passed away, the village faced the possibility of extinction.