of the city cemeteries, but later was wisely converted to its present uses. In 1861 the remains in the long-disused burial-ground were carefully removed, the place beautified with gravel-walks, flowering shrubs, miniature lakes, garden seats, and bubbling fountains, and then it was thrown open to the public as a recreation ground. The noble elms and sycamores which here lift their massive arms to heaven are centenarians, natural monarchs of the primeval forest, earliest worshippers in God's first temples, lords of the soil whose Sovereignty even the bloody red man did not dispute. A monumental bust of Colonel Robert L. McCook recalls the memory of that patriot to the visitor in Washington Park. The name of Cincinnati is linked with the fame of a great many notable artists. Hiram Powers, the sculptor, was one of the earliest and most renowned of the masters of plastic art in America. Many were the vicissitudes of Powers's early life in the Queen City; they included an essay at the "show business," in which ven ture he was assisted by Mrs. Trollope. Together they became lessees of a sort of wax-works, which they called "The Infernal Regions." I believe Powers modelled the figures and painted the scenery for this earthly representation of the abode of Plutus, while the English authoress acted as a managerial body of one, and looked after the money THE ORGAN IN MUSIC HALL. at the entrance. These people of genius, here absurdly misapplied, gave the enterprise sufficient vogue to keep it alive for many subsequent years. Monsieur A. Hervieu, a French painter, who accompanied the strong-minded Fanny Wright to America, fixed upon Cincinnati as a promising home for art, and while there painted a large historical canvas representing the "Landing of Lafayette in Cincinnati in 1825." There are collectors in Cincinnati who, whatever might be the value of its execution, would give many times its weight in gold for this picture, so great would be its historical interest at the present day; but Hervieu's great work has disappeared, and the world of art has no knowledge of its destruction or its preservation. William H. Powell, who painted "De Soto discovering the Mississippi River," and James H. Beard, whose portraits were greatly admired, were contemporaneous in Cincinnati from 1830 to 1840. About this latter date a man of manysided genius appeared upon the scene. Thomas Buchanan Read at that epoch began his art life in Cincinnati as a sculptor; but abandoning this field, he threw himself into the to him more congenial arms of painting and poetry, in both which domains his name will long have prominence. The approving local verdict upon Cincinnati artists has often been confirmed by the severest critics of the Old World. Powers's "Greek Slave" is esteemed wherever sculpture has a status. One of Henry Mosler's works, which, if I mistake not, was painted in the seclusion of his Cincinnati studio, was bought by the French government for the Luxembourg Gallery. The wood-carving studios of the Fry family and of Mr. Benn Pittman are interesting places to visit. I paid my devoirs to both, and at both saw work which awakened my liveliest admiration. The theory of the heredity of talent is strongly borne out in the case of the Fry family, all of whom, from grandfather to grandchildren, are clever wood-sculptors. Miss Laura Fry has had a life-long training in artistic pursuits, and some of her work is of the most interesting character. The head of this family of artists, Mr. Henry L. Fry, is a native of Bath, England. During the period of his apprenticeship to his profession in England, he was engaged, with a hundred other carvers, on the new Houses of Parliament, and afterward worked in ecclesiastical Gothic under Sir Gilbert Scott in Westminster Abbey. Mr. Fry came to Cincinnati in 1851, and during these thirty years he has never had an idle month. Few are the houses of opulence in or near the Queen City which do not bear some traces of the beautiful wood-carving of the Fry family. The front of the grand organ in the Music Hall is a most interesting example of the quality and character of Cincinnati woodcarving. It is a mass of superb detail of marvellous richness, intricacy, and delicacy of execution, and it well deserves the pride in which all Cincinnati holds it. Whatever position other cities may take in respect to the production of beautiful objects in porcelain, to Cincinnati is as- ed useful, In this Magazine, in May, 1881, there appeared a very interesting article on the general growth in Cincinnati of a taste for pottery decoration. It began in the Centennial period with the overglaze painting of tea-cups for Centennial tea parties, and proceeding through various stages of energy and enterprise, arrived at its present proportions, which are those of a large, interesting, and very promising industry. Mrs. Maria Longworth Nichols, a granddaughter of Nicholas Longworth, was a careful student of all the developments and discoveries of the decoration period, making practical experiment herself of everything that seem spect to pottery decoration, which she has since carried into execution. Mrs. Nichols worked, studied, and experimented daily in the Hamilton Road Potteries, availing herself of all their resources, and struggling with the most indomitable pertinacity against repeated failures in her search after the secrets of Limoges. The hard fires and unregulated kilns of the potteries were fatal to progress or success, but Mrs. Nichols at least learned the causes of her difficulties, the technical obstacles to be overcome, and in what direction to proceed to do it. Mr. Joseph Longworth, Mrs. Nichols's father, in September, 1880, handed over to her the main building now occupied by the Rookwood Pottery, and the property on which the additional buildings have since been erected. In this way Mrs. REUBEN R. SPRINGER. Nichols established the very creditable and successful enterprise with which her name is connected, and which is so full of promise as a great future art industry. The source of Cincinnati's prosperity is to be found in the wonderful diversity of the local productions. Colonel Sidney D. Maxwell, superintendent of the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce, in his lecture at Pike's Opera-house upon Cincinnati manufactures (delivered in 1878), said: "The number of different kinds of goods made here is beyond the estimate of many of the best informed. If anything of a surprising nature was revealed by our industrial displays, it was the scope of our production." The food production of Cincinnati, of which pork is the leading feature, is the heaviest article in the city's figures, but it is closely approached in amount by spirituous and malt liquors, while the iron interest is colossal; and this giant iron, too, big as he is, feels it is not best to be alone, for Colonel Maxwell, who knows the truth, as figures can not lie, refers to wood as "the queenly consort of our iron production." Yet who that has ever visited Cincinnati can forget the extent to which five-storied ready-made clothing establishments figure in the streets? Again, not to know Cincinnati's soap and candles is to argue one's self a know-nothing, or close thereto, at least in matters of housekeeping necessity. The leather industry occupies a prominent place in the yearly financial report, while in the publishing business, especially in the department of law-books, Cincinnati is exceeded by but one other city in the country. The tobacco business furnishes the summaker some wonderful rows of figures. In 1879-80 the production of chewing tobacco in Hamilton County (Cincinnati) was 2,590,860 pounds, the value of stamps on which, according to the report of the collector of internal revenue, was $414,537 60; while of smoking tobacco there were produced 1,601,363 pounds, with a stamp payment to the United States of $256,268 08. The two large suburban towns of Covington and Newport in Kentucky, which have been made substantially part and parcel of Cincinnati's self since the perfection of the bridge communication, are both provided with enormous tobacco factories of their own, and figure quite as largely as Hamilton County upon the tax list of the internal revenue collector. In 1784, eight bags of cotton were seized at Liverpool by the port authorities on the assumption that they must have come from the West Indies, as the United States was incapable of producing so large a quantity. In 1879-80 the United States produced 5,761,252 bales of cotton. As an interior cotton market, what city possesses the advantages of Cincinnati! Her great Southern Railway courses to the heart of the cotton-growing land, and the yield of a thousand plantations waits for the gathering of the Cincinnati traders who buy the king fibre for productive reselling. Over three hundred thousand bales are annually received in Cincinnati. Of this great mass only a few thousand bales are detained there; the bulk is transported to the cotton mills of New England. Some of the greatest fortunes in Cincinnati have been made in iron. Yet Colonel Maxwell says the riches of their iron-producing district have been "scarcely touched" as yet. The iron production now reaches about the annual figure of $13,000,000. The article of food production has reached in one year the imposing figure of $27,841,537, of which $9,500,000 represents the pork part. In the laudable spirit of an unbiassed investigator, I visited one of the largest whiskey distilleries, and also one of the largest beer factories, and took copious-notes about high wines, government gaugers, the maltsters at work sweeping the hot iron floors, the ice cellars colder than Siberia ever dared to be, the inventions for rolling beer kegs upstairs in a jiffy; but trying to decipher these VOL. LXVII.-No. 398.-17 |