Cincinnati turns 200 today — again.
Most folks would likely argue that the Queen City actually had its bicentennial in 1988, 200 years after Matthias Denman, Israel Ludlow and Colonel Robert Patterson came ashore at the northern bank of the Ohio River and decided that this would be a pretty neat place to live. Shortly afterward, they dubbed the location Losantiville.
You could also say the city dates to 1790, the year Northwestern Territory Governor Arthur St. Clair changed our name to "Cincinnati" to honor the revolutionary war veterans group the Society of Cincinnati. That would also be technically correct, in a way.
You could also point out (even more correctly) that indigenous people had been living in the basin formed by Cincinnati's giant hills for hundreds of years prior, as evidenced by the earthworks that once occupied what is now Mound Street in the West End and other places. Of course, we aren't sure when those first Cincinnatians arrived, but last year, Cincinnati City Council replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples' Day to honor them.
But we love arbitrary days that mark the passage of time, so we have yet another anniversary we can commemorate. On Feb. 5, 1819, Ohio's General Assembly formally voted to approve incorporation for the City of Cincinnati, recognizing its charter and giving local officials the power to tax and enforce laws. That legislation went into effect March 1 that year. If you're looking for the date that Cincinnati became a city in the most technical, municipal sense of the word, this is that day.
Soon after incorporation, Isaac G. Burnet was elected Cincinnati's first official mayor, a position he held until he declined to run for re-election in 1831. Mayor and council's duties at the time were similar to today's in some ways and, uh... different in others. The city's elected officials were to "fix the assize of bread, to establish wharves, to regulate the landing of rafts and other water craft and to prevent every description of animal from running at large," historian Charles Theodore Greve wrote in his 1904 volume Centennial History of Cincinnati and Representative Citizens. (Greve apparently had yet another idea about when Cincinnati's centennial actually was, likely tied to Cincinnati's nominal incorporation as a town in 1802).
Under Cincinnati's new status as a city, council and the mayor also had the power to "regulate and prohibit all puppet shows and other exhibitions in the city; and to levy tax on all hogs and dogs."
From those humble, hog-and-dog-taxing, puppet show-prohibiting beginnings, Cincinnati rose to become one of the most prominent commercial and cultural cities in the country just a few decades later. The Queen City is still pretty grand today, and really, doesn't look a day over 150.
