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Cincinnati a Queen City? Only on the Frontier
DAVID S. STRADLING
| While perhaps not as famous as "Call me Ishmael," a memorable line opens Richard C. Wade's seminal work: "The towns were the spearheads of the frontier." That simple declarative sentence threw into question everything historians thought they knew about how the frontier worked. Frederick Jackson Turner's conception of the frontier, so central to how Americans thought of themselves and their nation's history, was clearly flawed. Rarely does a single book so quickly and thoroughly change the way historians think. The book's influence derived from two factors: Wade's evidence, so powerful and abundant that his radical declaration seemed incontrovertible; and Wade's straightforward writing, as evidenced by the appearance of his thesis in the very first sentence, which made everything he wrote seem matter-of-fact. |
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I first read this opening sentence—and all those that followed it—thirty years after Wade had written The Urban Frontier. I was as taken by the book as previous generations of historians had been. I found it so revelatory that I even remember where I was while reading it. The book introduced me to urban history, and it introduced me as well to one of the founding tenets of the field: cities have been integral to the development of this nation, even in its earliest decades and even on its frontiers. |
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Undoubtedly one of the reasons that Wade's work so struck me was its attention to my hometown, Cincinnati. This was the first serious treatment of Cincinnati's history by an outsider that I had read, and, given my pride in the Queen City, I felt rather pleased. Having grown up in a shrinking city whose politicians and boosters increasingly found it necessary to defend Cincinnati as a bona fide urban center, as a place that still mattered, I found it refreshing to come upon a book that set out to prove that Cincinnati counted as a city. To support his thesis regarding the centrality of cities on the frontier, Wade gathered every bit of evidence that might be mustered in support of the idea that even infant Cincinnati was urban. According to The Urban Frontier, by 1830 Cincinnatians had built a Queen City along the Ohio River, with a thriving economy and a rich, urbane culture. |
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But there is a problem, and not a small one. If Cincinnati was clearly a city forty years after its founding, it was not one when Matthias Denman and a group of other investors commenced their settlement, initially called Losantiville, in 1788. Denman founded what he hoped would become a city—laying out and naming streets, hammering stakes in the ground, sending new maps to the printers, placing advertisements back East—but declaring that a city exists does not make it so. Wade knew this, and he devoted the bulk of The Urban Frontier to attempting to convince readers that the five aspiring cities he studied, including Cincinnati, were in fact urban. |
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WHAT CONSTITUTES A CITY? | |
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The kind of evidence that Wade gathered and the manner in which he categorized it tell us a great deal about how he, and many other historians of his era, thought about cities. Curiously, economics play a relatively insignificant role in the discussion. Chapter 2 describes the "economic base" of the city, focusing on river travel and trade, and on the development of Cincinnati as "the Great Emporium of the West."1 Wade discusses early breweries and iron manufacturing, too, but he does almost nothing by way of measuring or explaining the city's role in the development of the frontier. Agriculture is nearly as invisible in The Urban Frontier as cities were in Frederick Jackson Turner's The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1894). Wade tells us nothing about the importance of urban manufacturing as compared to rural manufacturing, perhaps because a map of Ohio's turn-of-the-nineteenth-century grist mills and saw mills would have revealed development along waterways in towns and in the countryside. This was an era when economic activity was remarkably diffuse, in even the most urbanized regions, let alone on the frontier. |
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