Church of the Steps, Mount Adams in Cincinnati

So I'm visiting my friend Joe, and I say, "Hey Joe, let's go take some pictures. Know any good places to take pictures?" and as if this was some bizarre Godfather crossover Joe says, "I'll think about it." Luckily for Joe I'm not Clemenza--and luckily for me, Joe knows where to take some good pictures.

Our first stop is up in Mount Adams, specifically at the top of the Mount Adams steps, next to Holy Cross-Immaculata. A Good Friday tradition known as Praying the Steps has given this church another name, "Church of the Steps." Each year on Good Friday, pilgrims gather at the base of the Mount Adams stairway and pray at each step on the way to the crucifix pictured above. Some more background on that can be found here.

The views of the river are the best part of the Cincinnati landscape, in my opinion. This afternoon a snow storm was coming in added an interesting element. Chilly, but interesting all the same.

To the city's credit, Cincinnati does a good job preserving history, even as they revitalize parts of various neighborhoods. Signage on the landscape serves, to me at any rate, as physical footnotes to dig deeper--a clue that this spot was not always as it appears now. A place to start asking questions about what was.

The Mount Adams Steps originated as a path that Immaculata parishioners wore up the hillside to visit the church's construction site. The Archbishop Purcell put in a stair of wooden steps (probably a good thing from an erosion standpoint) and the city took over maintaining the thoroughfare sometime later. The most recent stairway was built in 2009.

When they built the landing with the markers, they included a photo of the skyline. Because there's very little reason not to, I took my own version.

I may not have been able to get the exact same angle and maintain the skyscraper focus but I don't think that really hurts the shot at all. I love how the sign pre-dates the Great American building.

Mini-post: Ault Park

Cincinnati has some great parks, and in Mount Lookout there's Ault Park. Created in 1911 and named for Ida and Levi Ault who donated the land and had served on the Cincinnati Park Board.

The pavilion was built in 1930, and in the summer months a fountain runs between the two staircases. It's an impressive, gorgeous structure--the snow fall just added to the charm.

Just a pretty picture of snow showers, with the flag for contrast. The wide open playing fields make the park a hub for activities during the warmer months.

The classy lamps look older than they are, but that doesn't take away from them. This was the point of the evening where the sun was almost down, the wind had picked up, and Joe and I were both ready to hightail it to Coffee Emporium.

Hope Iron Furnace

So these days if you're hiking in Southern Ohio long enough, the odds are pretty good you'll stumble along something like this:

It's a reminder that once, about 150 years back for anyone keeping score, the Hanging Rock region of Ohio (a 100 by 28 mile iron-rich area that ran from Kentucky to West Virginia, cutting through Southeast Ohio) provided the majority of high quality pig iron for the United States and beyond.

Fires were built in the base of the furnace with charcoal made from the surrounding forest. Air was forced into the furnace (giving "blast furnaces" their name--blasts of air superheated the charcoal) and melted down the iron ore with limestone. Impurities would float to the top of the molten iron mixture, and could then be removed. This is what we call "slag," and at some furnace sites you can still find it in the ground.

For those of you who have traveled in Southern Ohio and seen how it's all blanketed with trees, think about that. 46 furnaces running full tilt, constantly cutting down trees to use as charcoal. This went on for nearly 100 years, and since the last furnaces stopped operating in the 1910's the forests have come back--that tells you something about how things have gone for the region since the iron boom ended.

Part of why the Hope furnace was built here is the hill it's nestled against--because of the height of the furnace (see photo below) it was easy to build a bridge from the hill to dump the iron and limestone into the top. The stone in the hill also makes me wonder (I couldn't find any evidence of this) if the site wasn't chose because of easy access to building materials.

The Sandy Run river also flows near the site of the furnace, which in the 1850's would have been a key source of transport and power. What strikes me is even after accounting for preservation efforts, this structure is still intact after being left more or less alone for 140 years. The rest of the structures are long gone, and even the adjacent sandstone structure is run down. But it's still not hard to tell what this furnace was used for (at least in a broad sense).

At this time (March 2014) I haven't been able to find definitive explanation for the structure on the right. But, my best guess is a small, less intense furnace for creating charcoal to use in the main iron furnace. I'm going to keep digging into this, because I'm pretty surprised there's no clear answer. It's another big stone structure sitting next to the one the signs and literature speak to, but you're going to ignore it? Very curious.

Try as I did, I couldn't get a really good shot into the furnace. It's not much to look at--years of leaves, fallen stone, wooden reinforcing. Not much that one of the furnace workers would recognize, I'm assuming...tho that might be more because there's no deadly fire inside.

Above the furnace the woods are littered with cut stones, like the one above. At first glance, it's easy to assume it's a cannibalized piece of the furnace...but this looks like a base stone, and getting it 20 feet up a steep hill just to abandon it seems unlikely. It could be a stone from some other long-removed structure--the village of Hope did essentially vanish once the iron furnace ceased production, and the structures that could be salvaged were.

To me it highlights the challenge of archaeology in general. There are a LOT of clues, and clues from multiple eras all exist together. Being able to properly sort them out, and draw the correct conclusion (as opposed to one that supports a pet theory) is the tricky part, and that takes a lot of time and energy.

Sources for this post:

Division of State Parks, Lake Hope SP

US Forest Service pamphlet on Iron Furnaces in Wayne National Forest

Wikipedia on the Hope Iron Furnace

Roebling Suspension Bridge--Cincinnati, OH

So everyone knows the Brooklyn Bridge, and how it was designed by John A Roebling. But where did Roebling get the experience to win such a bid? Well, in Cincinnati. Among other places.

One of the spiffy things about Cincinnati's location is how it's directly across the river from a river. This puts the Queen City at a wonderful cross roads--traffic up the Ohio, down the Ohio, from the interior of Kentucky, the interior of Ohio. Cincinnati was briefly considered as a replacement national capital after the British sacked DC during the War of 1812, and the fact it was smack-dab in the middle of all these key waterways (while still being out of range of Royal Marine expeditionary forces) was a big reason.

But all that river traffic was even worse than the current trainwreck that I-75 becomes two-to-four times a day now. Have you seen the steamboats of the mid 1800's? We're not talking a Honda Civic--we're talking a four story building on it's side, getting in the way of everything else that may want to cross the river. That made traffic between Ohio and Kentucky difficult--sure, you could ferry goods and people, but it just added to the congestion in a major way. Not to mention you couldn't always depend on the river to be high enough, or low enough, you needed a place to land those ferries...there are reasons we build bridges, people.

So starting in 1846 (I'm pulling these dates and names from Wikipedia, for the record--as much as I love history I suck at memorizing the details), the Covington and Cincinnati Bridge Company incorporated and called up John Roebling, who'd already designed and supervised the construction of several impressive spans around the country. It wasn't until 1856 that construction actually began--everything from lobbying against the bridge by the ferry operators to slow funding kept things at a glacial pace. Construction kept up at the same rate--between weather, funding, and health issues of key members of the Bridge Company work only took place during maybe a year and a half out of these 4 years.

The Civil War hit, halting construction. However, during the course of building defenses the Union Army built a pontoon bridge across the Ohio--proving to the community that a bridge might be a pretty good idea, after all. This solved the funding problems, and besides an invasion scare construction resumed in 1863. By 1866 the bridge was completed, paving the way for other spans across the Ohio River (see my banner photo).