The Early Days

     One of the most frequent ice-breaker questions is “If you could have one superpower, what would it be?” For me, it would be time travel. I hold no illusions that the “good old days” were as good as people believe they were; some things were much better, but others were much worse. I would just like to take a day trip here and there to visit familiar places, experience them for a while, and then return to modern times.

     As I travel the streets of Fairfax and look at the old houses, I wonder about the people who lived here 100 years ago. Who were they? Where did they come from? What attracted them to this area? How did they make their living?

     In this article, I will focus on the area that is now the Village of Fairfax at the time it was first called “Fairfax.” As I mentioned in The Joseph Ferris House article, this area was once owned by the Ferris family. After the deaths of Joseph & Priscilla Ferris’ children, the heirs chose to sell the land.

     The 1884 land ownership map below shows that most of the area that is now known as Fairfax was owned by Joseph Ferris’ heirs, the Ferris and Jewett families. The Wooster Turnpike had been built several decades earlier. 

    Farms owned by Adam Stirnkorb, Fred Burkhart, and Philip Miller appear in the northwestern (upper left) section of the map. George S. Courtney later purchased the Stirnkorb land. William Zeh bought a farm on Red Bank Road which included property where Virginia Avenue is now. The Rosen family operated a dairy farm on Red Bank Road. Interestingly, in addition to their farms, Courtney, Zeh, and John Rosen all had other jobs. Courtney owned a grocery, Zeh was a machinist, and Rosen was a street railway motorman.

William Zeh was selling pigs in this ad in the September 6, 1914 Cincinnati Enquirer.

    John Henry Linnemann, on the other hand, dedicated himself to chicken farming in the area that is now the Audubon Park Subdivision. In addition to chickens, the Linnemann family had cows and hogs and raised crops. In 1907, Frank Thesing bought land on Wooster Pike where he farmed and operated a sand and gravel pit. Thesing also worked as a railroad mechanic. Frank Thesing married Elizabeth Linnemann, John Henry’s daughter. 

John Henry Linnemann and his Leghorn chickens in 1906. From A History of the Village of Fairfax by Elizabeth Steele and Patricia Kuderer.

    The residential area of the current village is comprised of four subdivisions. The Fairfax Subdivision was platted in 1910. The boundaries of the Fairfax Subdivision are Murray Avenue on the north, Wooster Pike on the south, the western side of Belmont Street on the east, and the eastern side of Germania Avenue on the west.

Fairfax Subdivision Plat - Hamilton County Recorder's Office

Plat Book 20, Pages 80 and 81

    The Dublin Springs Subdivision was platted in 1913 and includes the area south of Wooster Pike.

Dublin Springs Subdivision Plat - Hamilton County Recorder's Office

Plat Book 21, Page 35

    A plat map for the Madison Heights Subdivision was also filed with the Hamilton Country Recorder’s Office in 1913. The Madison Heights boundaries are Murray on the north, Wooster on the south, the western side of Germania on the east, and Southern Avenue on the west.

Madison Heights Subdivision Plat - Hamilton County Recorder's Office

Plat Book 21, Page 48

    The first section of the Audubon Park Subdivision, in the residential area west of Southern Avenue, wasn’t platted until 1946 with another section added to the subdivision later. 

     If the Hamilton County Auditor records are accurate, there were a few houses in the Fairfax area prior to platting. However, once the Fairfax subdivision was platted, lot sales and home building began in earnest. 

Cincinnati Post, July 1, 1911

Cincinnati Post, June 1, 1912

    As the area began to grow, the real estate broker handling the Dublin Springs subdivision was advertising 4 ½ acres on the south side of Wooster Pike, hyping the growing neighborhood and the traffic flowing through it:

Cincinnati Post, August 28, 1913

        Soon the local newspapers were running ads featuring homes in Fairfax:

Cincinnati Post, July 3, 1914

Cincinnati Post, July 18, 1914

    So, if you are familiar with Fairfax, I am interested in your opinion on where these houses are/were located. I am nearly certain that the house on the left in the first ad is on Germania and the house on the right is on Watterson. I am leaning toward the house second from the left being on Lonsdale and the house second from the right being on High Street. I found a few houses in Fairfax that look like the house in the second ad.

     A glimpse at the 1920 census gives us some insight about early Fairfax residents. First, they were working class. Most were machinists, streetcar operators, railroaders, construction workers, and factory workers. A few of the men had more unusual occupations, like near-beer brewer, private caterer, and egg inspector. Married women managed their households. Unmarried adult daughters were office workers, seamstresses, and factory workers.

     Second, there were a good number of first- and second-generation Americans. Not surprisingly, there were a good number of residents from Germany and other European nations. Several people had roots in Alsace-Lorraine and fled that area during and after the Franco-Prussian War. What did surprise me, though, was the number of Hungarian immigrants who chose Fairfax as their home. They were among the 1.7 million Hungarians who left their country in the early 20^th century for better economic opportunity in the United States. Remember the article about Mary Engel, The Hero? Mary’s parents were among the Hungarian immigrants who lived in Fairfax.

     Third, there were several extended families who settled in Fairfax together. For example, 78-year-old Joseph Whitney, his wife Catherine, adult daughter Lydia, and married sons Edward and Stephen and their families all lived here. Edward and Rosa Seibert and their family lived at Germania and High Streets and their two married daughters and their families were their neighbors. Several members of the Wieland family lived on Watterson, including near-beer brewer Louis, who, as an aside, was busted during Prohibition for brewing the real stuff:

Cincinnati Post, August 18, 1922

    The first public school in Fairfax opened in 1918 at the corner of Wooster Pike and Spring Street. It was organized by Mrs. Carrie Conklin, who taught in Fairfax for six years before leaving to help organize and teach at Dale Park Elementary in Mariemont. According to A History of the Village of Fairfax by Elizabeth Steele and Patricia Kuderer, Mrs. Conklin later “became a social worker for the area. Funded by the County Commissioners, her duties included calling on new families in the community. She never went empty handed, many times the first meal enjoyed in a new home was provided through her kindness, emmigrant [sic] families who settled here received her help and advice, and a new baby’s first gift was a layette made by Mrs. Conklin herself.”

     In 1924, elementary age Fairfax children began attending school in Mariemont, until Fairfax Elementary School opened in 1930. Older children attended Plainville School.

     The following memories of the early days in Fairfax were shared in A History of the Village of Fairfax, which was published in 1976 in honor of the United States’ Bicentennial:

Mrs. Florence Rea remembers moving to Fairfax in a horse and wagon in 1922. There were few houses and the streets were dirt.

Catherine [Czinege] Abrams remembers watching her mother cook over a coal stove. For heating they had a pot bellied coal stove and their light came from kerosene lamps. Her father walked to Bramble and Whetsel to board a street car . . . . Sidewalks were unheard of . . . [they] had boards to walk on when the streets were muddy. . . . Her family came to Fairfax in 1917.

Helen [Zivanov] Hughes remembers the warmth and friendship showed her parents when they moved to Fairfax. Both were emigrants [sic] from Yugoslavia. Burger Chef [corner of Wooster Pike and Spring Street] was a spring. Several of the women would come and wash their clothes in wash boilers, then take the heavy, wet clothes home in a wheel barrow.

Mrs. Byron Blackburn remembers coming here in 1924 when there wasn’t any gas or water yet. Her family carried water from the well at Germania and Hawthorne.

Mrs. Betty [Thesing] Steele remembers the farm on Wooster Pike that her parents and grandparents owned. As children she and her two sisters all helped on the farm. Early in the day, she and her grandmother fed the chickens and gathered the eggs for market. Later each one would take her turn with the butter churn, pumping up and down until the cream turned to real butter and buttermilk. . . . In the fall of the year folks butchered hogs for their own use. They had a smoke house that Grandma Linnemann took care of. It would take several days of keeping a hickory fire going to smoke the hams, homemade sausage and bacon.

Mrs. Catherine [Haberthy] Shannon remembers her father digging a twenty-five foot well by hand with help from Jim McLaughlin. The new home he was building still didn’t have city water. Drainage was also a problem as no sewer lines existed in the 1920s. After a heavy rain the empty lots stood in water. In the winter if they froze over, . . . she and other children would use them as a skating rink. When telephone service was put through, a good neighbor two blocks away on Watterson gave her number in the event of special calls for her friends. If a call came to her, she would hang a white cloth on the porch post.

    In January 2001, Mrs. Virmorgan Lucus Ziegler shared some memories of her childhood in Fairfax with her friends at Fairfax Presbyterian Church. She and her parents moved to a home on Watterson Road in December 1921: 

It was a bright and clear day and cold . . . . There were no paved roads and the move vehicle got as far as Washington Road (now called Watterson Rd.) and Hawthorne St. and due to the thawing that had taken place during the morning, it could not go any farther. Thus, all the furniture had to be carried by the move men to our house two blocks away, opposite High Street.

What did Fairfax Subdivision look like then? The wide open spaces. There were about ten houses on Washington Rd. . . . At that time Washington Rd. went north to the top of the hill and then made a ninety degree left-hand turn down along the hillside to the bottom of the hill and then another ninety degree right-hand turn over a bridge . . . and continued on as the road is now. There was no house to house mail delivery. Mail was delivered to the end of Whetsel Street in Madisonville just over the tracks of the traction line which went to Milford and Blanchester. There was a commissary of mailboxes and the address was 4000 Whetsel St. Our Public Transportation was the Madisonville Street Car at Bramble and Whetsel Streets. When Dad came home from work he picked up the mail and brought it home. 

As I recall Germania Street was the most built up. There was nothing west of Southern Avenue except a couple of farms. On the east was Herget’s woods, in the Belmont and Settle Road area. It was beautiful with big, old mature trees and I walked through those woods hundreds of times after Dale Park School opened in 1925.

Most everyone had a garden during the summer and those areas were kept free of weeds and grasses; but many open lots, grass and weeds grew up to their full height without ever being cut.

     The Fairfax of 100 years ago was a bit primitive. In August 1922, 175 residents of the Fairfax Subdivision met at the Fairfax Colony School on Wooster Pike to discuss incorporation. They were concerned about poor water quality and believed that as an incorporated village they would be able to negotiate to be connected to Cincinnati water.

    In January 1923, the Cincinnati Post ran a story about the aspirations of the “baby community” of Fairfax:

A city of modest contentment; of neat but not pretentious homes; of pretty gardens; of crimeless and viceless living. This is the dream of Fairfax.

In their vision is well-built streets, a modern schoolhouse, several churches, a city hall, groceries, hardware stores, a park, water brought from Cincinnati’s water works, and extension of the Madisonville street car line – and, of course, a movie theater.

Fairfax Presbyterian Church, January 8, 1923 Cincinnati Post

Fairfax children, January 8, 1923 Cincinnati Post

    In February 1923, residents filed a petition for incorporation that the Hamilton County Commission rejected because “the place was only a settlement of poor persons in little homes who could not afford to pay the increased taxes that would follow incorporation and never would be able to pay off the bonds the town issued.” Ouch!

     Of course, we know it was another 32 years before Fairfax finally incorporated as a village. Thankfully, Hamilton County undertook a project to connect outlying areas of the county, including Fairfax, to the Cincinnati Water Works within a few years.

     The building boom in Fairfax was in full swing, but the community was having a hard time beating its reputation as “a settlement of poor persons in little houses.”

     In December 1928, Bleecker Marquette, executive secretary of the Better Housing League, encouraged Hamilton County Commissioners to establish standards for new subdivisions. He reported that the League had completed a study of several subdivisions and determined that many were simply communities platted on former farm land with dirt roads and no utilities. He cautioned the county against allowing more subdivisions like Fairfax and three other local subdivisions, stating “We can say to you from long experience that it will be years before the county will rid itself of four slum areas which have existed now for some time.”

     The Fairfax Welfare Association (now the Civic Association) took exception to the Better Housing League’s assessment of the subdivision. Association president J. H. Berling and secretary Harry Linnemann sent a letter to Mr. Marquette stating that he was unfair to Fairfax. They wrote that the information the League used in their assessment was likely from five years earlier. They touted the improvements made in the since then:

The streets of Fairfax all have water and sewers. Gas has been brought into many of them and will be brought into more of them at an early date. The streets themselves . . . are being made passable and by next year everyone of them will have been hard surfaced. We have sidewalks on the full length of our three main streets – Wooster Pike, Washington Avenue and Germania Avenue. As soon as more walks are put in we hope to apply for house-to-house mail service.

Over 200 new homes have been started, or will have been started, in our town by January 1, during the course of 1928, and the type of our construction has improved immeasurably. The outhouses are disappearing along with their health menace and modern plumbing connected with the county sewer system installed in their stead.

    Berling and Linnemann acknowledged that there were still issues to be addressed, like fire protection, trash collection, and street lighting. They also boasted that a school would soon be constructed in the area. They concluded their letter as follows:

Local pride throughout our town has revolted against the unkind assertions that you have made of it, and we feel that in all fairness that you should retract the aspersions made on our town in as public a fashion as they were originally made.

    How’s that for some civic pride?

     Things continued to improve over the next few years. Fairfax School opened in 1930 and brought with it more community activities, including the PTA and parents’ club, Boy and Girl Scouts, and sports. Businesses and major corporations made Fairfax their home. It seemed that everyone wanted a piece of this “slum” when the Ford Transmission Plant opened here in the 1950s. And this tough little village battled back when the Ford plant closed in the late 1970s.

     There are several dozen homes in Fairfax that are at least 100 years old. Those “little houses” built for “poor persons” have stood the test of time. There are a number of current Fairfax residents whose families endured the tough times in the early days of this community. There is something reassuring about a sense of continuity. Looking forward, we can hope that the present and future generations of Fairfax residents have the perseverance, foresight, and civic pride of those who came before us.