Watch: University of Cincinnati renovates Siddall Hall
Siddall Hall, a University of Cincinnati residence hall, is scheduled to reopen for the fall semester of 2024 after 18 months of construction. Take a look around.
The fall semester at local colleges and universities begins this month, and as we prepare for a new academic year, as a history student, I find myself reflecting on the beginnings of higher education in Cincinnati.
In particular, what we can learn from the past. Lessons can come from unexpected sources.
Here are five lessons I’ve learned from the history of some of Cincinnati’s oldest colleges.
Lesson 1: Additional information may be needed
The University of Cincinnati lists 1819 as its founding year. However, the Cincinnati city directory does not list the UC until 1874. How can this be?
UC was founded as a municipal university in 1870 by the Ohio legislature and funded by the estate of Charles McMicken. The school held its first classes in 1873.
Over the decades, UC acquired several other colleges, including the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, Cincinnati Law School, Ohio Mechanics Institute, Medical College of Ohio, and Cincinnati College.
The last two colleges were both founded in 1819, so the UC can claim that date as its founding date, even though that was 52 years before the UC was founded.
Lesson 2: It’s good to have friends you can rely on
Cincinnati College was founded on January 22, 1819. It ran into difficulties and closed after a few years. Then Dr. Daniel Drake, an eminent Cincinnati physician and the city’s first historian, reopened the institution in 1835. (More on Drake later.)
The college, which included the Cincinnati Law School, shared its building on Walnut Street with the Mercantile Library.
After a devastating fire in the Cincinnati College building in January 1845, members of the Mercantile Library raised $10,000 (about $413,388 today) to help the college make repairs. In return, the college offered the library a 10,000-year lease negotiated by Alphonso Taft, later Attorney General, Secretary of War, and father of William Howard Taft.
Cincinnati College fully merged with UC in 1918. The lease for the Mercantile Library is now up for renewal in 9,821 years.
Lesson 3: Things don’t always go the way you want them to
Back to Dr. Drake. His greatest goal was to establish a school to train doctors, who were urgently needed in the western frontier towns.
On January 18, 1819, Drake secured a charter for the Medical College of Ohio in Cincinnati. He also founded the Commercial Hospital and Lunatic Asylum, which served as a clinical facility for the school.
On November 1, 1820, the Medical College held its first class with 20 students. The following spring, seven of them graduated.
But Drake was apparently difficult to deal with and a power struggle with the teaching staff led to Drake being expelled from the school he had founded after just one year.
Drake did not give up and opened Cincinnati College in 1835 on the condition that he be allowed to establish the medical school there. A bitter rivalry with the Medical College ensued until Drake’s teaching staff deserted him after four years and the school was closed.
Thus, Drake’s dream of founding a medical school was “a will-o’-the-wisp that he always followed and that forever eluded his reach,” as historian Charles Frederic Goss so elegantly put it in “Cincinnati – The Queen City.”
What Drake created, however, endured. The Medical College of Ohio was incorporated into UC in 1896; today it is the UC College of Medicine. Commercial Hospital became Cincinnati Hospital, then Cincinnati General Hospital, then University Hospital, and now UC Medical Center.
Lesson 4: Sometimes it takes a while to get started
Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, is one of the oldest universities in the country, but it took some time to establish.
In 1792, President George Washington signed an act directing Congress to set aside a township for the establishment of an academy or university on the 311,682 acres purchased by John Cleves Symmes in the Miami Valley. A township in Butler County was chosen; College Township was renamed Oxford.
On February 17, 1809, the Ohio General Assembly passed an “Act for the Establishment of Miami University.” The date was celebrated by the university as Charter Day.
However, the construction of the college took a long time and was interrupted by the War of 1812 and Cincinnati’s efforts to move the school there instead. Miami University finally held its first classes on November 1, 1824, about 15 years after the charter was granted. 200 years later, Miami is a successful location.
Lesson 5: Adapt to new situations
Xavier University is not averse to change.
Bishop Edward Fenwick founded the private university in 1831 as a men’s college, then called the Athenaeum, located next to St. Francis Xavier Church on Sycamore Street. (Not to be confused with the Athenaeum of Ohio, which was originally the St. Francis Xavier Seminary.)
Because Bishop John Baptist Purcell found it difficult to maintain the number of students in the Catholic school, in 1840 he asked the Society of Jesus, the Jesuit order of the Catholic Church, to take over responsibility for the school.
The college was renamed St. Xavier College and later Xavier University.
Xavier moved to the suburb of Evanston in 1912 to property he had purchased from the Avondale Athletic Club (where the Cincinnati Open tennis tournament began in 1899).
While women have attended evening and weekend classes since 1914, women became fully admitted at Xavier in 1969. Today, Xavier is led by a female president, Colleen M. Hanycz, who was hired in 2021.
