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Hamilton, Ohio

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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A city and the county-seat of Butler county, Ohio, U.S.A., on both sides of the Great Miami river, 25 m. N. of Cincinnati. Pop. (1890), 17,565; (1900), 23,914, of whom 2 949 were foreign-born; (1910 census), 35,279. It is served by the Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton, and the Pittsburg, Cincinnati, Chicago & St Louis railways, and by interurban electric lines connecting with Cincinnati, Dayton and Toledo. The valley in which Hamilton is situated is noted for its fertility. The city has a fine public square and the Lane free library (1866); the court house is its most prominent public building. A hydraulic canal provides the city with good water power, and in 1905, in the value of its factory products ($13,992,574, being 31.3% more than in 1900), Hamilton ranked tenth among the cities of the state. Its most distinctive manufactures are paper and wood pulp; more valuable are foundry and machine shop products; other manufactures are safes, malt liquors, flour, woollens, Corliss engines, carriages and wagons and agricultural implements. The municipality owns and operates the water-works, electric-lighting plant and gas plant. A stockade fort was built here in 1791 by General Arthur Saint Clair, but it was abandoned in 1796, two years after the place had been laid out as a town and named Fairfield. The town was renamed, in honour of Alexander Hamilton, about 1796. In 1803 Hamilton was made the county-seat; in 1810 it was incorporated as a village; in 1854 it annexed the town of Rossville on the opposite side of the river; and in 1857 it was made a city. In 1908, by the annexation of suburbs, the area and the population of Hamilton were considerably increased. Hamilton was the early home of William Dean Howells, whose recollections of it are to be found in his A Boy's Town; his father's anti-slavery sentiments made it necessary for him to sell his printing office, where the son had learned to set type in his teens, and to remove to Dayton.