Our feature OKI Wanna Know has answered questions ranging from local candy to politicians to the ghost stairs of Columbia Parkway. This week, WVXU's Bill Rinehart dives into a story ripped from today's headlines.
Cincinnati voters are about to be asked whether to sell or keep the Cincinnati Southern Railway. A discussion in the office prompted this question from coworker Pete Pickering:
"Why does Cincinnati own a railroad to begin with?"
It's all because of geography, transportation and economics. The Zane L. Miller professor of history at the University of Cincinnati, Dave Stradling, says in the 19th century, a lot of food produced in Ohio and the Midwest went through Cincinnati.
"Cincinnati's traditional trading partners were down-river," he says. "The longer answer has to do with the way in which Cincinnati was trying to recreate or maintain its economic ties to the deep South, which had been constructed over decades of reliance on steamboat travel, which went down the Ohio to the Mississippi and the various ports along the Mississippi."
Stradling says even before the Civil War, it was obvious the railroad was going to supplant river traffic. A city was benefiting and it wasn't Cincinnati.
"Chicago grows really really quickly. In part because it has much, much better connections to the West, but it also has much better connections to the East. But there's also the competition of the Great Lakes themselves. Which in the summertime, you can load grain up on boats and it's very cheap," Stradling says.
"Cincinnati has to do things that other places won't to try to maintain its economic viability."
The Queen City of the West already had rail connections to some major cities, but not in the south.
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Stradling says Kentucky had its own interests in mind, and most train tracks in the Bluegrass state led to Louisville, a Cincinnati competitor. That included the Louisville-Nashville railway, which didn't make it to Cincinnati until 1872 and led to the building of the L & N Bridge, which we now call the Purple People Bridge.
Without help from anyone in Kentucky, city leaders decided they still needed to do something.
"Cincinnati decided that it would be best to get the support of the state of Ohio — which they did through legislation in 1869 — that would allow it to raise funds to develop a railroad that went to Chattanooga. And then from Chattanooga connected to all these other railroads that then reached out into Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi."
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The money came from the sale of bonds. Strandling says even then it was unusual for a municipality to invest in a railroad.
"Private capital builds almost all of the railroads in the United States," he says. "Except for the Transcontinental Railroads which are built with federal support. Essentially all of the railroads are built by companies selling bonds to people who are along the line, who are gonna themselves profit from the existence of a railroad."
Strandling says after the Civil War, there's less resistance in Kentucky to the idea of a railroad coming out of Cincinnati, largely, he says, because there was a need for investment.
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"That's the typical reasoning for building a railroad; that these are folks who are going to suddenly have much, much better connections to what is by far the largest regional marketplace. So it means their bourbon, or their corn, or their whatever it is they're growing or producing will be of more value to them."
Cincinnati voters still had to OK the measure. And in 1869 they did. More than 15,000 people said "yes" to selling $10,000,000 in bonds. Fifteen-hundred opposed it. Those voters approved another $6,000,000 for construction seven years later. In 1878, they were asked to raise another $2,000,000. The first vote failed, but a second attempt passed.
He says the creation of the railroad counters the idea Porkopolis was always 10 years behind the times.
"I think of this as being a marker of just how progressive Cincinnati was, and thinking about the various innovations they might engage in to remain a strong economic force in the Midwest."
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