The Vinous Legacy Behind Some Curious Mount Tusculum Street Names
Way atop Mount Tusculum, there are some streets that remind us this marvelous hill was once a vineyard. The streets named Chardonnay Ridge, Riesling Knoll, and Catawba Valley are fairly redolent of the vine. Curiously, those obvious streets may have less connection to that old vineyard than three nearby streets, namely Delaware Ridge, Creveling and Elsinboro, and therein lies a tale.
The prominence we know today as Mount Tusculum was once known, according to the 1943 WPA-published “Guide to Cincinnati,” as Bald Hill, supposedly because “the Indians had cleared away the trees in order to spy on the invading white men.” This is absolute bunkum, baloney and claptrap. If the Native Americans wanted to spy on the settlers downhill in Columbia, they would have kept the trees in place so they wouldn’t be seen, right? Additionally, the settlers were just blaming the Shawnee for their own deforestation. With lumber needed for housing and fuel, the white folks timbered all of Cincinnati’s hills within a few decades.
Bald Hill became Mount Tusculum when Nicholas Longworth planted his grapes there. He named his vineyard after a wine-producing hill located just south of ancient Rome. Longworth was, for most of his life, the second-richest man in the United States after only John Jacob Astor in New York. Most of his wealth was in land. He owned half the downtown area, all of Mount Adams and what later became Eden Park, as well as large tracts out on the surrounding hills, including the hill overlooking the old settlement of Columbia that he called Mount Tusculum.
Longworth planted most of his suburban plots with grape vines and reaped a fortune as he inspired a winemaking fever in Cincinnati. By 1850, Longworth was the biggest local winemaker at a time when Cincinnati counted 300 vineyards, amounting to 900 acres. In its peak year, Cincinnati’s vintners bottled 320,000 gallons of wine.
Although Longworth propagated dozens of grape varieties as he endeavored to find the grape ideally suited to Cincinnati’s climate, the Catawba was his cash cow and the grape that built his reputation. U.P. Hedrick, in his 1919 book, “Manual of American Grape-Growing” gives kudos to Longworth:
“At that time the center of American grape culture was about Cincinnati, and an early shipment of [Major John] Adlum's Catawbas went to Nicholas Longworth of that city and was by him distributed throughout the grape-growing centers of the country. As one of the first to test new varieties of American grapes, to grow them largely and to make wine commercially from them, Nicholas Longworth is known as the ‘Father of American Grape Culture.’"
Longworth shipped his Catawba wines all over the planet and made many fans, notably the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who wrote a very long poem praising Longworth’s vintages, ending with:And this Song of the Vine, This greeting of mine,
The winds and the birds shall deliver To the Queen of the West, In her garlands dressed, On the banks of the Beautiful River.
This poem, inspired by Longworth’s Catawba wines, is among the earliest references to Cincinnati as the Queen of the West, later shortened to the Queen City. And the grapes for those wines were grown in what is now Alms Park. You can still see the entrances to Longworth’s wine cellars around the hillside there.
All good things must come to an end and Longworth’s wine empire – along with most of America’s wine industry – collapsed due, among other things, to a blight just as the Civil War ended. Nicholas died and his only son Joseph inherited a lot of now barren vineyards in Tusculum, Mount Adams, Delhi and elsewhere, which he promptly began selling off. The Delhi plots were turned into flower gardens and The Garden of Eden was sold to the city as Eden Park.
Joseph Longworth grew up in what we now call the Taft Museum when his daddy owned that fine mansion before selling it to the Sintons, who married the Tafts. It was Joseph’s task to monetize all of his father’s former vineyard properties. He filed a plat to divide Mount Tusculum into a very exclusive subdivision, centered on a couple dozen substantial hilltop estates, most of which are named after grape varieties. He also platted more than 100 small lots along Eastern Avenue at the bottom of Mount Tusculum. None of the hilltop lots were smaller than five acres and some were as large as twelve acres.
The grape varieties Joseph Longworth employed in naming his hilltop estates were very popular in the early 1800s but are far less famous today. The grapes he memorialized included Alvey, Creveling, Delaware, Diana, Elsinboro, Iona, Isabel, Logan, Muscadel, Norton, Traminer, and Venango. Today, all of those estates have either been absorbed by Alms Park or have been further subdivided.
Of all the grape varieties cited by Joseph Longworth and presumably cultivated by his father, only three remain today, as the names of residential streets: Delaware Ridge, Creveling and Elsinboro. Curiously, Delaware Ridge acquired its current name fairly recently; previously, it was known as Herbemont Lane. Herbemont is yet another antique grape variety.
There used to be a Logan Avenue and a Muscadel Avenue on Mount Tusculum but, because those streets were swallowed up by the expansion of Alms Park, they were officially vacated by the City of Cincinnati in 1932, along with Wine Press Road. You might think that some of today’s streets are remnants of those bygone vineyard days, like Catawba Valley Drive, Chardonay Ridge and Riesling Knoll but, no. Chardonay and Riesling weren’t named until the mid-Twentieth Century. Catawba Valley Drive dates from the 1880s, but apparently existed for decades only as a paper street.
The residual streets represent grapes far out of fashion in the United States but still cultivated for sale. The Elsinboro (also known as Elsinburgh or Extra) and Creveling grape varieties are difficult to find under those names but are reputedly still grown as table grapes. Cincinnati’s own Skeleton Root Wine Makers offers a wine from Delaware grapes they describe as “Dry, medium body, soft and easy on the palate. Copper hue in the glass with bright aromatic notes of mango and sweet melon.” Skeleton Root also offers a Catawba that sounds very much like Nicholas Longworth’s prize vintage – a sparkling Catawba Pet Nat that may even now inspire a contemporary Longfellow.
