Cincinnati was incorporated as a city on March 1, 1819. Louis, Missouri, and New Orleans downriver. In 1811, the introduction of steamboats on the Ohio River opened up the city's trade to more rapid shipping, and the city established commercial ties with St. Clair changed the name of the settlement to honor the Society of the Cincinnati. The original surveyor, John Filson, named it "Losantiville". Early history Cincinnati as depicted in 1812 with a population of 2,000 Ĭincinnati began in 1788 when Mathias Denman, Colonel Robert Patterson, and Israel Ludlow landed at a spot at the northern bank of the Ohio opposite the mouth of the Licking and decided to settle there. The club was named for Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a dictator in the early Roman Republic who saved Rome from a crisis and then retired to farming because he did not want to remain in power, becoming a symbol of Roman civic virtue. Clair was at the time president of the Society, made up of Continental Army officers of the Revolutionary War. Clair, the governor of the Northwest Territory, changed its name to "Cincinnati", possibly at the suggestion of the surveyor Israel Ludlow, in honor of the Society of the Cincinnati. Two years after the founding of the settlement then known as "Losantiville", Arthur St. History įor a chronological guide, see Timeline of Cincinnati. Forbes ranked Cincinnati as the 5th best city for young professionals in 2023. Recently, Cincinnati has been named among the 100 most livable cities in the world, at number 88, and is on many Best Places to Live lists, including and U.S. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals is based in the city.Ĭincinnati is the birthplace of William Howard Taft, the 27th President and 10th Chief Justice of the United States. The city's largest institution of higher education, the University of Cincinnati, was founded in 1819 as a municipal college and is now ranked as one of the 50 largest in the United States. It is home to three professional sports teams: the Cincinnati Reds of Major League Baseball the Cincinnati Bengals of the National Football League and FC Cincinnati of Major League Soccer it is also home to the Cincinnati Cyclones, a minor league ice hockey team. Ĭincinnati has the twenty-eighth largest economy in the United States and the fifth largest in the Midwest, home to several Fortune 500 companies including Kroger, Procter & Gamble, and Fifth Third Bank. Many structures in the urban core have remained intact for 200 years in the late 1800s, Cincinnati was commonly referred to as the " Paris of America" due mainly to ambitious architectural projects such as the Music Hall, Cincinnatian Hotel, and Roebling Bridge.
It later developed an industrialized economy in manufacturing. However, it received a significant number of German-speaking immigrants, who founded many of the city's cultural institutions. The city developed as a river town for cargo shipping by steamboats, located at the crossroads of the Northern and Southern United States with fewer immigrants and less influence from Europe than East Coast cities in the same period. Throughout much of the 19th century, Cincinnati was among the top 10 U.S.
The city is the economic and cultural hub of the Cincinnati metropolitan area, Ohio's most populous metro area and the nation's 30th-largest with over 2.265 million residents. The population of Cincinnati was 309,317 in 2020, making it the third-most populous city in Ohio after Columbus and Cleveland, and 65th in the United States. Settled in 1788, the city is located in the northern side of the confluence of the Licking and Ohio rivers, the latter of which marks the state line with Kentucky.