Grafton Hill seems pretty “new” architecturally, particularly the better known part of the neighborhood around Stoddard Circle. But there is this house on Central that looks quite old. It has the trad I-house form, with an L rear, but not set with the gable end to the street, the way most are in Dayton.

 

 

So lets use it as an armature around which to discuss a bit of neighborhood development.

 

Here is a map of some features of early Grafton Hill, mostly before the Civil War. The first bridge in Dayton was the Dayton View bridge: there has been a river crossing on this site since the early 1800s.

 

 

The bridge drove road alignments as shortcuts. Tate’s Mill Road is a good example, breaking off the Covington Pike (Main Street) & gaining the river at the mill at the head of Steele’s Race, then angling around the base of Steele Hill to reach the bridgehead.

 

Steele's hill was a popular community picnic ground due to the view over the river to Dayton town.

 

Tate's Mill Road was eventually renamed Forest Avenue.

 

As this was a good location for a bridgehead settlement there was at reportedly at least one aborted town plat (“Pierceton”) in the vicinity, then some large lots laid out west of Salem. The first surviving Grafton Hill town lot plat apparently was by John Steele in 1847.

 

 

By the end of the 1860s the area had developed into an area called Dayton View, which at that time meant the area mostly east of Salem. Nothing was developed east of the bridge.

 

 

A map of the plat history (one can see how “Grafton Hill” developed as two neighborhoods mostly separated by the Van Ausdal property, which was subdivided in 1910-12.

 

The black line on the map was an early horse car line, the second in the city, which connectd the 1869 "Dayton View" plats to the city, and then extended on to Oakwood.

 

 

A close-up of the eastern part of Grafton Hill, showing the large Stoddard plats (in red) and the Van Ausdal property (in blue) as the divider between “Dayton View” and Stoddard’s “Belmonte Park”, with the two great mansions of that era.

 

 

The Stoddard Mansion (with Lutzenbergers caption)

 

 

And the Hawes Mansion (again with caption)

 

 

(some of this stuff almost reminds me of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, a tale of the rise and fall of great business families:  Nothing remains of Hawes’ enterprise, his mansion gone and factory torn down, nothing except, ironically, the houses of his factory hands in North Dayton)

 

…and a view of the river from the tower in the Hawes mansion, looking toward the Robert Blvd area…note the roof finial in the foreground. 

 

 

Anyway, back to the oldest house.  One can assume replatting over time, but the old house sits on that 1847 plat. So 1847,’48 as the oldest date, perhaps.

 

 

Grafton Hill in 1869, the year the elite Central and Superior “Dayton View” plats were made. A small bridgehead community is visible, as is a brewery, and a scattering of houses on “Low’s Lots”.

 

One can also see property lines driven by the US rectangular coordinate survey quarter sections, but also some survey lines derived from the river and roads

 

 

The old house again, with the rear L slightly visible. Some decorative shutters have been removed exposing the red brick under the whitewash. The central chimney seems to indicate this is a “double pen I house’ without a central hall; two rooms side-by-side, sharing a central chimney. A common vernacular style in the Ohio Valley (a bit more in Kentucky than here, though).

 

 

The 1869 map again, enlarged and the likely house circled. There is a little inset view of the Dayton View covered bridge (probably not the original one) and the river in flood, from the Lutzenberger collection. My guess at the camera location is that little red arrow.

 

 

And the Lutzenberger pix. The house circled. The Van Ausdal mansion is probably the house just to the right

 

 

Verification?. A side elevation with identical fenestration and chimney arrangement as the blow-up in the inset. Wood frame extension probably happened later

 

 

Given the fate of this block of Central Avenue its amazing this has survived into our era.  Let’s hope it stays occupied so it wont fall pretty to the demolition wave.

 

Bommy’s Place & “downtown Grafton Hill”

 

 

Surfing through the Dayton Librarys online Lutzenberger Collection of old Dayton pix one wonders sometimes "where is this (or more typically, "where was this"?)

 

Such was it with Bommy's Place.

 

One suspects that Lutzenberger might have been a "wet" since he did include taverns and hangouts on occasion in his photos. This apparently was a Dayton View landmark saloon, and according the caption had "excellent" sandwiches (maybe it was a free lunch place..free lunches were a popular draw in pre prohibition saloons?).

 

But were was it?

 

 

The description and the river in the background give it away. This was on Riverview between Salem and the Dayton View bridge, but on the river side.

 

Here is the map, and the "find" here is that Bommy's was part of a little neighborhood shopping district, that also included the Riverside Brewery of Adam Schantz (1882) and a line of row houses All of this backed up to the river.  “Downtown Dayton View” as there was no shops on Salem.

 

 

 

Across River Street were what look like some Victorian villas and maybe a few houses from early Dayton View (that corellate with the 1869 map). And one can see that Van Ausdal mansion.

 

 

A real interesting aspect of this site is the the relationship to the river.  A close reading of the Lutzenberger pix shows the ground dropping away to the bottoms to the rear of Bommys, and then the wide expanse of the the river channel.

 

Thanks to Larry Sizer of the  Slidertown Webazine (who emailed me these) I can use Conservancy District working drawings to investigate the riverfront a bit…doing some environmental history?  Note that these drawings are "upside down"..the top is to the east southeast, bottom to the west northwest.

 

This is a large overview of the channel with the original {post 1913/pre channelization) one foot countours drawn on the riverbed and bottoms.  Bommy’s is shaded in red on the lower left corner.  One can see the “Robert Boulevard” levee at the top, which was a filling-in of the bottoms for about one or two blocks west of the old early-mid 9th century river levee.

 

 

Taking a close up one can see how there was building behind Bommy’s, right into the bottoms in this case, as well as sewer outfalls at the foot of Salem.  No levees or embankments, perhaps just the natural slope to the first bottoms.  In a way this seems a bit like the city/river relation along the Ohio in Cincinnati, along the bottoms from Sawyer Point to Columbia

 

 

Next door the Riverside Brewrey and the rows.  Note that even at this date there still privies being used (“Toilets” label for some of the outbuildings).  Also a bit more detail on the rows, showing long wooden stairs, so maybe these were really two or two & half story places with upper and lower apartments.

 

 

The character of this area has drastically changed with time due to the conservancy district work.:

 

 

 

Note the bench. According the Craig Daltons

book on Dayton breweries:

"

 

The Riverside Brewery, as well as a small house where Adam Schantz, Jr. was born, was situated on the ground which needed to be cleared and removed to improve the river channel. This meant the razing of both structures. A large piece of land was left between the river and the street. The heirs of Adam Schantz, Sr. donated this to the city of Dayton in December, 1918. A fountain with a lily was built in memory of Mary Schantz, their mother, and an oak tree was planted nearby in memory of Adam Schantz, Sr., their father. Although the lilies are gone and the fountain runs no longer, the benches that are part of the fountain still overlook the beautiful Miami River, and couples who sit there are shaded by the old oak tree whose branches reach over as if to shelter the monument to his wife from the storms."

 

No oak nor fountain, but maybe this is one of those benches.

 

In fact, on this Sanborn, other than the oldest house, only one building survives to this day.

 

 

A before and after of one of those Dayton “rowhouses” that are really a big multifamily building.  This one is pretty neat due to the Romanesque touches and rough-hewn limestone façade (but what about the wrought-iron uprights and porch by that arch? Hmm). 

 

 

 

Still, neat to see this building still surviving.  The thing with Salem is that it was a residential street mostly.  Might be worth a future study, since I looked at the upper limit of Salem retail with that mall area expansion/contraction post.  That would be the end-state while this little neighborhood on the river would be the genesis.

 

 

I should also say that the Shantz connection is of historical interest, as this brewry was the source of the money used to launch the Shantz real estate interests.  Shantz, or his estate, built some key parts of Dayton, including Edgemont, a part of Oakwood, south Ludlown Street downtown, and Moraine. 

 

The Shantz Estate could be a theme which to structure a future post about early 20th century urban growth.

 

 

So is Grafton hill now almost entirely the more modern buildings you showed us in the last thread? 

 

It'd be interesting to get down to Dayton with some of your posts in hand.  Thanks for all the research you put into these posts, they may comprise the most interesting series of threads on UO.

^

no, there is a lot of single family homes of various styles.  Most of the 19th century stuff from the neighborhoods first development is gone but the thing that makes this neighborhood really unique, to my eyes, is the early 20th century housing stock.

 

What's remarkable here is that they are "suburban" (large Prarie School, Colonial, Spanish, and Tudor revival + one or two shingle style house) but in the heart of the city.  Basically it would be like having a, say, Cleveland Heights or Bexley or Hyde Park right next to downtown, rather than 2 miles way. If you are familiar with Atlanta, its like a little Ainsley Park, but closer to Five Points rather than at the edge of Midtown.

 

Daytonians really have no idea what they have in this neighborhood...or maybe they once did, which is why the apartment boom.

 

It'd be interesting to get down to Dayton with some of your posts in hand.  Thanks for all the research you put into these posts, they may comprise the most interesting series of threads on UO.

 

sometimes I wonder if I'm putting lipstick on a pig with this Dayton stuff.

 

But yeah, I did try blogging about this but that turned out to be pointless.  I'd rather share this stuff on UO as I know the poeple here are genuninly interested in citys, urban history, culture, architecture and urban form, etc.  More of a true community of interest and I am really gratefulll to you all here, esp the people running the site and adminstering it, as well as the content providers/posters.

 

 

 

 

Another awesome post...any idea if there is anything left of the Indian mound mapped below? I looked on google maps but cant really tell...

 

Thanks for the answers, Jeff.  I think I can picture it pretty well, now.

Nice job!

 

sometimes I wonder if I'm putting lipstick on a pig with this Dayton stuff.

 

Trust me, you're not.

Jeffrey, as far as "lipstick on a pig" -

 

Dayton comes off to many lifetime residents and most of the business and military transients who filter through the area as completely whitebread, uninteresting and with no local flavor.  I find Daytonians to generally be profoundly disconnected with the city's past. Witness the destruction of most downtown landmarks. There are few in this town who remember even the recent (40 years or so) past.

 

Your stuff is fascinating but it is also incredibly sad when reflected against the lack of local interest in historicity. There is spot interest - yuppies colonizing former redneck neighborhoods in the east end, for instance. But in general, Dayton is a highly transient town that in many cases only goes back a generation or so with any coherent memories.

 

Why? Most kids who grow up in Dayton view the area as inherently inferior and want to get the hell out. I did when I graduated from college. So the Dayton area tends to be a collector of people who took career opportunities that are incidentally based here and some entrepreneurs.

 

I don't know where the "local self loathing" comes from, but it's quite prevalent.

 

And when I read your stuff and I recall my mother's enthusiasm for collecting, er, "Daytoniana", I feel a bit ashamed that the city has been used by so many people as "real estate kleenex" - grow up here, go to school here, then go to a "good" city where the good jobs are.

 

More than a "pig", Dayton has been (for years) a multi year "stopover" for many people. That has resulted, over time, in deteriorated local pride and sense of place.

About that Indian Mound...nothing left.  There was a second west of the river, in the Wright-Dunbar area.  This gave the name to Mound Street.  It, too is gone.

 

Further out there was a mound on Alex road, and Fort-Ancient/Mound City earthworks on the Calvary Cemetary hill and a geometric earthwork in Alexandersville (where Alex Bell Road meets Dixie Drive in West Carollton, south of Dayton proper).  There there is the WPAFB mound and the big one in Miamisburg.

 

To TheDonald.  I need to send you a PM on yr message as I have some questionst that you or yr mothers research might be able to help me with. 

 

 

 

 

 

Jeffrey, I'd be happy to help. Go ahead.

About that Indian Mound...nothing left.  There was a second west of the river, in the Wright-Dunbar area.  This gave the name to Mound Street.  It, too is gone.

 

Further out there was a mound on Alex road, and Fort-Ancient/Mound City earthworks on the Calvary Cemetary hill and a geometric earthwork in Alexandersville (where Alex Bell Road meets Dixie Drive in West Carollton, south of Dayton proper).  There there is the WPAFB mound and the big one in Miamisburg.

 

Thanks - I kinda figured most of the mounds near downtown were long gone. I'd heard of a couple others you mentioned. I'm a nerd about "first cities" - and I love places like Dayton that have seen continual, sometimes dense habitation for maybe thousands of years.

When you say first cities do you mean native American settlements, or does it include early European things too?

 

For the mounds here, I wonder if there were more at one time in the older part of Dayton.  This map just shows these two, but I wonder. 

 

The mound builders had a remarkable sense of geography or topography if one considers where they located their earthworks. 

Heres' a link to a pix of those rowhouses shown in the Sanborn and Conservancy District maps.  Caption says they were built in 1882 and was "Dayton's first Apartment House"

 

Dayton's First Apartment House

 

...and this has been torn down.