Hamilton Ohio

At a casual glance, Hamilton is a typical midwestern town, but a closer look reveals strange and inexplicable events of possibly supernatural origin. A mischievous poltergeist plays its tricks in a High Street tavern. More than a century ago, a young boy narrowly escaped death in a fall that left him gravely ill, and some say his cries still echo in his family home. A vaporous woman appears on the stairs of a Hamilton home once owned by one of the county's richest men. Could this be his daughter who died from suicide? Hamilton native and contributor to the Dayton Lane Ghost Walk Shi O'Neill mines the history of the town's many spectral occurrences.

Going back to its roots in 1791, Hamilton has been populated by exceptional and dynamic personalities who created a truly unique city. The people who contributed to the city's growth included authors Robert McCloskey, Fanny Hurst, and William Dean Howells; developer of the "Hollow Earth Theory" John Cleves Symmes; major-league pitcher Joe Nuxhall; folk artist Nan Phelps; orator and Chautauqua speaker Lou Jenks Beauchamps; world-class archer Darrell Pace; Frederick Brant Rentschler, founder of the world's largest aircraft company; teacher and aeronautical engineer Raymond L. Bisplinghoff; Frank Clair, coach and member of the Canadian Football League Hall of Fame; Rear Adm. Donald Wulzen; and Shuler and Joseph Doran, two brothers who pioneered early wireless radio in America. Hamilton has also benefited from business leaders, educators, political figures, philanthropists, city officials, and fascinating characters and citizens who have made the city an interesting community.

Illuminating the experiences of life in small-town America, award-winning writer for CBS News Peter Davis pens an ode to a small town thirty miles north of Cincinnati—documenting its strengths and struggles over the course of a year. After a scandal involving a high school teacher caught his interest, award-winning news writer Peter Davis spent a year studying life in Hamilton, Ohio. While examining the small town during an intense time of change, including segregation of schools and economic decline, Davis shares an honest, full scope view of the life in a small town during the 1960s. Hometown takes readers into the forces that unite and divide the small-town community of Hamilton through a look at politics, sports, marriage, crime, and social lives in a variety of classes.

Founded as Fort Hamilton in 1791, the City of Hamilton was settled by pioneers and immigrants and was forged in steel by her talented workers and craftsmen. Factory owners became wealthy and built magnificent homes along Dayton Street. Hamilton prospered and became known as the "Greatest Little Industrial City of Its Kind in the World," home to Mosler Safe Co., Ford Motor Co., Beckett Papers, and many others. Following World War II, some factories closed their doors or moved away, but Hamilton persevered and became a city powered by small business and the arts. Through vintage images, this book showcases Hamilton's success, its survival of the Flood of 1913, its blue-collar job loss, and now, its rise as the "City of Sculpture," attracting sculptors from across the world.