Francis Kennedy, his wife Rebecca, and their seven children arrived at Cincinnati early in February 1789, just months after the very first settlers. At the time, the little town consisted of only three cabins. Mrs. Kennedy became the fourth woman in town. Just one other family, some Germans named Pesthal, had young children.

While waiting to clear their plot of land, the Kennedys opted to live on their flatboat, pulled up to the riverbank at what is now the Public Landing. One of the Kennedy daughters, whose name was Rebecca and who later married a man named Reuben Reeder, told the story in an 1858 letter to the Cincinnati Pioneer Association:

“We lived in our boat until the ice began to run, and then we were forced to contrive some other way to live. What few men there were here got together and knocked our boats up and built us a camp. We lived in our camp six weeks. Then my father built us a large cabin, which was the first one large enough for a family to live in. We took the boards of our camp and made floors in our house.”

It seems that the boundary lines were none too clearly marked at the time, because Mr. Kennedy miscalculated his metes and bounds when he laid out his cabin in the woods.

“Father intended to have built our house on the corner of Walnut and Water Streets, but not knowing exactly where the streets were, he built our house right in the middle of Water Street. The streets were laid out, but the woods were so very thick, and the streets were not opened, so it was impossible to tell where the streets would be.”

Water Street (approximately today’s Mehring Way) was located right on the water – the Ohio River. The woods there were “so very thick” that survey marks were hard to locate. That is a very different view of Old Cincinnati than most folks have.

The best-known early pictures of early Cincinnati suggest there were few trees here. These antique images usually show a couple dozen buildings on a nicely cleared riverfront. The nearest trees remaining from the primeval forest lie some distance beyond Fort Washington, maybe north of Fifth Street.

If you travel along the Ohio River, however, you will see many locations where trees grow right down to the riverbank. Although (amazingly!) Cincinnati’s first settlers did not bring a photographer along to document their arrival, the surviving descriptions, like Rebecca Reeder’s, make it clear that large trees towered over the very edge of the river. Thousands upon thousands of these trees were harvested for construction or fuel before the earliest drawings of Cincinnati were committed to paper around 1800.

A.E. Jones, in his “Extracts from the History of Cincinnati,” describes this sylvan abundance along Cincinnati’s future riverfront:

“The first level or plain was covered with a dense forest of beech, walnut and sycamore trees, with a thick undergrowth of spice wood [i.e. redbud]. The second or upper plain was also thickly wooded with large trees of sugar [i.e. maple], oak, walnut, hickory and in some places poplar trees, but was comparatively clear of underbrush.”

A good survey was necessary to sell land. While workmen labored to clear forests within the city limits, reports emphasize how overgrown the surrounding countryside was. James McBride, in his 1869 book, “Pioneer Biography,” describes the difficulties faced by two men walking from Columbia (now Columbia-Tusculum) downriver to Losantiville:

“The bank was narrow, and there was no road or traces; the woods were thick, and the way much obstructed by underbrush and vines, so that the traveling was very tedious.”

Our first settlers were divided among three occupations: woodcutter, hunter and surveyor. There was some overlap as some men performed two or three of these functions, but the essential work involved surveying the land that would become the town.

Cincinnati began as a commercial venture. Cincinnati’s original 760 acres were owned by Mathias Denman, Robert Patterson and Israel Ludlow, and this trio aimed to make a profit selling lots to immigrant pioneers. To sell a lot, it needed to be surveyed and cleared, so woodcutters and surveyors were quite busy.

Tree-felling continued at a rapid pace and Jones reports that a substantial portion of Cincinnati was cleared by the summer following the first settlement:

“When spring opened more cabins were built, principally between Walnut Street and Broadway, and the population had increased by the first of May to eleven families, besides twenty-four unmarried men, all dwelling in twenty log cabins, and nearly all of the large trees had been cut down between Walnut Street and Broadway, south of Second Street, although the logs, or many of them, remained on the ground for several years afterward, as is well remembered by some of the older citizens still living.”

Rebecca Reeder does not relate how or whether the family had to move their cabin. Her father and uncle operated the first ferry across the Ohio River, shuttling supplies to and from Kentucky. Hauling a shipment of cattle one day, Francis Kennedy drowned in the Ohio when his ferry capsized. His widow relocated her family to the Silverton/Pleasant Ridge area. There, her daughter Rebecca listened to her stories. Both Rebeccas are now buried in the Pleasant Ridge Presbyterian Cemetery.

The house in the middle of Water Street would have been located right about where the PNC Grow Up Great Adventure Playground sits next to the Roebling Bridge.