Fort Mitchell, Kentucky

The suburb of Fort Mitchell just south of Covington carries the name of an earthwork fortification built here in October of eighteen sixty-one to protect Cincinnati from Confederate attack. Ormsby McKnight Mitchel, a professor at the Cincinnati College who designed the defensive network, was its namesake, and the fort occupied high ground in what is now Kenton County with artillery commanding the approaches from the south and east. The fort was one of seven built to defend Cincinnati.

In September of eighteen sixty-two, Confederate forces under General Henry Heth probed the line and clashed with Union troops commanded by General Lew Wallace, the same man who would later write the novel Ben-Hur. The fort itself was never taken. The community that grew up around it incorporated as a city in nineteen ten and today is one of the denser inner-ring suburbs in the Cincinnati metropolitan area.

The city later grew by annexation, absorbing South Fort Mitchell, which had incorporated in nineteen twenty-seven, in nineteen sixty-seven and Crescent Park in nineteen ninety-nine. Today the best-known stop is Vent Haven Museum, which says it is the only ventriloquism museum in the world. It was founded by William Shakespeare Berger, a Cincinnati businessman who gathered roughly five hundred figures starting in nineteen ten, and it opened to the public in nineteen seventy-three.

It now holds more than one thousand figures from twenty countries.