Hamilton, Ohio: Fort to Paper Capital

The city of Hamilton, Ohio, began the way many things did in the Northwest Territory: as a military outpost built for the business of war. Fort Hamilton was established in seventeen ninety-one by General Arthur St. Clair, who used this bend of the Great Miami River as a supply base for his ill-fated campaign against the Northwest Indian Confederation. St. Clair suffered one of the worst defeats in United States Army history that same year, his forces routed by Miami and Shawnee warriors near present-day Fort Recovery. But the fort held, and a settlement grew around it.

The city that emerged was named for Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, a choice that reflected the founding generation's reverence for the new federal government. By the early nineteenth century Hamilton had incorporated as a city and was establishing itself as a manufacturing center, fed by the power of the Great Miami River and the commerce that moved along it.

The transformation that defined Hamilton's industrial identity came in eighteen forty-five, when the Hamilton and Rossville Hydraulic Company diverted river flow through a canal system that supplied cheap water power to dozens of mills. Paper was what Hamilton did best. Mills producing coated paper, newsprint, and specialty grades multiplied along the hydraulic. The Champion Paper Company eventually grew into a major coated paper producer, anchoring a regional industry that lasted well over a century. Abraham Lincoln stopped here in eighteen fifty-nine to give a campaign speech on the subject of popular sovereignty, which suggests the city was already prominent enough to be worth a candidate's time.

Hamilton's industrial era wound down in the late twentieth century as Champion Paper and its successors restructured and consolidated. The hydraulic canal that once powered the mills has mostly been covered or filled in. But the streets of the city still carry the grid logic of a place built around moving water and making things, and the Great Miami River, wide and brown, continues to flow past a city that has been remaking itself for over two centuries.