Indian Hill: Shawnee and Miami Hunting Ground to Cincinnati's Estate Village

The wooded hills northeast of Cincinnati were Shawnee and Miami hunting ground. From their villages at Pickaway and Chillicothe, both nations ranged through these slopes and fished the Little Miami River. The main roads through Indian Hill today follow, in general, those original Indian trails.

In seventeen eighty-seven Major Benjamin Stites came down the Ohio River with a surveying party, was struck by the strategic beauty of the land between the two Miami Rivers, and eventually obtained a large tract here from John Cleves Symmes. The area transitioned slowly through farming into scattered estate properties in the early twentieth century, when Cincinnati industrialists began claiming hillside tracts.

Indian Hill incorporated as a village in nineteen forty-one specifically to protect its rural character against suburban annexation. Its charter declared the community's purpose as solely residential to preserve the rural atmosphere, limiting development to single-family homes on lots ranging from one to five acres. Bridle trails are written into the landscape by design. The village transitioned to city status in nineteen seventy when its population exceeded five thousand, and with just over six thousand residents today it covers nearly nineteen square miles of woods and winding roads where two nations once hunted.