Mariemont Ohio: Mound Builders to Model Town

The bluff above the Little Miami River where Mariemont now sits has been home to people for more than a thousand years. Fort Ancient culture communities farmed and buried their dead here between roughly one thousand and sixteen fifty A.D. Along what is now Little Miami Bluff Drive, a low earthen embankment still runs through the trees, a remnant of their presence. Just upstream, the Madisonville site, one of the most heavily excavated Fort Ancient villages in Ohio, occupied the same plateau from the fifteen hundreds into the sixteen hundreds.

European settlement displaced these communities, and by the nineteenth century this was quietly tended farmland above the river valley, ten miles east of Cincinnati. In nineteen thirteen, a Cincinnati widow named Mary Muhlenberg Emery began secretly buying these farm parcels through intermediaries, hiding her identity over twelve years to avoid inflating prices. She spent those years working with town planner John Nolen on a vision for a complete community, with housing for working and middle-class families, a central inn, shops, churches, and schools all within walking distance.

On April twenty-third, nineteen twenty-three, Mariemont was formally founded. Nolen and twenty-five architects designed the buildings together. The American Planning Association named it a Great Neighborhood. The earthwork on the bluff still predates all of it by a thousand years.