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BIOGRAPHIES
Source:
1789 - 1881
History of Cincinnati, Ohio
with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches
Compiled by Henry A. Ford, A. M., and Mrs. Kate B. Ford
L. A. Williams & Co., Publishers
1881
(Transcribed by Sharon Wick)
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REES E.
PRICE, of Oak Thorpe, Derbyshire, England, was born
August 12, 1795. His father, Evan Price, an enterprising Welsh
merchant, was a fine specimen of manly beauty, endowed with
more activity and strength than men ordinarily possess. His
early life had been passed among the sterile hills of his
native Cambria, whither his ancestors had fled from the
fruitful plains of Monmouth and Herefordshire for refuge
during the Saxon conquest. At the age of twenty-five he
turned his back upon his mountain home and wended his way into
London, in 1781. He obtained employment in a dry-goods store,
where by five years of close application to business he
acquired a good reputation and sufficient means to become a
trading merchant. About this time he married a Miss
Sarah Pierce, of Welsh and England descent. She was
born in London, and was a blue-eyed English blonde of
remarkable beauty, and was entering her nineteenth year when
married. She left her pleasant home and accompanied her
husband in his toilsome perigrinations, to assist him in his
business. She bore her husband six children, two of whom died
in infancy. The children were born at different places, where
our trader happened to stop, and it is due to this fact that
Oak Thorpe, Derbyshire, England, is the birthplace of our
subject, Rees Price, the oldest son of his
parents. On the first of July, 1801, they sailed from the
Liverpool docks to cast their fortunes in the young republic
of America, and on the thirtieth day of the following August
they safely landed at the wharves of Baltimore, Maryland. He
at once made his way over the mountains to the valley of the
Miami, to carry out a long cherished scheme of entering upon a
business for himself. This was at a time when the star of
empire seemed to have settled over Cincinnati. He brought with
him his stock of goods in three five-horse wagons, he and his
family following in a gig. Their journey over the mountains
was long and tedious, but at last a part of the wagon train
arrived at Brownsville, Pennsylvania, and the other two wagons
had gone forward to Pittsburgh. Our trader followed the first
part of the train, and on arriving at Brownsville purchased a
flat-boat in which he stowed his family and goods and gig; the
balance of the goods was then taken on at Pittsburgh, and in a
few days the precious freight was landed in Cincinnati in the
foot of Main street, June 1, 1807. He had then his wife, four
children, and about ten thousand dollars worth of store goods.
Cincinnati at that day contained about two hundred
houses, and these were located principally on three streets
running north and south—Main, Sycamore, and Broadway, and the
three running east and west—Front, Columbia and Lower Market
streets. Fifth and Main streets were far up in the woods, and
a brickyard was situated in the swamps not far south from
where the Burnet House now stands. The population of the city
did not exceed two thousand at that time. After Mr.
Price had established his business he found it necessary
to return to Baltimore for more goods. The entire journey had
to be performed on horseback, rendering the undertaking
hazardous, and requiring good physical health to endure and
some grit to accomplish. His valuable wife determined to share
the hardship of this return journey with her sturdy companion,
and both accordingly set out on a bright October day to cross
the mountains, leaving the house and goods in charge of their
eldest daughter, Sarah, and Rees, their eldest
son now in the thirteenth year of his age.
The subject of our sketch, Rees Price,
inherited many of the native endowments of his parents. He was
well developed physically and mentally. With shapely limbs he
walked with the energy and springing step of his father and
possessed the suave manner, candor, and mental characteristics
of his mother. He won many friends outside of those who were
brought into contact with him in merely a business way. His
father's success in business enabled him to make large
purchases of lands west of Mill creek, but his long years of
honest toil, that brought him such large results, were wasted
in naught in trying to help incompetent kinsmen and others, to
such amounts in the use of his name as brought bankruptcy to
his own fortunes. He attempted to retrieve his lost fortune,
and began the second time, at an advanced age, to accomplish
the result; but the task proved a struggle too great for the
will-power of the man, and he died November 19, 1821, at the
age of sixty-four years.
Rees E. Price was twenty-seven years of age at
the death of his father, and, owing to the want of educational
advantages previous to the year 1808 and his father's
embarrassments, he was called upon to aid him in extricating
himself from his obligations. This labor, severe as it was,
proved the only education of great practical importance
received. He was in every sense of the word a frontiersman in
pioneer life; strong, active, and a hard laboring man. He
could go into the timber and in the sunlight of one day cut,
split, and stack three cords of wood. With his keen edged
skinning axe he felled the forest and helped to make way for
the school houses, furnace flues and factory-stack. With
honest sweat and toil he manufactured millions of brick to be
used in building the beautiful mansions and business blocks of
the Paris of America. He was truly an honest man, and a hard
working, faithful brother. A classical education 1 might have
developed other qualities of the mind had he spent his time in
school and afterward followed some of the leading professions.
But no course in life would have developed his usefulness,
have made him a more valuable, respected and admired citizen,
in all probability, than the honest, straightforward course he
took and maintained with his dying principles through life. In
one sense he was truly educated, being a useful worker.
At the age of twenty-one he found his father's estate
insolvent. He had a constitution by nature strong, and as yet
unimpaired, and went to work with a will to correct the
misfortune. He possessed a good stock of correct
principles, and, under the guidance and influence of his
mother's love, fortune was made to smile upon his brave
endeavors, and at the age of thirty-four he found himself free
from all incumbrances. Of the leading traits which
formed the character of our subject at that time we may
mention his industry, honesty, will power, and benevolence.
These traits adhered to him through life. He was kind and
considerate to the poor, ready and punctual to help those in
need, while his word was his bond, and was so considered by
his acquaintances. He was a man possessing prodigious
strength. He at one time lifted a log with a man on it that a
number of men had failed to lift without the man; at another
time he shouldered a stone that a number of men singly had
tried in vain to raise from the ground. He was a peaceable,
silent, thoughtful man. In his living he was temperate and
frugal, a student of man and of nature, the results of which
wrought out for him principles then regarded by the slow age
as odd notions and conceits, but now better accepted by the
thinking mind as living facts. In politics he was an admirer
of Jackson, the heroic will power and patriotism of the man,
completely winning his favor for the time being, but the
governing policy of the old hero as it developed itself,
though popular with the masses, found no sympathy or support
from Mr. Price. He subsequently became an
anti-slavery man, and voted for James G. Birney
for President, since which time he has taken no part in
politics.
The act of Congress which robbed Mexico of its
territory, to annex it to the United States in the interest of
the dark spirit of slavery, was declared by him to be an
abhorrence and that the nation had dishonored itself in
perpetrating such a wrong. His sense of justice was so much
outraged at this flagrant act that he published his
declaration to the world that he had no part in this
dishonesty of the Government, and that to such a Government he
owed no allegiance. He visited Washington city, and in the
Senate chamber in an almost frenzied condition denounced the
unrighteous act in the presence of the men who had consummated
it, and for the course he took, exhibiting an unreasonable
contempt for the danger in which he was placed, was imprisoned
by the authorities as a felon.
At the age of twenty-nine our subject was married to
Miss Sarah Matson, daughter of Judge
Matson, the distinguished gentleman so well known in
this county. After this marriage, in a dower conferred upon
his daughter, the unselfish character of the man was
beautifully illustrated. To Sarah was given by her
father eighty-two and a half acres of one of the most valuable
farms in the Ohio valley, located but a few miles west of the
city, on the banks of the river. The manly feelings of Mr.
Price refused to have the farm conveyed to him or at
any time to receive any profit therefrom, accepting it as law
that there can be. no legal title to land unless purchased by
labor, and that he would eat no bread that was not won by
honest toil, whether right or wrong. These were the axioms
that governed him through life and illustrated his convictions
at all times.
Mr. Price was a close student of
Scriptural prophecies and gave them literal interpretation,
politically and ecclesiastically. He held that Jesus of
Nazareth was the Son of God by virtue of his loyalty to the
divine attributes, and that Scripture prophecies indicate the
modern advent of the grand man on earth who, with similar
loyalty to divine principles, will be endowed with power like
that ascribed to the meek and lowly one, Bishop
Morris, in the Christian Advocate of February 22, 1849,
says that—
In his habits he is abstemious; drinks no tea, coffee,
or anything but water; eats no animal food, but eats
vegetables and fruits, except apples, which are the forbidden
fruit, and are the raw material from which comes cider, which,
in 1840, was used as the symbol of man worship— one of the
marks of the feast. He is fluent, often shrewd; has a
stentorian voice, and talks not by the hour only, but by the
day and night. Still he is gentle, polite and good-natured;
bears reproof with meekness and contradiction with patience,
but never yields a point which is to him rendered certain by
revelation; he believes the Bible, but interprets it by the
spirit within him.
Although Mr. Price was a remarkable man,
he was never in school after he was eleven years of age. He
was married ninth December, 1824, after which he moved to the
mouth of Mill creek, where John E. Price, his eldest
son, was born and named after both grandparents. Mr.
Price died January 20, 1877, on the hill which bears his
name.
Mr. John Price was born November 29, 1825, and
after leaving school turned his attention to brick-making. In
1851, he accepted a position on the Ohio & Mississippi
railroad as conductor, and is the oldest official in that
business on that line. In 1845 he was one the contractors for
the construction of the Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton. The
first train was run over that line tenth of April, 1854. In
1860, beginning in the month of October, he went south and was
engaged on a road between Sabine pass and Beaumont, Texas, but
the breaking out of the war stopped proceedings. The
work now is being pushed forward by other parties. He was in
the war three years as, from October, 1862, till October,
1865, superintendent of a division on the Nashville &
Chattanooga railroad. He was also on other lines. In 1868 he
began the construction of the Price's Hill inclined plane,
which he and his brother finally completed, including the
elevator, in 1875, at a cost of about two hundred thousand
dollars. He was married May 11,1875, to Miss Fannie
Kugler, daughter of David Kugler, of
Clermont county, Ohio. By this marriage Mr. Price is
the father of two children. He resides on Price's Hill.
Source: 1789 - 1881 History of Cincinnati, Ohio, with
Illustrations and Biographical Sketches - Publ. L. A.
Williams & Co. - Page 426 |
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