Lytle Park Historic District

About this property

Lytle Park Historic District is a historic district in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. Roughly bounded by 3rd, 5th, Sycamore, Commercial Sq., and Butler Sts. in downtown Cincinnati, it centers on Lytle Park. In 2014, Western & Southern Financial Group, owner of many properties within the Lytle Park Historic District asked the city to remove historic status of several historic buildings. The company hopes to demolish sections of the district in order to build new office space. Lytle Park has a storied history and represents one of the oldest areas in the city. Originally a hardwood forest, the park and its vicinity was the early site of Fort Washington, built in 1789 to protect early settlers of the Ohio River town from Indian attacks. Mathias Denman, Robert Patterson, John Filson and Israel Ludlow, met on the land of their new purchase, then called Losantiville (future Cincinnati). The land that would become Lytle Park was covered in trees just like most of the landscape. In 1789, the settlement of Losantiville was picked as the perfect place for a fort for the headquarters of the army during the Indian wars. Fort Washington was located right around where the Guilford School Building now stands (now the office of Eagle Realty Group). Fort Washington was designed by Major John Doughty. Directly to the east of the fort, Doughty also laid out a garden and a peach orchard with saplings from Fort Harmar in Marietta Ohio. Dr. Richard Alison was the surgeon general for Fort Washington. In the 1790s he built a small house in the peach grove were Lytle Park now sits. His horse, Jack, received a bullet in the head during the battle of Fallen Timbers. That horse kept going carrying the good doctor and 3 wounded soldiers out of danger. The bullet remained imbedded in the horse’s skull, and afterwards when the Doctor would be riding his horse through Losantiville it was the favorite joke of his to remark "that his horse had had more in his head than some doctors he had known." Allison and Jack, the horse, retired from Army life in 1796. Dr. Alison practiced medicine in Cincinnati from his office on Broadway Street until his death in 1816 you can visit him in Wesley cemetery in Northside. The site next served as the homestead of the prominent Lytle family. Surveyor General of the Northwest Territory William Lytle II built his house there in 1809, about ten years prior to the completion of the neighboring Martin Baum mansion (now the Taft Museum of Art). Lytle II was known for helping set up the first bank in Cincinnati called the Miami Exporting Company, along with other reputable men of the day. He was the first president of the Cincinnati Humane Society and one of the founders of the University of Cincinnati.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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