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The Queen City of the West 45
Reports of civic meetings those days usually carried the name of Judge Timothy Walker.* He and another Harvard graduate, John C. Wright, established in 1833 the first college of law west of the Alleghenies, the Cincinnati Law School;§ and he later founded the Western Law Journal At the Walker house on Fourth Street, Charles Dickens, Chief Justice Coleridge, Mr. Macready, the actor, and many another distinguished visitor to Cincinnati were entertained.6
4-Thanks to the profits of industry and trade but equally to the character of its citizens, Cincinnati of the 'forties and 'fifties enjoyed a cultural and social life comparable to the leading cities of the Atlantic seaboard. It was famous for its several colleges and fifteen schools ;f for its astronomical observatory; for its thirty-five newspapers and magazines;% for its half-dozen books and music publishing houses; and especially significant for the young bookkeeper of Irwin & Foster, the city had
* Timothy Walker (1806-1856) ,19
t These included Cincinnati College, St. Xavier College (now Xavier University), Woodward College and High School, Lane Theological Seminary, colleges of law and medicine, four academies and classical schools, and eleven common schools.20 Charles Dickens wrote in American Notes: "Cincinnati is honorably famous for its free-schools . . . ; no person's child among its population can, by possibility, want the means of education/*
% In addition to four or five newspapers, there were literary, religious, fraternal, medical, and trade journals, which had editorial and publication offices in Cincinnati.20 |
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