
From Illustrated Police News, Image extracted from microfilm by Greg Hand
By 1920, the residents of Mt. Adams had exhausted whatever was left of their patience. The storied hilltop community was overrun with rats and the residents blamed an unregulated dump underneath the rickety old Ida Street Bridge. The Mt. Adams Welfare Association decided drastic measures were in order. They decided to kill them with fire.
Under the gaze of newspaper and motion-picture cameramen, the Welfare Association saturated the festering midden with more than 150 gallons of fuel oil and posted a brigade of club-wielding Boy Scouts on the perimeter. Shortly before 9 a.m. on Sunday, June 27, Ed Steinway, chief of the city’s Fire Prevention Bureau, signaled to his torch-bearing lieutenants, and the conflagration erupted. Despite audible squeaking, and the overpowering stench of burning flesh, few rats emerged from the blazing trash heap, although thousands of roaches scrambled for safety. Despite the few documented fatalities, the Association declared victory.
Rats came to Cincinnati with the European settlers and thrived in the nascent town. Charles Theodore Greve, in his 1904 “Centennial History of Cincinnati” describes an infestation during the 1830s:
“Another prominent merchant of early Main street was S. S. Smith, whose store in the late ‘thirties’ and early ‘forties’ was at the corner of Ninth and Main. He was a brother of the well known Sol Smith the comedian. He is credited with having surpassed the feat of St. Patrick in clearing the snakes from Ireland for he is said to have cleared the rats from Main street. These pestiferous animals had become a great pest and destroyed much property of the merchants. Finally Smith succeeded in capturing an enormous rat to whose neck after much labor and considerable excitement a small bell was attached by a chain. This was turning the tables on the rats who had once thought of belling the cat.”
“The rest of the rats did not receive their old comer when he was let loose with favor and as he approached, fearing perhaps that some one had succeeded in belling the cat, they retired precipitately. After a short time no rats were seen or heard. Once in a while with a gentle tinkling of the bell the public were admonished that one at least was left. Finally this sound ceased and one day some workmen found the skeleton of the unfortunate rat with the bell still about its neck lying behind some barrels. It was suggested that it had died of grief from lack of companionship. The story is told that not a rat has been seen on Main street since, although the writer does not vouch for the truth of this tale.”
The estimable Charles Cist, in his 1845 book, Cincinnati Miscellany, or Antiquities of the West, relates the tale of a farmer who attempted an unsavory and underhanded method for disposing of his barnyard rodents:
“I am reminded of the circumstance by a rumpus kicked up in the 5th street market a few days since. It seems that a farmer from Colerain township brought in a lot of rats which he sold for squirrels a few market days since. They brought him five cents each. The affair leaked out in the neighborhood, and a man of the same name being accused with it, it almost occasioned a fight. I should like to know who bought these squirrels; that the problem might be solved whether public prejudice deprives us of an addition to the existing luxuries of our Cincinnati markets.”

From Illustrated Police News, Digitized by University of Minnesota Libraries
Although we can blame our ancestors for encouraging rats through unsanitary practices, we must remember just how animal-dependent Cincinnati was back in the day. The city couldn’t function at all without thousands of horses dropping tons of manure and uneaten grain. Throughout the downtown basin, dairies housing hundreds of cows, breweries with mountains of grain, slaughterhouses spewing blood and offal and outdoor markets groaning under wagonloads of vegetables offered a banquet for vermin of all sorts. Cincinnati didn’t get its garbage collection act together until well into the twentieth century. Until then, rats were just part of daily life. The Cincinnati Enquirer [October 2, 1909] reported the plight of a Corryville family:
“From R.H. Stuempel, of 2823 Euclid avenue, came a complaint to the Health Department yesterday that his house, which is next door to a stable, is overrun with rats, and that he and his family fear for their lives. ‘We have no official rat-catcher,’ said Clerk [Joseph M.] Ray, of the Health Department, ‘and I do not know what we will do in the matter.’”
Even eminent institutions like the City Hospital were confronted by rodent problems. According to the uncharacteristically poetic Cincinnati Commercial Tribune [April 8, 1903]:
“Four members of the august Board of the City Hospital Trustees yesterday consumed much of the afternoon discussing rats. The report of the Superintendent handed them implied that the institution has rats in the garret, rats in the cellar, rats that are brown and rats that are yellow – they run through the wards, the patients annoy, and resist every effort their lives to destroy.”
The hospital attempted to evict the rodents by bringing in a nationally noted rat-catcher, “Professor” Louis Hirsch, who had earned a reputation by banishing rats from the White House. The Cincinnati Times-Star [March 27, 1890] interviewed a local rat-catcher who boasted about capturing 34 rats from one of the local hotels. He planned to sell them to sportsmen, who trained dogs, particularly terriers, to kill rats. That was the solution adopted by the county jail, according to the Cincinnati Post [April 26, 1901]:
“Nellie, a fox terrier member of Jailer [Lewis] Kushman’s band of seven dogs, established a new rat-killing record at the jail Wednesday night, killing nine.”
That paled in comparison to Reuben Adams, a young boy employed as rat-catcher at the Cincinnati Abattoir Company, who, according to The Union newspaper [December 4, 1920] had dispatched anywhere from 25 to 30 rats every day for five months.
Killing rats was a common sport in Cincinnati for many years. The Enquirer [February 12, 1888] described Sunday morning hunts at a dump on Eighth Street out near the Millcreek. A local resident, a molder by the name of Mike Daly, watched the neighborhood dogs chase vermin for several weeks and decided to challenge the canines.
“His plan is to run after the frightened rat, and by a sudden swoop gather it up, catching it by the back of the neck. A swing of the arm and the rodent is dashed on the frozen ground to die of a badly broken up system within a minute. In one exhibition, lasting about two hours, he caught thirty-one rats.”
Well into the twentieth century, Cincinnati mayors would declare occasional “Rat-Killing Days” to enlist city residents in the effort to rid the city of the feral pests, but only a total change in lifestyle served to reduce the rodent population.
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