City - Cincinnati, OH - Queen City Pride 1904 Vykort

Colorized photo from 1904 Original title: Fountain Square Photographer: Detroit publishing Location: 98 W Fifth St, Cincinnati Ohio If you live in Cincinnati, then you are probably familiar with this particular fountain. For those that aren't, this is the Tyler Davidson fountain, gifted by hardware store owners Henry Probasco and Tyler Davidson in 1865. Originally they wanted to give it to the city in the 1860's, but the civil war started and that took precedent. After the war, eight months later, Tyler died. Henry wanted to dedicate the fountain to him. Henry wanted a grand fountain, something large and different. He wanted something that people could drink from, so it would not only be beautiful, but also functional. Maybe its because he owned a hardware store that he liked function. He didn't like it when kids had to go to the bar for a drink of water. So he set out to Europe to find someone that can make him a fountain. He found August von Krelin at the Royal Bronze Foundry in Munich Germany. As it happens this foundry already had something that was similar to what he was thinking of, though he wanted some additions that included kids with animals that became drinking fountains. The fountain had a theme, the Temperance of water and it featured: The statue starts with a mother figure, with her arms stretched, water raining down from her hands onto the people below. Water rains down on a peasant farmer hoping for rain for his dry fields, a man praying for water to douse a fire, a mother cajoling her child to take a bath, a woman offering a cup for her invalid father. Once it got to America, and they took the land they needed from butchers that used to work in this location. Then they did something interesting. Under this fountain is a large hollowed area, it was filled with 2000ft of copper pipe, and enough room to fill it with a lot of ice. This way the fountain had cold water year round. Bronze cups were attached to each corner, as they felt a communal cup was less gross than just drinking from the stream. Here are some interesting tidbits about this fountain. While Henry did pay for this fountain, in 20 years time after it was set up, he went from a rich merchant that owned a mansion, to dead broke, as his creditors took all of it. The fountain is made of recycled bronze from an army surplus from Denmark. To recoup the costs of war, the Danes had a national garage sale. The foundry purchased many old bronze Danish cannons, Twenty-Four tons of scrap were melted to make this fountain. Even stranger, legend has it that the fountains sculptor, August von Kreling, was quite drunk one evening. He took hit lit cigar and used it like a pencil to draw an idea for this fountain on the table cloth. It was very strange for the time, because normally you would use deities in fountains, not commoners and poor people. Because of this he couldn't find a single buyer for it. Then one day, 25 years later, Henry walked into a shop looking for something unusual and grand and August finally got to see his vision come to light.