DIXIE TERMINAL
Intersection of the Dixie Highway and U.S. 42 in Florence, with the Caintuckee Grill, in the 1960s.
1916 and celebrated with the planting of 400 trees along the route and plans for a statue of Simon Kenton to greet travelers after they crossed the John A. Roebling Bridge. The route from Erlanger to Florence, Ky., was completed in August 1921. It was celebrated by a parade and dance in Erlanger, which drew hundreds. The highway was opened to Williamstown in September 1924. The entire highway was not completed through Kentucky until a bridge spanning the Rockcastle River in Laurel Co. was finished in 1925. Seeing the success of the highway and its impact on towns, boosters along the Three-L Highway wanted their road to be designated part of the highway as well. Pendleton Co. officials submitted petitions to the Dixie Highway Association in 1923 to have the Three-L Highway designated the Licking Valley Branch of the Dixie Highway. Although some began to call the Three-L Highway “Dixie Highway,” the association never recognized any stretch of the Three-L Highway as part of its official highway system. The net effect of the Dixie Highway was to place Northern Kentucky along one of the major northsouth corridors connecting the industrial North with the rapidly growing Florida playgrounds. Tourist stops such the Halfway House in Williamstown that provided food, gasoline, and accommodations thrived on the tourist trade of families going to and from vacation spots in Florida. Clark, Thomas D. A History of Laurel County. London, Ky.: Laurel Co. Historical Society, 1989. “Covington Good Willers Celebrate Opening of Pike to Williamstown,” KP, September 25, 1924, 1. “Covington Plan Draws Praise from Forester,” KP, January 24, 1917, 1. “Double Track Highway,” KP, May 29, 1923, 1. “Erlanger Celebrates,” KP, August 15, 1921, 1. Foster, Mark S. Castles in the Sand: The Life and Times of Carl Graham Fisher. Tallahassee: Univ. of Florida Press, 2000.
Preston, Howard L. Dirt Roads to Dixie: Accessibility and Modernization in the South, 1885–1935. Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1991. “State Will Not Give Pike Trees,” KP, March 8, 1917, 2.
Chris Mieman
DIXIE TERMINAL. The Dixie Terminal in Cincinnati was used by Northern Kentucky streetcars and buses from 1921 until 1996. In the second decade of the 1900s, area civic leaders Frank J. Jones, A. Clifford Shinkle, and Charles P. Taft formed a company to build, on the southwest corner of Fourth and Walnut, a commercial complex that became Cincinnati’s largest indoor shopping arcade and office building. The first two floors of the building were to be devoted primarily to retail shopping, and the remaining eight floors were to be leased as commercial office space. Shinkle, who was the president and one of the primary stockholders of the Covington and Cincinnati Bridge Company (see John A. Roebling Bridge), suggested to Taft that an annex to the south of the proposed Fourth & Walnut Building would be an ideal terminal location for the Green Line Company’s streetcars arriving from Northern Kentucky. Taft, who was a major stockholder in the Cincinnati Gas and Electric Company, a business owned by the Green Line’s parent, the Columbia Gas & Electric Company, agreed. Taft had plans drawn for a four-story annex to the Fourth & Walnut Building, with the lower two floors for use as the transit company’s streetcar terminal and the top two floors designed for additional office space. The Green Line signed a long-term lease on the annex in 1917. Cincinnati’s Planning Commission was delighted that as many as 70 Covington Division Green Line streetcars per hour would no longer run on Cincinnati city streets; they could go directly from the Suspension Bridge to the Dixie Terminal’s
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proposed upper streetcar loop. Although Newport Division cars would travel on Cincinnati’s Third St., they would avoid the very congested areas of Fourth and Fifth Sts. and would unload and load in a Dixie Terminal ground-level loop. Since the Suspension Bridge linked Cincinnati to the South via Kentucky, the bridge company’s president, Clifford Shinkle, proposed naming the whole project, including the annex, the Dixie Terminal, and his proposal was accepted. Shinkle was also responsible for getting the Dixie Highway project (U.S. 25) from Michigan to Florida routed over the Suspension Bridge from Cincinnati to Covington through Kenton Co., along the route of the Lexington Pike. Construction on the Dixie Terminal was delayed by World War I and did not begin until 1919. The terminal was completed in 1921, at a cost of $3.5 million. The shopping arcade was designed in the Italian Renaissance architectural style, with a sky-blue vaulted ceiling over the main shopping area. Low-relief medallions decorating the ceiling were colored alternately brown and cream and blue and cream, with touches of gold. The arcade was furnished with warm cream–colored marble walls, and shops in it were framed with pilasters rising to the vaulted ceiling. The Cincinnati Enquirer labeled the Dixie Terminal the brightest jewel in Cincinnati’s crown. On Sunday, October 23, 1921, the Green Line’s Covington Division cars began running directly into the upper terminal level through a viaduct from the Suspension Bridge above Second and Third Sts. A month later, on November 27, the Newport Division streetcars started using the Dixie Terminal’s lower level via Third St. With the opening of the lower level of the Dixie Terminal, the Green Line discontinued its use of the L&N Bridge, and all of the Newport Division cars used the Central Bridge to and from Cincinnati. The two levels within the Dixie Terminal were arranged similarly. The tracks in each level formed a horseshoe-shaped loop. The streetcars entered
Dixie Terminal, Cincinnati.