A Brighter Sun MARY EMERY’S PLANNED COMMUNITY BY K.M. STAMMEN
E
ncompassing about one square mile of real estate to the east of Cincinnati lies a village that could pass for any purposefully created English garden community on the other side of the pond—a similarity that was very much by the design and intention of its creator, Mary Emery.
Nestled along a soft bend on the banks of the Little Miami River, Mariemont sits a little northeast of Hyde Park and south of Indian Hill. Away from the bustle, noise and unsanitary conditions that early 20th-century Cincinnati offered, Emery envisioned a community lifted from the gardens of a nearEnglish countryside. The Garden City movement, an early-20th-century urban planning idea, promoted satellite communities surrounding a central city, in this case Cincinnati. Emery conceived Mariemont to be a place for all income levels that would contain homes, industry and agriculture. Unlike suburbs, which sprang forth as bedroom communities from the central city on which they depended, garden cities were intended to be self-sufficient.
MARY’S STORY CINCINNATI ART MUSEUM
DIVISION OF RARE AND MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS, CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
So what would make an otherwise shy woman who inherited a vast fortune upon her husband’s death want to so publicly create a brand-new town and one of the relatively few planned communities in the United States? Her vision was born of benevolence and bereavement, which brought the mourning mother and grieving widow ever so briefly into the spotlight near the end of her life, but solidified her place in history forever.
Mary Emery was born Mary Muhlenberg Hopkins in New York City in 1844. At the age of 16, she was accepted into the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn, excelling in the traditionally maledominated fields of mathematics and science. At the height of the Civil War, when she was 18 years old, Mary and her family moved from New York City to Cincinnati, where she met and married Thomas Emery in 1866. Mary’s husband was the eldest son of a family that owned and operated a candle-manufacturing, Portrait of Mary M. Emery real estate and housing-construction empire. The by Dixie Selden. company grew substantially during their marriage, as did their family. They had two sons, Sheldon and Albert, and they summered near Newport, Rhode Island, in their great estate, aptly named Mariemont.
OHIOHIS TORY.ORG
35
