Cincinnati ( SIN-sin-AT-ee; colloquially nicknamed Cincy) is the most populous city in Hamilton County, Ohio, United States, and its county seat. Settled in 1788, the city is located on the northern side of the confluence of the Licking and Ohio rivers, the latter of which marks the state line with Kentucky. It is the third-most populous city in Ohio (after Columbus and Cleveland), and the 66th-most populous city in the U.S., with a population of 309,317 at the 2020 census. Cincinnati serves as the economic and cultural hub of the tri-state Cincinnati metropolitan area, Ohio's most populous metropolitan area and the nation's 30th-largest, at over 2.3 million residents.
Throughout much of the 19th century, Cincinnati was among the top 10 U.S. cities by population. The city developed as an inland port for cargo shipping by steamboats, located at the crossroads of the Northern and Southern United States. Although it had fewer immigrants and thus less influence from Europe than major East Coast cities in the same period, it received a significant number of German-speaking immigrants, who founded many of the city's cultural institutions. It later developed an industrialized economy in manufacturing. Many structures in the urban core have remained intact for 200 years; in the late 19th century, Cincinnati was commonly referred to as the "Paris of America" due mainly to ambitious architectural projects such as Cincinnati Music Hall, the Cincinnatian Hotel, and the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge.
Greater Cincinnati has the 28th-largest economy in the U.S. and the fifth-largest in the Midwest, and is home to Fortune 500 companies Kroger, Procter & Gamble, GE Aerospace, Western & Southern, Fifth Third Bank, Cincinnati Financial, Cintas, and American Financial Group. The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is based in the city. Institutions of higher education in Cincinnati include Xavier University and the University of Cincinnati, which is among the largest universities in the country by enrollment. The city's major league professional sports teams include the Cincinnati Bengals (NFL), Cincinnati Reds (MLB), and FC Cincinnati (MLS).
Two years after the founding of the settlement then known as "Losantiville", Arthur St. Clair, the governor of the Northwest Territory, changed its name to "Cincinnati", possibly at the suggestion of the surveyor Israel Ludlow. The name was chosen in honor of the Society of the Cincinnati, made up of Continental Army officers of the Revolutionary War, of which St. Clair was then president. The society, in turn, was named for Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a dictator of the early Roman Republic who saved Rome from a crisis and then retired to farming because he did not want to remain in power, becoming a symbol of Roman civic virtue.
Cincinnati has many nicknames, including Cincy (or Cinci), the Queen City or Queen City of the West, the Blue Chip City, the City of Seven Hills, and Porkopolis. The traditional Queen City nickname is taken from an 1819 newspaper article and further immortalized by the 1854 poem "Catawba Wine". In it, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote of the city:
For many years, Cincinnati was known as "Porkopolis" after the prominence of the pork processing and sales industry in the city. In 1988, the city built a park, Bicentennial Commons, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the city's founding and commissioned British artist Andrew Leicester to create a sculpture for the entrance. Leicester came up with four steamboat smokestacks, a nod to the city's riverboat history, each topped with a winged pig. Initial reaction was derision, but the city soon embraced the "Flying Pigs"; the city's Flying Pig Marathon was named after them, and the city's Big Pig Gig inspired by them. The city has used it as a symbol and a brand.
One nickname, the City of Seven Hills, stems from the June 1853 edition of the West American Review, "Article III—Cincinnati: Its Relations to the West and South", which described and named seven specific hills. The hills form a crescent around the city: Mount Adams, Walnut Hills, Mount Auburn, Vine Street Hill, College Hill, Fairmont (now rendered Fairmount), and Mount Harrison (now known as Price Hill). The name refers to the Seven hills of Rome. Newer nicknames such as "The 'Nati" are emerging and are attempted to be used in different cultural contexts. For example, the local Keep America Beautiful affiliate, Keep Cincinnati Beautiful, introduced the catchphrase "Don't Trash the 'Nati" in 1998 as part of a litter-prevention campaign.
Cincinnati was founded in 1788, when Mathias Denman, Colonel Robert Patterson, and Israel Ludlow landed at a spot at the northern bank of the Ohio opposite the mouth of the Licking River and decided to settle there. The original surveyor, John Filson, named it "Losantiville", a combination of syllables drawn from French and Latin words, intended to mean "town opposite the mouth of the Licking". On January 4, 1790, St. Clair changed the name of the settlement to honor the Society of the Cincinnati.
In 1811, the introduction of steamboats on the Ohio River opened up the city's trade to more rapid shipping, and the city established commercial ties with St. Louis, Missouri, and New Orleans downriver. Cincinnati was incorporated as a city on March 1, 1819. Exporting pork products and hay, it became a center of pork processing in the region. From 1810 to 1830, the city's population nearly tripled, from 9,642 to 24,831.
Construction on the Miami and Erie Canal began on July 21, 1825, when it was called the Miami Canal, related to its origin at the Great Miami River. The first section of the canal was opened for business in 1827. In 1827, the canal connected Cincinnati to nearby Middletown; by 1840, it had reached Toledo on Lake Erie. Railroads were the next major form of commercial transportation to come to Cincinnati. In 1836, the Little Miami Railroad was chartered. Construction began soon after, to connect Cincinnati with the Mad River and Lake Erie Railroad, and provide access to the ports of the Sandusky Bay on Lake Erie.
Residents of Cincinnati played a major role in abolitionism. Many fugitive slaves used the Ohio River at Cincinnati to escape to the North. Cincinnati had numerous stations on the Underground Railroad, but there were also runaway slave catchers active in the city, who put escaping slaves at risk of recapture. Given its southern Ohio location, Cincinnati had also attracted settlers from the Upper South who traveled along the Ohio River into the territory. Tensions between abolitionists and supporters of slavery broke out in repeated violence, with whites attacking black people in 1829 in a wave of destruction that resulted in 1,200 black people leaving for Canada. The riot and its refugees became topics of discussion throughout the country, and black people organized the first Negro Convention in 1830 in Philadelphia to discuss these events.
White riots against black people took place again in Cincinnati in 1836 and in 1842. In 1836 a mob of 700 pro-slavery men attacked black neighborhoods and a press run by James M. Birney, publisher of the anti-slavery weekly The Philanthropist. Tensions increased after congressional passage in 1850 of the Fugitive Slave Act, which required cooperation by citizens in free states and increased penalties for failing to try to recapture escaped slaves. Abolitionist Levi Coffin made the Cincinnati area the center of his anti-slavery efforts in 1847. Harriet Beecher Stowe lived in Cincinnati for a time, where she met escaped slaves and used their stories as a basis for her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), which was crucial in galvanizing public support for the abolitionist cause.
The city had a labor shortage until large waves of immigration from Ireland and Germany in the late 1840s. The city grew rapidly over the next two decades, reaching 115,000 people by 1850. During this period of rapid expansion and prominence, residents of Cincinnati began referring to the city as the Queen City.