Rees E. Price
Rees E. Price, of Oak Thorpe, Derbyshire, England, was born August 12, 1795. His father, Evan Price, an enterprising Welsh merchant, was a fine specimen of manly beauty, endowed with more activity and strength than men ordinarily possess. His early life had been passed among the sterile hills of his native Cambria, whither his ancestors had fled from the fruitful plains of Monmouth and Herefordshire for refuge during the Saxon conquest. At the age of twenty-five he turned his back upon his mountain home and wended his way into London, in 1781. He obtained employment in a dry-goods store, where by five years of close application to business he acquired a good reputation and sufficient means to become a trading merchant. About this time he married a Miss Sarah Pierce, of Welsh and England descent. She was born in London, and was a blue-eyed English blonde of remarkable beauty, and was entering her nineteenth year when married. She left her pleasant home and accompanied her husband in his toilsome perigrinations, to assist him in his business. She bore her husband six children, two of whom died in infancy. The children were born at different places, where our trader happened to stop, and it is due to this fact that Oak Thorpe, Derbyshire, England, is the birthplace of our subject, Rees Price, the oldest son of his parents. On the first of July, 1801, they sailed from the Liverpool docks to cast their fortunes in the young republic of America, and on the thirtieth day of the following August they safely landed at the wharves of Baltimore, Maryland. He at once made his way over the mountains to the valley of the Miami, to carry out a long-cherished scheme of entering upon a business for himself. This was at a time when the star of empire seemed to have settled over Cincinnati. He brought with him his stock of goods in three five-horse wagons, he and his family following in a gig. Their journey over the mountains was long and tedious, but at last a part of the wagon train arrived at Brownsville, Pennsylvania, and the other two wagons had gone forward to Pittsburgh. Our trader followed the first part of the train, and on arriving at Brownsville purchased a flat-boat in which he stowed his family and goods and gig; the balance of the goods was then taken on at Pitttsburgh, and in a few days the precious freight was landed in Cincinnati in the foot of Main street, June 1, 1807. He had then his wife, four children, and about ten thousand dollars' worth of store goods.
Cininnati at that day contained about two hundred houses, and these were located principally on three streets running north and south-Main, Sycamore, and Broadway, and the three running east and west-Front, Columbia and Lower Market streets. Fifth and Main streets were far up in the woods, and a brickyard was situated in the swamps not far south from where the Burnet House now stands. The population of the city did not exceed two thousand at that time. After Mr. Price had established his business he found it necessary to return to Baltimore for more goods. The entire journey had to be performed on horseback, rendering the undertaking hazardous, and requiring good physical health to endure and and some grit to accomplish. His valuable wife determined to share the hardship of this return journey with her sturdy companion, and both accordingly set out on a bright October day to cross the mountains, leaving the house and goods in charge of their eldest daughter, Sarah, and Rees, their eldest son, now in the thirteenth year of his age.
The subject of our sketch, Rees Price, inherited many of the native endowments of his parents. He was well developed physically and mentally. With shapely limbs he walked with the energy and springing step of his father and possessed the suave manner, candor, and mental characteristics of his mother. He won many friends outside of those who were brought into contact with him in merely a business way. His father's success in business enabled him to make large purchases of lands west of Mill creek, but his long years of honest toil, that brought him such large results, were wasted in naught in trying to help incompetent kinsmen and others, to such amounts in the use of his name as brought bankruptcy to his own fortunes. He attempted to retrieve his lost fortune, and began the second time, at an advanced age, to accomplish the result; but the task proved a struggle too great for the will-power of the man, and he died November 19, 1821, at the age of sixty-four years.
Rees E. Price was twenty-seven years of age at the death of his father, and, owing to the want of educational advantages previous to the year 1808 and his father's embarrassments, he was called upon to aid him in extricating himself from his obligations. This labor, severe as it was, proved the only education of great practical importance received. He was in every sense of the word a frontiersman in pioneer life; strong, active, and a hard-laboring man. He could go into the timber and in the sunlight of one day cut, split, and stack three cords of wood. With his keen-edged skinning axe he felled the forest and helped to make way for the school-houses, furnace-flues and factory-stack. With honest sweat and toil he manufactured millions of brick to be used in building the beautiful mansions and business blocks of the Paris of America. He was truly an honest man, and a hard-working, faithful brother. A classical education might have developed other qualities of the mind had he spent his time in school and afterward followed some of the leading professions. But no course in life would have developed his usefulness, have made him a more valuable, respected and admired citizen, in all probability, than the honest, straightforward course he took and maintained with his dying principles through life. In one sense he was truly educated, being a useful worker.
At the age of twenty-one he found his father's estate insolvent. He had a constitution by nature strong, and as yet unimpaired, and went to work with a will to correct the misfortune. He possessed a good stock of correct principles, and, under the guidance and influence of his mother's love, fortune was made to smile upon his brave endeavors, and at the age of thirty-four he found himself free from all encumbrances. Of the leading traits which formed the character of our subject at that time we may mention his industry, honesty, will-power, and benevolence. These traits adhered to him through life. He was kind and considerate to the poor, ready and punctual to help those in need, while his word was his bond, and was so considered by his acquaintances. He was a man possessing prodigious strength. He at one time lifted a log with a man on it that a number of men had failed to lift without the man; at another time he shouldered a stone that a number of men singly had tried in vain to raise from the ground. He was a peaceable, silent, thoughtful man. In his living he was temperate and frugal, a student of man and of nature, the results of which wrought out for him principles then regarded by the slow age as odd notions and conceits, but now better accepted by the thinking mind as living facts. In politics he was an admirer of Jackson, the heroic will-power and patriotism of the man, completely winning his favor for the time being, but the governing policy of the old hero as it developed itself, through popular with the masses, found no sympathy or support from Mr. Price. He subsequently became an anti-slavery man, and voted for James G. Birney for President, since which time he has taken no part in politics.
The act of Congress which robbed Mexico of its territory, to annex it to the United States in the interest of the dark spirit of slavery, was declared by him to be an abhorrence and that the nation had dishonored itself in perpetrating such a wrong. His sense of justice was so much outraged at this flagrant act that he published his declaration to the world that he had no part in this dishonesty of the Government, and that to such a Government he owed no allegiance. He visited Washington city, and in the Senate chamber in an almost frenzied condition denounced the unrighteous act in the presence of the men who had consummated it, and for the course he took, exhibiting an unreasonable contempt for the danger in which he was placed, was imprisoned by the authorities as a felon.
At the age of twenty-nine our subject was married to Miss Sarah Matson, daughter of Judge Matson, the distinguished gentleman so well known in this county. After this marriage, in a dower conferred upon his daughter, the unselfish character of the man was beautifully illustrated. To Sarah was given by her father eighty-two and a half acres of one of the most valuable farms in the Ohio valley, located but a few miles west of the city, on the banks of the river. The manly feelings of Mr. Price refused to have the farm conveyed to him or at any time to receive any profit therefrom, accepting it as law that there can be no legal title to land unless purchased by labor, and that he would eat no bread that was not won by honest toil, whether right or wrong. These were the axioms that governed him through life and illustrated his convictions at all times.
Mr. Price was a close student of Scriptural prophecies and gave them literal interpretation, politically and ecclesiastically. He held that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God by virtue of his loyalty to the divine attributes, and that Scripture prophecies indicate the modern advent of the grand man on earth who, with similar loyalty to divine principles, will be endowed with power like that ascribed to the meek and lowly one.
Bishop Morris, in the Christian Advocate of February 22, 1849, says that-
In his habits he is abstemious; drinks no tea, coffee, or anything but water; eats no animal food, but eats vegetables and fruits, except apples, which are the forbidden fruit, and are the raw material from which comes cider, which, in 1840, was used as the symbol of man-worship-one of the marks of the feast. He is fluent, often shrewd; has a stentorian voice, and talks not by the hour only, but by the day and night. Still he is gentle, polite and good-natured; bears reproof with meekness and contradiction with patience, but never yields a point which is to him rendered certain by revelation; he believes the Bible, but interprets it by the spirit within him.
Although Mr. Price was a remarkable man, he was never in school after he was eleven years of age. He was married ninth December, 1824, after which he moved to the mouth of Mill creek, where John E. Price, his eldest son, was born and named after both grandparents. Mr. Price died January 20, 1877, on the hill which bears his name.
Mr. John Price was born November 29, 1825, and after leaving school turned his attention to brick-making. In 1851, he accepted a position on the Ohio & Mississippi railroad as conductor, and is the oldest official in that business on that line. In 1845, he was one of the contractors for the construction of the Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton. The first train was run over that line tenth of April, 1854. In 1860, beginning in the month of October, he went south and was engaged on a road between Sabine pass and Beaumont, Texas, but the breaking out of the war stopped proceedings. The work now is being pushed forward by other parties. He was in the war three years as, from October, 1862, till October, 1865, superintendent of a division on the Nashville & Chattanooga railroad. He was also on other lines. In 1868 he began the construction of the Price's Hill inclined plane, which he and his brother finally completed, including the elevator, in 1875, at a cost of about two hundred thousand dollars. He was married May 11, 1875, to Miss Fannie Kugler, daughter of David Kugler, of Clermont county, Ohio. By this marriage Mr. Price is the father of two children. He resides on Price's Hill.
From History of Hamilton County, Ohio, With Illustrations and Biographical Sketches, Compiled by Henry A. Ford, A.M. and Mrs. Kate B. Ford (Cleveland, 1881)