A Little piece of Paradise… College Hill, Ohio - SELFCRAFT

Hamilton Avenue) is today. The cottage was empty on Cary’s property after he built his seven room brickhouse about 1832-35. Peter Stryker purchased the frame house and moved it to Perry Street in Mt.Healthy where is still stands, although remodeled. The bricks used for Cary’s house were made andburned on the site. The workmen stayed with the family until their job was finished.It was among these peaceful and beautiful surroundings that the Cary sisters gathered theirinspiration for many of their poems, and it was in memory of the old home that Phoebe Cary wrote thepoem, “Our Homestead”, the closing lines of which are:Our homestead had an ample hearthWhere at night we loved to meet;There my mother’s voice was always kind,And her smile was always sweet;And their I’ve sat on my father’s kneeAnd watched his thoughtful brow.With my childish hand in his raven hair-That hair is silver nowBut that broad hearth’s light: Oh that,broad hearth’s light!And my father’s look and my mother’s smile.They are in my heart tonight.Recollections of the days of their youth are set forth in a book entitled Clovernook, written by Alicein 1851, which gives a history of part of their lives spent on College Hill.Elizabeth Jessup Cary was described by Alice years later.” My mother was a woman of superiorintellect and of good, well ordered life.” Phoebe recalled: “She was a wonder of my childhood...How shedid so much work, and yet did it well; how she reared carefully, and governed wisely, so large a family ofchildren, and yet found time to develop by thought and reading a mind of unusual strength and clearness,is still a mystery to me...An exemplary housewife, a wise and kind mother, she left no duty unfulfilled,yet she found time, often at night, after every other member of the household was asleep, by reading, tokeep herself informed of all the issues of the day, political, social, and religious.” 28After the death of Elizabeth in 1835, Robert married Anna Schmidt Lewis, a frugal woman whobelieved the writings of Alice and Phoebe were a waste of time. Their stepmother caused such dissentionthat Robert built another house for him and Anna, and the children stayed in the brick Cary’s Cottage oftoday. Anna had not deterred Alice and Phoebe and they became well known, moving to New York Cityabout 1852. Both are buried in Greenwood Cemetery, New York.Eventually the house was no longer in the Cary family and was purchased by William CooperProcter in 1903. It was given in trust to the Trader sisters, Georgia and Florence, as a home for tensightless women. Such was the beginning of Clovernook Home for the Blind. 29 Cary cottage was placedon the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.Georgia, after many operations, went blind at age eleven. Education was only available from stateinstitutions for the blind but the Traders persuaded the Cincinnati Board of Education to admit Georgia.As a result of her admission, the Cincinnati schools began to offer classes for the blind in a regular schoolroom situation. The sisters also convinced the schools of the need of school sponsored compulsory eyeexaminations. The public library opened a Braille reading room as a result of the sisters urging.It was this background that impressed Procter to found Clovernook. The Shakers from Lebanon,Ohio donated looms and taught Clovernook residents how to weave. The largest of the Clovernook28 The Poetical Works of Alice and Phoebe Cary, With a Memorial of their Lives, Mary Clemmer, 1876.29 Queen City Heritage, Helping Cincinnati’s Blind Citizens: Twentieth Century Attitudes and Activities, Lyle Koehler,, Volume 44,Number 4, 1986.30