It was about a year ago that I first heard of Nineveh. Not the Bible story (it took me an embarrassingly long time to remember it’s connection to Jonah and the Whale), but a local neighborhood in my city, Troy, Ohio.
I don’t remember how Nineveh first came to my attention. I just remember being told it no longer existed, and that it was completely destroyed in the 1913 Flood (if you aren’t familiar with that flood, this is a good source). There are stickers here and there around Troy, like on a light post outside the post office, that demark the water flood levels, and they are significant. But, I’d never heard of an entire neighborhood being destroyed, so I went to the Local History Library to learn more.
Imagine that. A librarian going to a library for information.
If I remember my local history lesson correctly, there were at least two black neighborhoods in Troy in the early 1900s: Slabtown and Nineveh. Slabtown, located west of downtown, got it’s name because of the canal and race system that ran through the area; the ground was too saturated to build anything but a house with a slab foundation. Evidently it was a murky mess. Slabtown was well established as far back as 1892, as it was referenced in a local paper by name in that same year. The neighborhood is still there, though I’m not sure anyone but historians still call it Slabtown.
Nineveh was locate across the river from downtown Troy, hemmed in by Market St and Staunton. By all accounts, it was destroyed in the flood. There is currently a baseball field, bike path, and levy where Nineveh used to be. The Local History Library had some pictures of Nineveh during and after the flood, but there was very little information about the community. Was it an exclusively black community? How many people lived there? What was the neighborhood like? Why wasn’t it rebuilt?
I dug deeper, beginning with the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. Insurance companies needed to know the layout of towns in order to properly evaluate fire risks, so they created wonderfully detailed maps every decade or so. They listed addresses, industries, water sources, house descriptions, and more. And because they were updated about every 10 years, flipping through the maps gives a detailed view of how Troy changed over time.
But, Nineveh was not on the fire insurance maps until 1911. And even then, is a stretch, since Nineveh was a blank space amongst all those other meticulously recorded properties. The houses along Staunton and Miami, the streets of Nineveh, were not included. Only the businesses and dwellings along N. Market St.
Why. Wasn’t. Nineveh. There.
At this point in my research I was just irked. The information should have been there, but it was not. When I’m irked, I dig in. This went from being a passing curiosity to a challenge. A challenge to find the story that historians deemed unimportant. But if a whole part of the town was destroyed in the flood, there should be documentation.
I’ve had many people suggest there were no houses along Staunton or Miami, that it just wasn’t developed yet. Others have said people might have lived there, but in shacks without proper addresses. And those are viable reasons, except there’s this historical resource called the U.S Census that disagrees.
I spent weeks going through Troy OH census records, page by page, to find the people living in Nineveh. I made a spreadsheet with their names, addresses, and whether they rented or owned.
Stewart and Rosa Thomas, 31 Miami St
Stord Family, 35 Miami St
Helen and Charlie Ross, 29 Miami St
Ike Kiser, 30 Miami St
Jones Family, 111 Miami St
Those are five families that owned homes in the heart of Nineveh in 1910, three years before the flood destroyed it. There are a lot of house numbers missing, especially between 30 and 111 (I have a theory that 111 Miami was meant to be 11 Miami, but even then, quite a few homes were missing).
The 1910 Census was recorded by people walking from house to house, speaking to the inhabitants. It was not uncommon for Census workers to make mistakes. Census workers were only human after all, prone to the same faults and cultural norms as everyone else. In fact, I would suggest that it would be easy for a 1910 Census worker to skip sections of a community. Especially if they were considered unimportant and/or the area unappealing?
It turns out, that as amazing as the Sanborn Fire Maps are, they are incomplete. It was standard practice to only keep record of areas deemed commercially significant. On one hand, since the production of the maps would have been resource consuming, it makes financial sense to be judicial in their scope. On the other, I’d estimate over 50% of the Troy Sanborn map is not “commercially significant,” so I question where (not whether) racial and/or economic bias have played a role.
Racism within the insurance industry is not a radical claim. I might revisit it again later, especially if lack of insurance stymied rebuilding in Nineveh (just speculation, but a reasonable suspicion). But for now, I need to pull myself back from the brink of a deep tangent, and refocus:
Where did those families go? Did they really all die in the flood? What happened to the land they owned? Did the city buy it from them, or the county, or the state? Is there a connection to the town of Nineveh west of Troy?
I need the rest of the story.
So, my next steps will be to search newspaper data bases that are free to use at the library (gasp!), find a list flood victims and cross reference it with my name/address spreadsheet, and then maybe pay a visit to the records office downtown. Though from expereince, I know the workers at the records office will need parcel numbers, and finding those is a task unto itself. So wish me luck, to whatever end.
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