Savior Maier and his son-in-law, F. L. Emmert, opened a saloon at the corner of Clifton and Vine streets in 1881. In the day-to-day operation of the saloon, Maier and Emmert learned that brewers were struggling to deal with the large quantities of wet mash, or spent grain, a byproduct of brewing. Seeing an opportunity, Emmert changed the focus of his business and started dealing in spent brewer’s grain.
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The birds are back in town!
Bird migration is at its peak right now in the Cincinnati area and on our Edge of Appalachia preserve. All of our bird breeders that leave for the winter are now back in southern Ohio, Indiana, and Northern Kentucky and singing in their territories.
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Is this the last Great Auk?
The Great Auk (Pinguinus impennis) was a penguin-like, flightless bird found along coastlines in the north Atlantic. It was valued for its meat, fatty oils, and feathers, and was hunted to extinction in the mid-1800’s. As the bird became more rare, collectors paid handsomely for specimens.
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A Snapshot of Early Cincinnati Breweries
Early immigrants, like Frederick Billiods, William Attee, Patrick Reilly, Peter Jonte, Thomas Wood and John Walker, opened breweries in Cincinnati that produced beers found in their native countries – France, England and Ireland – mostly traditional ales and porters.
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Early Photography Series 2 of 4 – Ambrotypes
The ambrotype is a direct positive image and uses the wet collodion plate process. The photographer mixes a liquid emulsion of gun cotton (combination of purified cotton with nitric and sulfuric acid), ether and alcohol.
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Long live the extinct mastodon!
The American mastodon (Mammut americanum) is the iconic “Ice Age” creature of the Pleistocene epoch (2.58 million to 11,700 years ago) for North America, and an example of its extinct megafauna.
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The hummers are coming!
So wrote John James Audubon, noted ornithologist and artist (and first official employee of our predecessor institution, the Western Museum), on the spring migration of Ruby-throated Hummingbirds (Archilochus colubris).
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Early Photography – Part 1 of 4
The daguerreotype was invented by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre and was introduced to the French Academy of Sciences on January 7, 1839. A silver-plated copper plate is polished on the silver side to a mirror-like sheen and exposed to iodine vapor.
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Irish Tape and Our Sound Recording Collections
One of the collections I get to manage is the Sound Recordings, and, as you can imagine, we hold a pretty diverse spectrum of recording technology.
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