The Cities: Alexandria, Virginia and Newport, Kentucky

Alexandria and Newport are River Cities – one on the Potomac River opposite Washington DC and one on the Ohio River opposite Cincinnati, Ohio. This website – and the large study on which it rests -- focuses on these two cities as they were in years just before the Civil War (Alexandria) and just after (Newport). In the nineteenth century the United States was still a rural nation, but cities were the way of the future.

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Alexandria in 1860

Alexandria in 1860 was a prosperous commercial city – a Georgian City – exporting the agricultural products of the Shenandoah Valley locally to the hinterland along the Potomac and to more remote destinations in America and to Europe. It was also a slave city with 1192 enslaved blacks and 1388 free blacks making up 21 percent of the total population of 12,293. Like many southern slave cities, Alexandria did not attract immigrants; Germans amounted to less than two percent of the population while immigrants from Ireland made up only six percent of residents. In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, Alexandria was continuing to enjoy what had been a decade of sustained economic prosperity. The “bird’s eye” lithograph captures much of the fruits of this decade of prosperity even though it was drawn in 1863 when the Union Army occupied Alexandria and built forts to protect the city and the approaches to Washington. Click here for bird’s eye view. The aftermath of the Civil War would plunge Alexandria in a long descent to urban decay and neglect from which it would only emerge as a prosperous city in the 1970s.

Newport in 1873

Newport in 1873, on the eve of the financial Panic of that year, had also enjoyed a recent history of good times, but as a burgeoning industrial town. In this Victorian City, heavy industry, especially steel and iron production, led the way in development and attracted large German and Irish immigrant populations. Newport had a tiny black population but 30 percent of its residents had been born overseas as had 60 percent of all adults -- 34 percent in Germany and 14 percent in Ireland. Many jobs in heavy industry were highly skilled and paid good wages. Newport, with a population of 13,779 residents, was emerging as a true “workingman’s city” with good jobs and very high rates of home ownership. The “bird’s eye” lithograph shows the industrial might of the city centered on the Swift Iron and Steel Works, Newport’s largest employer. Click here for bird’s eye view. Newport suffered greatly in the Depression that followed the Panic of 1873, bounced back only to encounter further industrial strife in the early 1920s after which the city was allowed to fall under the sway of organized crime. Today it strives to regain its place as a proud river city.

Core Area maps are presented in the following pages. The ‘Core Area’ technique used in this web site is the result of applying GIS spatial measurements to the information on the social and political attributes of the inhabitants of Alexandria and Newport whose residences we were able to determine. The maps outline areas of concentration, indicating the areas within which 60 percent of the group under consideration lived.