A Rural–Urban Divide: The 1949 Campaign for Zoning in Hamilton County, Ohio

Urban and rural residents often have been at odds over government policy, as inhabitants of either the city or the country perceived programs that benefited the other as unwarranted or unnecessary. But in the twentieth century, with the growth of suburbs, places where people hoped to live in the pastoral countryside and commute to city-based jobs and amenities, the dividing line between city and country blurred. Government and civic leaders representing areas containing this urban-rural fringe, such as Hamilton County, Ohio, around Cincinnati, had to negotiate the balance between rural and urban interests in the implementation of regional initiatives, such as adoption of rural zoning.¹

While scholars have documented an undeniable interconnection between city and country, historians have primarily considered the process through which farms become the suburban neighborhoods of the metropolis as a movement of people and ideas from city to suburb. However, rural areas were not unoccupied before they became suburbs; rural residents' opinions and perspectives played an influential role in how suburban growth proceeded. The history of the effort to implement control of land use and development through rural zoning in Hamilton County demonstrates that urban residents could not simply impose their preferred vision of land-use regulation. Rural residents' opinions shaped the rules through which zoning could be enacted in Ohio townships, and when implementation was imminent in Hamilton County, rural residents rejected a regional zoning scheme they believed was not in their best interest, deferring land-use regulation in their townships.²

The campaign for rural zoning in Hamilton County began in the early years of the 1940s. In Cincinnati, urban leaders found conditions had shifted in ways that made continued urban growth quite different than it had been previously. During the nineteenth century, when those who could afford to do so moved away from central-city industry, they established neighborhoods that were soon annexed into the city. Cincinnati's government provided necessary services for suburban development: electricity, gas, water, and sewer service; fire and police protection; streetcar franchises and paved roads; et cetera. The city was also eager to gain the real estate tax revenue of this land, particularly when it was developed for expensive homes or industry.³

However, a few decades into the twentieth century, property owners outside the city began resisting the control of Cincinnati's municipal government. In his study of Cincinnati's annexation history, Roger C. Hanson explains that by the 1920s most suburban neighborhoods that needed the city's services had already been annexed and others remained independent because they designed alternative means of supplying public services to their residents; they either had the financial ability to provide them or established a contractual relationship with Cincinnati or another village or city to do so.⁴

While most early-twentieth-century Hamilton County residents recognized that there was a metropolitan Cincinnati, bound by economic ties, among those outside the central city there was significant opposition to become a part of it, even if consolidated municipal services would have made fiscal sense and lowered taxes. When debating the possibility of annexation to Cincinnati, a resident of the Village of Wyoming stated, "I'm against it because I'm against it, but I'm looking for some other reasons." Township residents had attachments to their own rural communities. Most townships had their own post offices, schools, churches, general stores, inns, and taverns. And in addition to township government, unincorporated areas of the county boasted volunteer fire brigades, civic associations, agricultural associations, sporting clubs, and long-established community festivals.⁵

Township advocates believed they were "the very grass roots of democracy," because, as William B. Guitteau put it, "township government is closest to the people, nearest to the soil." In response to efforts to reorganize local government and eliminate the township's role, rural elected officials formed the Ohio State Association of Township Trustees and Clerks in 1929 to promote the interests of townships. The organization's historian, Herbert C. Smith, even went so far as to assert that "the townships form the strongest bulwark of defense against the...