Cin Weekly1788

A reference on Cincinnati, Ohio — its buildings, trades and record, in order of date.

Still Standing

The Genius of Water Has Been on Fountain Square Since 1871

Bronze statue of a robed woman with outstretched arms in front of a glass office building

The Tyler Davidson Fountain, cast in Munich by August von Kreling and installed on what became Fountain Square in 1871, depicts the Genius of Water.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

A Munich foundry cast it, a grieving benefactor paid for it, and Cincinnati has moved it three times without ever moving it far.

The Commission and the Casting

Henry Probasco, a prosperous Cincinnati hardware merchant, commissioned the fountain in the mid-1860s as a memorial to his brother-in-law Tyler Davidson, who had died in 1865. Probasco engaged August von Kreling ↗, a German sculptor and director of the Nuremberg School of Arts and Crafts, to design the work. The foundry of Ferdinand von Miller cast it in bronze in Munich over several years. The finished fountain stood roughly forty-three feet tall and weighed an estimated 175,000 pounds ↗.

Von Kreling's central figure, which he named the Genius of Water, stands at the summit with both arms extended outward and slightly raised, water streaming from her palms. Below her, a ring of subsidiary figures — a farmer, a firefighter, a mother with a child — each receive or employ water, spelling out its necessity to daily life. The program is allegorical without being obscure, which is part of why it has worn well for a century and a half.

Gift, Installation and the Square Itself

Probasco donated the fountain to the city of Cincinnati, and it was dedicated on 6 October 1871 at the intersection of Fifth and Vine Streets — a site that thereafter took its identity from the fountain rather than the other way around. The square became a commercial and civic anchor through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, flanked eventually by the Carew Tower to the north and surrounded by retail and hotel blocks.

The fountain has been relocated within the square three times — lifted and repositioned during major renovations in 1971, again in the early 2000s, and most recently during the square's comprehensive 2020–2022 reconstruction — but it has never left the block. Each repositioning returned it to the centre of whatever new geometry the redesign imposed, confirming that the fountain is the square's fixed point and the surrounding pavement is what moves.

The Genius of Water remains the city's most legible civic symbol: a nineteenth-century bronze argument, still wet, still standing at Fifth and Vine.

The foundry of Ferdinand von Miller cast it in bronze in Munich over several years.

Gothic revival church facade with a rose window and twin spires above green trees

Cincinnati Music Hall, opened in 1878 to a Samuel Hannaford design in High Victorian Gothic, was condemned and nearly demolished on at least two separate occasions. Music Hall: the Building the City Voted to Tear Down Twice

Photo: Marharyta Volkova / Pexels

From the record

Key figures

  • Henry ProbascoCincinnati hardware merchant; donor of the fountain in memory of Tyler Davidson
  • August von Krelingsculptor; director, Munich Academy of Fine Arts; designer of the fountain
  • Ferdinand von MillerMunich foundry that cast the bronze
  • Tyler DavidsonProbasco's brother-in-law; died 1865; namesake of the fountain

From the record

Chronology

  1. 1865Tyler Davidson dies; Probasco commissions a memorial
  2. Late 1860s–1871design and casting in Munich
  3. 6 October 1871dedication at Fifth and Vine Streets, Cincinnati
  4. 1971, early 2000s, 2020–2022three relocations within Fountain Square during successive renovations

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