The Taft Museum
316 Pike Street; several designers;
1820 and later

The Taft Museum building, "Belmont," the Baum-Longworth-Sinton-Taft House, was originally the "country seat" of pioneer entrepreneur Martin Baum; it is an outstanding example of Federal-style residential architecture in "the West." Its present appearance, however, is the result of a series of alterations and additions under just five ownerships. Restoration to approximate its original form has continued since the house and its high-quality artistic contents were given to the people of Cincinnati by its last private owners, Annie Sinton and Charles Phelps Taft, about 1930.

Taft, an attorney, was the elder half-brother of President William Howard Taft; his wife was the daughter of David Sinton, a wealthy Cincinnati iron and real-estate magnate who acquired the house in 1871. From 1830 until his death in 1863, "Belmont" had been the home of Nicholas Longworth, Cincinnati’s eccentric but masterful "first millionaire," an enlightened patron of the arts. Although he Victorianized the interiors, replaced the Federal front doorway, and added bay-windows, Longworth’s most evident contribution to the building is now the fascinating murals (ca.1850) in the entrance hall by Robert S. Duncanson, the African-American landscape painter.

In spite of a long-standing tradition that the designer of Baum’s original frame mansion was Benjamin Henry Latrobe or James Hoban, current opinion attributes it, instead, to a collaboration between the client and a master-builder. In 1887 the Sintons added a precocious and compatible Federal-Revival wing (the present entrance) designed by William Martin Aiken (1855-1906) of Cincinnati and N.Y., later Supervising Architect of the U.S. Treasury. The Tafts enlarged their dining room in 1910 to the elegant Adamesque design of Elzner & Anderson (see 7). In converting the residence into a museum in the early 1930s, the first of several attempts was made to restore the building to its original Federal-style appearance; the architects were Frederick W. Garber (1877-1950) & Clifford B. Woodward (1880-1932), who led a fine Traditionalist firm that specialized in handsome and efficient school buildings and collaborated with several notedout-of-town architects (see 7). The museum’s superb collection of paintings and decorative arts, as well as its restored interiors, should not to be missed. A National Historic Landmark (NHL); listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NR); documented by the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS). Museum open regular hours.