First Commencement in a city finding its pride of place
The institution now officially known as the University of Cincinnati held his first Commencement on June 20, 1878, with an evening ceremony that packed Pike’s Opera House in the city’s basin on Fourth Street. Grand opera stepped aside for that Thursday evening, as seven graduates took a bow.
It was an evening of refinement in a rapidly growing city of 250,000 that still preserved both its virtue-and-vice heritage. Cincinnati was an international draw, boasting trade and cultural vitality, including the emergence of the city as a music center. The theater prospered greatly. Singers from throughout the U.S. and Europe flocked to Cincinnati to perform large-scale, classical works. The May Festival, housed in Music Hall, the largest concert hall in America at the time, rivaled anything Europe could offer.
At the time of its first commencement, the university was home to about 130 students pursuing one of three bachelor degrees — arts, science, or civil engineering. True to the cosmopolitan nature of the city even then, that first graduating class of 1878 included UC’s first Hispanic graduate (as well as international student): Thomas D’Aquino e Castro of Brazil. Three more Brazilian students graduated the next year. And following the Spanish American War, UC saw a small influx of Filipino students.
And that first class also graduated Winona Lee Hawthorne of Newport, Ky., the first women to matriculate and earn a degree from UC. That degree in hand, Hawthorne embarked on a well-traveled life as the wife of U.S. Army officer with dozens of postings from coast to coast, including a period when she taught Latin and Greek at what is today Mississippi State University. Each of her three daughters also went on to achieve college degrees – from Pratt Institute, Columbia University and the University of Wisconsin. And every generation of her family with daughters has named one of them Winona in honor of her place in UC history.
Featured image at the top: Pike's Opera House in 1800s Cincinnati
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