How Cincinnati's Old Money Built a Hill of Mansions and Then Sold Them All Off: Clifton

A knighted baron's castle in Clifton, Cincinnati just failed to sell at $139 a square foot. The reason starts in 1837 and runs through every mansion on the hill. Clifton was the hill Cincinnati's richest men climbed to escape the smoke and cholera of the basin. Pork packers, hardware kings, iron heirs, and a Standard Oil partner built castles on it in the 1850s through the 1880s, and almost none of them could hold on to what they built. One baron was priced out of his own castle in eight years. Henry Probasco, the man who gave Cincinnati the Tyler Davidson Fountain, went broke and ended up running a cemetery. Then in 1896 Boss Cox changed Ohio's annexation law and the village of Clifton lost its independence in a single citywide vote. This documentary follows the whole sell-off of Clifton, Cincinnati: Mount Storm and the Temple of Love, Probasco's Oakwood, Scarlet Oaks, the Sacred Heart castle, the McDonald estate that became a schoolyard, and the last mayor of Clifton who begged the city for parkways it never built. It ends in the present, with Glen Terrace sitting unsold, the National Register offering no legal protection at all, a 2024 rezoning that opens the hill to denser building, the Ohio Attorney General suing to stop the sale of the Hebrew Union College campus, and a neighborhood that is only now, in 2026, trying to draw a local historic district around what's left. If you grew up in Clifton, went to school in one of these castles, or had family at Scarlet Oaks, this is your hill. Would you buy Glen Terrace at that price, and what would you do with it? Tell me in the comments. Informational only. Not real estate or financial advice. Historical figures, dates, and property values are drawn from published records and listing data and may differ between sources. Some footage is illustrative. #Cincinnati #Clifton #OhioHistory