Miami Shores

Part of Moraine, but with a sort of seperate history, is Miami Shores. So a special post for this little suburb.

This was one of at least four, maybe five, "resorts" built along the Great Miami River north and south of Dayton. There may be more further south along the river in the vicinity of Hamilton and Middletown.

This was a development fad of the 1920s, maybe a bit earlier, too. Examples can be found in Louisville and Indianapolis as well. The idea was to develope areas along water as a sort of weekend getaway. "Boating/Bathing/Fishing" as the brochure says.

You'd get there by car, but the brochsure does show the interurban, too. In other cases these were developed around interurban access (Indian Lake up in Champaigne County is an example of that) or around railroad stops (Fox Lake in Lake County Illinois, near Chicago).

The brochure mentions the "Iron Bridge", and this pix shows that bridge, which seems like the old spans on Siebenthaler and on 725 west of Germantown. This is now replaced by a big concrete bridge, perhaps part of the road realignments associated with the extenstion of Gettysburg south to Moraine.
Miami Shores was laid out within a bend of the Great Miami, and didn't have that much frontage on the river. The swimming was not in the river but in the "swimming hole" south of Sellars Road.
One can see on the map Venetian Way as a parkway, and the "Swimming Hole" . Perhaps these are remnants of an earlier watercourse on this bend, as an 1875 map shows an old mill race where these features are at.

Since boating was one of the attractions there was two boat ramps. One by the bridge, the other further into the plat.

Since there is (or was) a boat ramp people had boats:

Miami Shores houses, mostly older ones shown here. Since this was so close to the Frigidaire plant one has to assume this pretty quickly became a place to live year round as well as a weekend or summer vacation getaway.




Downtown Miami Shores. If I recall right this was where the old "Iron Bridge" crossed the river, so there was a little collection of stuff near the bridge and and boat ramp. Reminiscent of little weekend communities in the chain of lakes area northwest of Chicago, which saw similar development in the 1920s.