Bond Hill is a neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio. Founded in 1871 in northeastern Millcreek Township in Hamilton County, Ohio, Bond Hill is currently a neighborhood of the City of Cincinnati. It is one of a number of neighborhoods lining the Mill Creek, an urban stream in southwestern Ohio. Bond Hill began as a commuter suburb connected to Cincinnati via the Marietta-Cincinnati Railroad. Bond Hill incorporated as the Village of Bond Hill in 1886 and was annexed into Cincinnati in 1903. Beginning in the 1960s, redlining by the Federal Housing Authority and blockbusting by Hamilton County realtors swiftly changed the demographic makeup of the community. The first black family moved to Bond Hill in 1964, but due to these practices, by 1978 nearly 70% of the community was black. By 2000, only 3% of Bond Hill residents were white.
Bond Hill was founded by a cooperative building association, the Cooperative Land and Building Association No.1 of Hamilton County, Ohio. The cooperative was organized in 1870 by five men including several teatotallers from nearby Cumminsville. The cooperative also included the radical utopian and English printer, Henry Watkin, mentor to Japanophile writer, Lafcadio Hearn. The cooperative initially planned on building in Cumminsville but for unknown reasons changed their site to the Bond Hill area where Watkin had been living. For at least 11 years after its founding in 1871, the sale of liquor was prohibited in Bond Hill according to the Constitution and By-Laws of the Cooperative. In the early 1880s, a disagreement centered around Bond Hill's church, considered by some to be the cooperative's non-denominational church and by others to be Presbyterian, likely caused a schism within the early community and the Cooperative. The role of Watkin and the early founders in the leadership of the community seems to have ebbed after this schism.
The origin of the name Bond Hill remains a mystery. The earliest available sources from 1870 simply indicate that Bond Hill was the name of the area in the 1830s. An oral history transcribed in 1961 by George E. Patmor, one of the village's earliest residents, indicates that the name was first given by visitors to a sawmill operated by a man named Bond: "In these days the people of St. Bernard and Cincinnati would use a footpath through the woods 'for a shortcut from St. Bernard to Bond’s sawmill to work or transact business.' It got to be a common saying that they were going up on Bond Hill, so this is how we got the name 'Bond Hill'."
Until the mid-1930s, Bond Hill was largely surrounded by orchards and dairy farms. Cincinnatians would picnic in Bond Hill on weekends. Even earlier, while the Miami-Erie Canal still flowed to the west of the neighborhood, parties frequented the nearby Ludlow Grove area between St. Bernard and Bond Hill. Today, much of this open and recreational space is gone. Residential developments replaced the dairy farms in the east of Bond Hill. Industrial facilities replaced the orchards in the south and the artificial lakes in the east. In the north, a regional high school and a large 4400 car parking lot and shopping complex were built in the 1950s. Community residents opposed these intrusions but were largely ignored. Perhaps the most radical change in the neighborhood was the construction of the Interstate 75 Millcreek Expressway over the length of the canal in western Bond Hill and the Norwood Lateral (State Route 562) extension in southern Bond Hill. By their completion in the early 1960s the rural character of the neighborhood had been fundamentally altered.
The environmental degradation and urbanization of the neighborhood presaged the exit of whites from Bond Hill in the 1960s and 70s. Realtors and local banks actively encouraged the demographic transition of the neighborhood. The Bond Hill-Roselawn Community Council was founded in 1965 to combat this change. Throughout the next twenty years the Bond Hill Community Council struggled to develop a community plan and to stabilize white flight. Their achievements included the creation of a Bond Hill Community Master Plan in 1977 and the recognition of the "Old Bond Hill Village" Historic District in 1982. However, the demographic shift never abated, and today (2004) Bond Hill is nearly as segregated a black community as it once was a white one a half century earlier.
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