When you see Fountain Square, in Cincinnati, you'd never guess it was once the site of a market for butchers. It was, though. That was before 1871. In that year, Henry Probasco was looking for a way to present the city with a memorial to his brother-in-law, Tyler Davidson. His solution was Fountain Square.

Probasco wasn't the sort of person who just pays the bills. He actively participated in selecting William Tinsley to design the square. He even traveled to the Royal Bavarian Foundry, in Munich, to commission the square's centerpiece, a massive bronze fountain. At the foundry he met Ferdinand von Miller and August von Kreling. The pair had collaborated on a design for a fountain called "The Genius of Water". The work was to be forty-three feet tall. The base would have reliefs of the many uses for water, surmounted by allegorical figures. The whole thing was to be topped with a nine-foot tall figure of a woman, the genius of water, with water pouring from her outstretched hands. We're talking nineteenth-century public sculpture at it's most characteristic. Probasco loved it, but he had a condition. Remember, he was a hands-on sort of patron of the arts. He insisted on the addition of figures of animals, one on each side, to be used as drinking fountains. The artists, lacking another client, acquiesced.

That's how Cincinnati lost it's butchers' market and gained one of its favorite landmarks, the Tyler Davidson Fountain. Since then, it's been moved around a bit and the square completely redesigned a couple times, but forty-three feet of bronze and granite exuberance remain as a memorial to Tyler Davidson and a symbol of Cincinnati.