HAMILTON  , a

city and the county-seat of Butler county, Ohio, U.S.A., on both sides of the Great Miami river, 25 M . N. of Cincinnati . Pop . (189o), 17,565; (1900), 23,914, of whom 2949 were foreign-born; (1910 census), 35,279 . It is served by the Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton, and the Pittsburg, Cincinnati, Chicago & St Louis railways, and by interurban electric lines connecting with Cincinnati, Dayton and Toledo . The valley in which Hamilton is situated is noted for its fertility . The city has a fine public square and the Lane free library (1866) ; the court house is its most prominent public building . A hydraulic canal provides the city with good water power, and in 1905, in the value of its factory products ($13,992,574, being 31.3% more than in 1900), Hamilton ranked tenth among the cities of the state . Its most distinctive manufactures are paper and wood pulp; more valuable are foundry and machine shop products; other manufactures are safes, malt liquors, flour, woollens, Corliss engines, carriages and wagons and agricultural implements . The municipality owns and operates the water-works, electric-lighting plant and gas plant . A stockade fort was built here in 1791 by General Arthur Saint Clair, but it was abandoned in 1796, two years after the place had been laid out as a town and named Fairfield . The town was renamed, in honour of Alexander Hamilton, about 1796 .

In 1803 Hamilton was made the county-seat; in 1810 it was incorporated as a

village; in 1854 it annexed the town of Rossville on the opposite side of the river; and in 1857 it was made a city . In 1908, by the annexation of suburbs, the area and the population of Hamilton were considerably increased . Hamilton was the early home of William Dean Howells, whose recollections of it are to be found in his A Boy's Town; his father's anti-slavery sentiments made it necessary for him to sell his printing office, where the son had learned to set type in his teens, and to remove to Dayton .