2026 Conference Tours

Nuclear History and Nature at the Fernald Preserve Bus Tour

8:30 am – 12:30 pm
Tour Guides: Casey Huegel & Jason Krupar
Max Capacity: 45
Accessibility: This tour will contain moderate walking. Come prepared for the weather.

Bring your binoculars for a tour of the Fernald Preserve! Seventy-five years ago, a small community northwest of Cincinnati called Fernald was selected by the Atomic Energy Commission for the Feed Materials Production Center, the nation’s first fully integrated uranium processing facility and the “first link” in the Cold War nuclear weapons complex. After several decades of production for the nuclear arms race, a “uranium leak” at the plant helped launch a grassroots environmental movement led by women in the Fernald Residents for Environmental Safety and Health who fought to clean up the nuclear waste in their backyard. 2026 marks twenty years since the completion of Fernald’s ten-year, $4.4 billion Superfund cleanup, which dismantled the site’s factories, remediated and isolated its radioactive waste, and ecologically restored the landscape. The 1,050-acre Fernald Preserve, a birding hot spot, features seven miles of hiking trails through wetlands, grasslands, and forest, and many opportunities to engage the site’s complex history, including interpretive waysides, a self-guided exhibit gallery, and films. Historians from the University of Cincinnati and professional interpreters will be onsite to guide you through Fernald’s remarkable transformation from production to cleanup and discuss its current mission to educate the public and monitor and remediate the Cold War’s environmental legacy.

Mariemont: The National Exemplar Bus Tour

9:00 am -12:00 pm
Tour Guide: Bruce Stephenson
Max Capacity: 45
Accessibility: This tour will contain moderate walking. Come prepared for the weather.

The Mariemont tour will follow the historic progression of John Nolen’s new town, which is listed on the National Historic Register. While a student at the University of Munich, Nolen was influenced by Camillo Sitte’s The Art of City Planning, and it was the text he consulted for his month-long 1902 study of Tuscany. The tour will examine the neo-Renaissance lines he employed at Mariemont with Dale Park, envisioned as a working-class neighborhood modeled on the English Garden City, the starting point. The pedestrian-scaled experience will take in The Mariemont Community Church, inspired by Anglo-Norman parish churches of the 12^th and 13^th centuries, the recent group of neo-classical townhomes, and the Concourse, a scenic overlook of the Little Miami River.

Picturesque Cincinnati: Spring Grove Cemetery and Glendale Bus Tour

9:00 am -12:00 pm
Tour Guides: Jill Beitz & Kathleen Smythe
Max Capacity: 45
Accessibility: This tour will contain extensive walking. Come prepared for the weather.

This tour will explore two Cincinnati landmarks of the mid-nineteenth-century Picturesque Movement: Spring Grove Cemetery and Glendale. Part of the Rural Cemetery movement, Spring Grove Cemetery was created in 1845 to relieve the small church cemeteries in downtown Cincinnati that were overwhelmed by cholera deaths. Renowned landscape architect Adolf Strauch joined the project in 1854. Strauch took a cluttered and eclectic layout and redesigned the cemetery with design features that are now recognized as part of his “landscape lawn plan.” We will explore Spring Grove’s park-like setting, including family monuments, connected lakes for drainage and aesthetics, and winding roads. The 733-acre cemetery was named a National Historic Landmark in 2007 and is also an arboretum with a mix of native and exotic flora and home to one National and 23 State Champion Trees.   

Just eleven miles up the road, the early romantic planned suburban community, Glendale, was developed in 1851. Laid out in a curvilinear fashion, the village of Glendale’s first lots ranged between one and two acres, and purchasers had to “erect tasteful dwellings to cost not less than $1,500 each. The railroad running through the center of the village made it convenient for men traveling into the city, but its pastoral setting was ideal for families. On this tour, we will see not just homes, but also the village square and the train depot (now a museum). In 1977, the village was named a National Historic Landmark.

Gentrification in Historic Over-the-Rhine Walking Tour

10:00 am-12:00 pm
Tour Guides: Anne Delano Steinert & Mary Burke Rivers
Max Capacity: 30
Accessibility: This tour will contain extensive walking. Come prepared for the weather.

Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine was one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in 19th-century America. Originally settled by German immigrants, the neighborhood has housed successive groups, including Appalachian migrants and African Americans displaced by urban renewal in the nearby West End. A strong people’s housing movement emerged in Over-the-Rhine in the 1980s to protect the needs and voices of low-income residents. When the 2001 police shooting of an unarmed Black teen set off a wave of civil unrest, business and political leaders joined together to create a community development corporation to facilitate yet another wave of neighborhood change. This tour will explore the history of housing and activism in Over-the-Rhine with an emphasis on gentrification since 2001.

Greenhills: New Deal New Town Bus Tour

1:00 – 4:00 pm
Tour Guides: Beth Sullebarger, Julie Turner, & Mayor Dave Moore
Max Capacity: 45
Accessibility: This tour will contain moderate walking. Come prepared for the weather.

Greenhills is one of three greenbelt towns built by the U.S. Resettlement Administration between 1935 and 1938. It represents one of the federal government’s earliest efforts to solve urban problems. This New Deal project was the largest experiment in garden city planning ever undertaken in the U.S. Funded by a $31 million appropriation through the Emergency Relief Act of 1935, the Greenbelt Town Program sought to provide a model for suburban planning and development, borrowing basic design principles from Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City concept and Clarence Perry’s Neighborhood Unit Plan. Other sources include Mariemont by John Nolen; Radburn, NJ, by Clarence Stein and Henry Wright; and Norris, TN, by Earle Sumner Draper, Tracy Augur, and Roland Wank. The village plan incorporated the basic elements of garden city suburban development in its use of a curvilinear street plan with five superblocks composed of cul-de-sacs and lanes, a commercial/civic center, town common, and a surrounding greenbelt, all of which remain basically intact. The village was named a National Historic Landmark in 2017.

University of Cincinnati Campus History and Planning Walking Tour

1:30 – 4:00 pm
Tour Guides: Greg Hand & Davarian Baldwin
Max Capacity: 30
Accessibility: This tour will contain moderate walking. Come prepared for the weather.

This tour will explore the history and future of the University of Cincinnati’s Burnet Woods campus. Originally a public park, the university moved into Burnet Woods in the 1890s. Through multiple expansions north into the park and east into neighboring Corryville, UC has carved out a distinctly urban collegiate experience in which athletic facilities are embedded in the heart of a dense hilly urban campus. This tour will explore the campus’ earliest buildings, subsequent expansions, and the stunning 1991 Campus Masterplan by Hargreaves Associates which used clever landscape strategies to unify a patchwork of existing campus buildings and transformed the campus “from one of a commuter campus – dominated by roads and parking lots, to a pedestrian-oriented campus with new buildings and open spaces that created a dynamic campus that now promotes the quality of student life.” Finally, historian Davarian Baldwin will discuss UC’s history of campus expansion and its most recent move into the adjacent historically African American neighborhood of Avondale.

From Industry to Recreation: Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky Riverfront Walking Tour

1:30 – 4:00 pm
Tour Guides: Elizabeth Keslacy & Jody Robinson
Max Capacity: 30
Accessibility: This tour will contain extensive walking. Come prepared for the weather.

The Cincinnati riverfront was once home to shipbuilders, meatpackers, and a busy port. As in other Rust Belt cities, it declined in the early twentieth century, eventually cut off from the rest of downtown by interstate highways. Starting in the late 1960s, the city revitalized the waterfront, responding to demands for flood control and public access. This tour will detail the 20^th-century evolution of the Cincinnati and Newport riverfronts. 

We will compare the approaches taken by these two cities – on the Cincinnati side, new parks, stadiums, museums, bars, and restaurants transformed the river into a recreational and cultural destination; while on the Newport side, the city reinvented itself as a center for family entertainment with an aquarium, multiplex theater, and indoor recreation options while also reinvigorating its reputation as a destination for gambling and nightlife. More recently, the cities have paid greater attention to their connection, creating links across the river using bike trails and the pedestrianization of a former railroad bridge. Highlights will include Smale Park, the Serpentine Wall and Concourse Fountain at Yeatman’s Cove, Sawyer Point, the Purple People Bridge, and Newport on the Levee to discuss the interconnection of ecology, infrastructure, and development.