Revolutionary War Soldiers Memorial Tablet
Cincinnati, Hamilton County, Ohio
Marker Inscription
The honor and glory of those soldiers of the revolution who after the war for freedom and independence helped to build up this western country and now lie buried here in Hamilton County, Ohio. This tablet is erected by the Cincinnati chapter of the Ohio Society Sons of the Revolution. MDCCCCIX. 1775. 1783.
Erected by Ohio Society Sons of the Revolution
The Story
Placed in 1909 by the Cincinnati chapter of the Sons of the Revolution, this tablet honors Revolutionary War soldiers who, after winning independence, moved west to help settle the Ohio country and now lie buried in Hamilton County. The dates 1775 and 1783 mark the span of the war for independence. The memorial links the founding generation to the westward push that opened the trans-Appalachian frontier.
Why it matters
It captures how Revolutionary War veterans became the pioneers of the early West, carrying the new nation's ambitions across the mountains into the Ohio Valley.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
When this tablet was placed in 1909, the United States was looking back with pride on its founding generation, and patriotic societies were busy marking the graves and deeds of the men who had won independence. The dates carved here, 1775 and 1783, frame the years of the Revolutionary War, from the first fighting to the peace that confirmed a new nation.
But the heart of this memorial reaches past the war itself to what came next. After the fighting ended, the young republic looked westward, across the Appalachian Mountains, toward the vast Ohio country. For soldiers who had just risked everything for independence, this new land offered a second chance: cheap or granted acreage, room to farm, and the promise of building something of their own.
Hamilton County, in the southwestern corner of Ohio along the Ohio River, sat at the gateway of that migration. The settlement that became Cincinnati grew at the edge of the frontier, and among its early residents were veterans of the Revolution who had traded the battlefield for the hard work of clearing land and founding towns.
People & events
The tablet does not list individual names; instead it honors a whole category of people — the Revolutionary soldiers who, in the words the erecting society chose, helped build up this western country after the war and now lie buried in the county's soil.
Try to picture their lives in two acts. In the first, they were Continental soldiers and militiamen who endured the long, uncertain struggle for independence. In the second, no longer young, they loaded wagons or boarded flatboats and set out over the mountains to start again in a raw new region where towns, roads, and farms had to be made from forest.
The monument itself is a historical event of a particular kind. In 1909, the Cincinnati chapter of the Ohio Society Sons of the Revolution — a hereditary patriotic organization devoted to preserving the memory of the founding generation — gathered to dedicate this tablet. Placing it was an act of remembrance by descendants and admirers determined that the pioneers among the Revolutionary dead would not be forgotten.
Its place in the American story
This tablet draws a line that runs straight through the center of the early American story: the line connecting the Revolution to the westward expansion that followed it. The same generation that secured independence also carried the new nation across the mountains.
The trans-Appalachian frontier, and the Ohio Valley in particular, was where the abstract idea of an expanding republic became real, farm by farm and town by town. Veterans who settled there were not only pursuing their own fortunes; they were extending the reach of the country they had fought to create, planting its institutions in new ground.
There is also something telling in the monument's date. By 1909 the Revolution was well beyond living memory, and Americans relied on societies like this one to keep its legacy visible. The tablet is thus a double artifact — it honors the founders, and it records how a later generation chose to remember them, linking the war for independence to the national drive westward that defined the century between.
If you visit
This is a place for quiet reflection rather than spectacle. A memorial tablet rewards the visitor who slows down, reads carefully, and lets the weight of its few words settle.
Notice the Roman numerals and the paired dates of the war. Small details like these were chosen with care by the people who dedicated it, and they reward a moment's attention. Stand for a second with the idea the tablet asks you to hold: that some of the men who won American independence are buried in the ground around you, and that they came here as pioneers in their later years.
If you're exploring Cincinnati and the Ohio River country, this fits well into a day spent tracing the region's early history. Let it be a prompt to look at the wider landscape — the river that carried settlers, the old routes west — and to imagine the frontier as it was when the Revolution's veterans arrived to build on it.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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