Saint Anne's Hill Historic District

St. Anne's Hill is a fourteen-block neighborhood of about 200 buildings just east of downtown Dayton, Ohio. Wide streets and large shade trees frame a mix of houses built mostly between 1860 and the early twentieth century. Roughly 40 percent are wood or brick folk-type dwellings with Eastlake porches, and about 30 percent are small cottages. Larger homes show Second Empire, Gothic, Romanesque and Queen Anne influences, including the Bossler Mansion and the Jacob Joyce House. Three large churches, a Fifth Street commercial strip of about 25 buildings from around 1880, and the Odd Fellows Lodge complete the neighborhood. The district was platted from 1845 and grew after the Miami-Erie Canal reached Dayton, drawing German immigrant workers, tradesmen and prominent German citizens. It is presented as Dayton's best and most intact German ethnic neighborhood and one of the city's few intact areas of late nineteenth century vernacular housing. It became a locally designated district in 1974.