Route #5: Carthage

I have been to Carthage exactly once. It was a pilgrimage of sorts. Four years ago, Jess Linz and I drove from Lower Price Hill to Carthage to meet a woman who we knew from newspaper clippings and neighborhood folklore. She had worked in Lower Price Hill as a community organizer in the 1980s and had formed a tenant cooperative, of which only a few empty buildings remained. 

But that’s not why we went to Carthage. This woman had worked out of the same third-floor office that I was working in at the time. When I started my job, I found a slim file in one of the cabinets: a Xeroxed article about her organizing efforts with Latino immigrants. Having the same assignment all these years later, we wanted to meet her to give our work the historical context that it deserved. We heard from neighbors that she had left Lower Price Hill to do organizing work in Carthage. And so off we went, Mapquest in hand.

Donnie and I will start our Carthage run from Su Casa Hispanic Center, where Jess and I met this legendary organizer.

From there, we will run down Fairpark into the residential section of the neighborhood, and then back up Vine Street. We will take Vine Street past the site of the Hamilton County Fairgrounds, then get back on Fairpark to Seymour. Seymour will take us to the Mill Creek Greenway Trail.

There are two large parks in Carthage, and we will get as close as we can to Caldwell Park. If we can access it from the Greenway Trail, we’ll take a detour to run through before heading back to the residential section via North Bend.

You can see the full route with milage markers here.


-Kayla