Hughes High School - Hughes Yearbook (Cincinnati, OH)

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'lN MEMORIAM. THOMAS HUGHES. BY A GRADUATE. By his great and wise bequest, Thos. Hughes, the wanderer from a foreign shore, has enshrined himself in the hearts of the young and 01d of our Qgeen City of the West, and built for himself a monument more proud than the pyramids of Ancient Egypt, and more lasting than the sculptured columns of the Eternal City. We can fancy how the thought- less boys of a half century ago in our city pointed the finger in derision at the solitary man who lived with his horse and dogs alone in his hum- ble cabin on Liberty Street, never thinking that in that secluded hut plans were forming by which their very descendants perhaps would rise up and call him ttblessed. A companion picture for the miser of Marseilles, who, jeered and hooted by the rude populace for his seltish- 11ess, in dying, bleesed that city with pure and sparkling water by means of his hard earned and well saved store-is the spectacle of Thos. Hughes uhloved, unappreciated and misunderstood perhaps during his life. in death opening up a fountain of learning from which have been drinking not alone the poor and destitute children of whom he made mention, but the children of the rich and the intelligent and refined of our city. Unhappy in his married relation, no doubt he took infinite pleasure in the one absorbing idea to which he was wedded--with no

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Hughes tjigb School. The last will and testament ofThos. Hughes, dated 4th of December, -. 1824, provided that Hthe residue of my land and property aforesaid shall be appropriated and applied to the maintenance and support of a school or schools, in the City of Cincinnati, for the education of poor destitute children, whose parents or guardians are unable to pay for their school- ing; the said property, the management of the funds arisingtherefrom, and those who are fit subjects to receive the benefits thereof, are to be placed under the control of a board of Trustees. . . . . . The trustees who remain in said city are authorized to appoint others to till Ivacancies from time to time. . . . The land Hto be by them kept, and rents used for the purpose aforesaid, or to be sold and the proceeds funded? In April, 1827, the tract of land referred to was laid out into lots by the trustees. March 3, 1845, a lot on Ninth Street was purchased for $9,000, for the purpose of a High School; but, in May, 185t, the same was sold for $15,700, arnd the proceeds invested in a lot on the south side of Fifth Street at the end of Mound, in Parks subedivision, the lot being ninety-five feet froht and two hundred feet deep. This grouhd cost $18,000, and in 185273 the present building was erected at a cost of about $25,000, and was named in honor of the munificent bequest of Thos. Hughes, the tt Hughes High School?

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voices of light hearted children echoing around his own hearthstone, his fancy pictured on the walls of his humble cabin, the many hundreds, yes, thousands of children whom he was in one sense adopting, whose minds would be made more clear and whose eyes more bright, whose powers for good more expanded and strengthened, by the learning he would give them. Unfriended and alone in the present, he was looking forward to the ftiendship of the future, and in imagination clasping hands with, and receiving the congratulations of the fathers and mothers of gene- rations yet to he. . 'No doubt the company that followed the remains of Thos. Hughes to his last resting place on that chill December day more than fifty years ago, seemed to the careless observer like a small 011:; but they little knew that it was only the head of the procession, and that column numbering in its ranks men of science and of art, lawyers, doctors, statesmen and divinee, bright eyed youth and beauteous 111aidens, is still passing, and the number is still swelling, till the funeral pageant of a monarch of the present day fades into insigniHcance, and the triumphal processions of the conquerors of the past, are excelled.