History

The house at 8315 Camargo Road in The Village of Indian Hill, Ohio, is a Victorian country house that has been both restored and updated as a comfortable and maintainable residence. 

The Victorian house at 8315 Camargo Road was built in 1865 for Emeline Shield Stickney, daughter of Cincinnati industrialist Francis Shield, sister of Edwin Shield (Shield’s Crossing) of Loveland, Ohio, and wife of Paul Stickney, formerly of Adams, New York.  Until her death in 1890, Emeline lived in the house with her four daughters, Blanche, Ella, Jennie and Clare. The names of Blanch and Ella are scratched in the glass of the lower right front window of the northwest bedroom on the main level. The house overlooks the former site of Allendale Station on the Cincinnati-Marietta Railroad, from which Emeline’s daughters, Blanche and Jennie, commuted. The house was sold by Ella Stickney in 1919.

The Victorian house is of balloon frame construction built around a small L-shaped cottage of braced-frame (post and beam) and stone construction, with the Victorian addition almost totally concealing the earlier pre-Victorian structure.  (See sketch.)

The earlier pre-Victorian cottage was probably built by James Rawlings of the DeMar family at the time of the construction of the Cincinnati and Marietta Railroad line to the northwest in the 1850s. There is a possibility that some structure, was built on the property as early as the 1830s, when the property was owned by James Jones, one of the founders of the Mt. Carmel Baptist Church, which held services on the bank of Sycamore Creek which crossed the northwest corner of the property when it was much larger.

In the 25 years following the sale by Ella Stickney, the house had many owners. Loren Shirk, a P&G manager, lived there in the 1940s and 50s, when the property included 4 acres, a dog kennel, a barn and chicken house. (See 1945 floor plan.) The Shirks partitioned the lot and built the brick ranch at 8323 Old Hickory as a retirement home. The present owners who acquired the property in 1974 gradually reversed the post-Victorian changes, upgraded mechanical systems, restored the historical portions of the house, and added compatible updated living space. (See current floor plan.) Records are available.