Longworth family Socialites Information

The Longworth family is most closely associated with Cincinnati, Ohio, and was one of Cincinnati's better-known families during the 19th and 20th centuries. The founder of the Ohio family, Nicholas Longworth (16 January 1783 - 10 February 1863), came to Cincinnati from Newark, New Jersey, sometime before 1808. He married Susanna Howell, three years his junior, daughter of Silas and Hannah (Vaughan) Howell, on Christmas Eve, 1807.

Nicholas Longworth was a winemaker who has been called the "Father of the American wine industry." He capitalized on the German-American movement into Cincinnati, producing a wine that replicated a drink native to Germany. During the late 1840s and throughout the 1850s, the family patriarch's wine ventures were increasingly profitable. However, the root of the Longworth family wealth was Longworth's real estate success.

He and his wife Susanna had five children, namely:

Oldest daughter Mary married John Stettinius, and was the matriarch of the Cincinnati family of that name. But the Longworth fame continued on through the second-youngest child and only son, Joseph.

On 13 April 1841, Joseph Longworth married Anna Maria Rives. His wife was the daughter of Landon Cabell Rives and Anna Maria Towles. Longworth's in-laws were a fairly well known central Virginia family, and Landon Cabell Rives was a doctor who studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Anna, her sister Margaret, and brother Landon Jr. were born in Nelson County, Virginia, and had come to Cincinnati with their parents in 1829. Their uncle was the American ambassador to France, United States Senator and member of the Confederate Senate, William Cabell Rives.

Joseph and Anna Maria (Rives) Longworth had a few descendants of note. Their daughter Maria Longworth Nichols Storer founded Rookwood Pottery in Cincinnati, named for the Grandin Road home of the Longworth family on the east side of Cincinnati (the house was so called because loud rooks – blackbirds of the family corvidae – constantly hovered around the place). Their son Nicholas Longworth II was a judge on the Ohio Supreme Court, and his son, Nicholas Longworth was a Cincinnati lawyer, and member of the United States House of Representatives, namesake of the Longworth House Office Building in Washington, D.C.. His sister Clara Longworth de Chambrun wrote about her brother and the larger family in a book called The Making of Nicholas Longworth: Annals of an American Family.

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