Cincinnati Tennis Club

The Cincinnati Tennis Club was founded in 1880 just five years after tennis was introduced in America, and is today one of the oldest active tennis clubs in the United States. Stewart Shillito, the son of John Shillito, the founder of the Cincinnati department store, Shillito's, had seen tennis played while on vacation at the fashionable seaside resort of Narragansett Pier, Rhode Island, and in 1878 he decided to build a court at his father's home on Highland Avenue and Oak Street in the Cincinnati neighborhood of Mt. Auburn. After the first court was built, interest spread rapidly among enthusiastic friends of Shillito, and by 1880, Cincinnati was ready for a tennis club. On December 3, 1880, Edmund H. Pendleton presided over a meeting...