Two Of Cincinnati’s Wealthiest Women Battled Over Who Would Honor A Very Dead Man

The pillars of Cincinnati society shook in 1910 as two very wealthy and very much respected women tussled over a man neither had ever met. The man in question was Abraham Lincoln, and he had been dead for 45 years.It was Eleanora Alms, or, as she was called in those days, Mrs. Frederick H. Alms, who first stirred the kerfuffle. Eleanora Cors Unzicker Alms was born in 1846 to Joseph and Margaret Unzicker. Her father was a very popular and successful doctor. Eleanora married Frederick Alms in 1870. Alms founded the very successful Alms & Doepke department in partnership with a brother and a cousin. When Frederick died in 1898, his entire estate, valued at $662,000, passed to Eleanora. In today’s dollars, that’s a bit more than $26 million. Eleanora moved into the Alms Hotel, another of her late husband’s successes, and lived there for the remaining 23 years of her widowhood.Cincinnati got a sense of Eleanora’s generosity when she offered to give the City of Cincinnati $100,000 to…