Step close to this 200-year-old wooden house at 316 Pike Street, the oldest domestic structure in downtown Cincinnati. This is the oldest domestic wooden structure in downtown Cincinnati, built about 1820. Step close and imagine the succession of Cincinnatians who once lived here — Martin Baum, Nicholas Longworth, David Sinton, Anna Sinton Taft and Charles Phelps Taft — their lives layered into the rooms you face.
The Taft house was first built for Martin Baum in 1820 and later became the residence of Nicholas Longworth. Recognized on the National Register and as a contributing property to the Lytle Park Historic District, the building gained National Historic Landmark status in 1976 in honor of the murals that grace its walls. Between 1851 and 1852, Robert S. Duncanson painted a series of eight large-scale landscapes directly on the plaster walls at Longworth's commission.
Second only to the house itself, those murals are considered the most significant pre–Civil War domestic murals in the United States and remain one of the museum's largest works. Inside these walls, you can still see Duncanson's eight landscape murals painted directly onto the plaster for the Taft family.