The Little Bank and the Big Basket of Newark, Ohio

Posted on March 28, 2023 by admin

If you happen to find yourself in Newark, Ohio, I recommend a look at the Licking County courthouse, a Second Empire structure from the grand age of U.S. courthouses, which was between the wars (that is, the Civil War and WWI).

Even though our visit coincided with exterior construction that mars its appearance temporarily, and a wicked cold wind, I knew I had to park the car and get out for a look.

Impressive. The visit to Newark was a digression. The most direct route from Columbus, Ohio to Uniontown, Pa. doesn’t pass through Newark, which is maybe 20 miles north of I-70 and U.S. 40 both. But we had a sight in mind there, so we made the detour, arriving in that large town (pop. 50,000) on the morning of March 19. As you’d think, the main road into town leads directly to the courthouse square.

Some county seats have intriguing buildings facing their courthouses, some don’t. Licking County, Ohio does.

A closer look at that last one.

Wow, an unexpected trove of details.

We’d stumbled upon the Home Building Association Co. bank building (with nickname The Old Home right above the door), a work by Chicago School patriarch Louis Sullivan, dating from 1914. The exterior has been nicely restored, but I could see peering through the windows that work is still underway inside. I understand that the building now belongs to the Licking County Foundation, and will eventually house the county’s convention and visitors bureau.

Notes Wiki: “The ornamentation included a winged lion quite similar to the ones to be found in Cedar Rapids, Grinnell and Sidney. Little mention is made in the literature about Sullivan as to why these creatures populate his banks. Also unique is the presence of Sullivan’s name in the tile mosaic over the front door.”

Yep, there it is. I didn’t notice when I was standing out in the cold.

Underfoot detail at the courthouse square speaks of a time of stronger faith in progress. Or at least when slogans had that faith.

Even so, Newark seems to abide, economically speaking. The U.S. industrial economy contracted, but it didn’t disappear. A sizably lighting products maker and a glass manufacturer run operations here, as do a welter of smaller factories across the county. Regional offices of larger banking and insurance companies are here, and OSU has a large regional campus in Newark as well.

About a block away from the square is the former sheriff’s residence and county jail, in a suitably sturdy Richardson Romanesque edifice. One Joseph W. Yost designed it.

A plaque outside the building told a story of mob violence – against an officer of the law, no less – from the early 20th century. The plaque’s a good deal newer than that, however. RIP, Deputy Marshal Etherington.

The backs of nearby buildings – mostly facing the square – feature history-themed murals in places that would otherwise be drab parking lots. Nice civic touch, Newark.

As interesting as downtown Newark turned out to be, that wasn’t actually the reason we came to town. This building was.

On the outskirts of Newark stands the seven-story former headquarters of the Longaberger Co., which used to make baskets whose look inspired the look of the building, and not in any abstract sense. They were sold via a multi-level marketing scheme.

The building opened in 1997 and is the sort of place that has articles written about it. For obvious reasons. In our time, the grounds and its large parking lot are freely open to passersby.

Company sales peaked at $1 billion in 2000, but it was downhill from there. Maybe its baskets, while handsome enough, were the kinds of possessions that eventually ended up in garages, and one was enough for most households.

The company folded in the late 2010s and the building emptied out, remaining vacant to this day. Another company owns the rights to the baskets and other products, but the operation isn’t here. For a time, redevelopment plans called for a boutique hotel, but that didn’t happen, and at last report the building was the subject of an ownership dispute.

Warren G. Harding, Favorite Son of Marion

Posted on March 27, 2023 by admin

Marion, Ohio, a burg about 36,000 residents 50 miles north of Columbus, happens to be along the route we took south from Michigan on the second day of our trip, March 18. It also happens to be the hometown of Warren G. Harding, which pretty much guaranteed a stop there by us.

After his sudden and unexpected death in office almost 100 years ago, the nation’s grief for its popular president allowed for the construction of an impressive memorial, finished in 1927 and, as Wiki points out correctly, the last of the big presidential memorials (at least so far). Donations paid for it, including pennies from schoolchildren, back when a penny could actually buy something small rather than nothing at all.

We arrived at the memorial in the afternoon. It was cold and very windy. The structure is whiter than I’d think it would be considering its 90-plus years in the elements, but I suppose the good people of Marion keep it maintained. Warren G.’s the only president they’re ever like to produce, after all.

Its marble Doric columns rise to support an entablature, but not a roof. Harding reportedly wanted to be buried under an open sky, and this was architect Henry Hornbostel and his partners’ way to honor that request.

Warren and Florence Harding are indeed buried within, and under the open sky.

A few miles away is the Harding house, built in the 1890s at the time of the Hardings’ marriage, when he was a newspaper editor and publisher and she a wealthy divorcee. The Marion Star, his paper, is still around, though it’s a Gannett asset these days.

We arrived too late to tour the house, but you can wander around the grounds. Yuriko and the dog had enough sense to stay in the car while I did this, in a wind that felt like it was going to freeze my face off.

Still, I got the satisfaction of standing on the very porch where Harding ran his front porch campaign for president beginning in the summer of 1920, briefly reviving the late 19th-century practice. He would be the last president to do so (as yet, unless you count the zoom campaigning of Joe Biden exactly a century later).

Marion will probably never have a summer, or any other season, like it again. The world came to Marion in 1920, including delegations from groups nationwide to offer their greetings to candidate Harding, and presumably many other people who showed up to hear the speeches he gave on the porch or otherwise join the festivities.

Speaking from the porch didn’t mean a lack of attention elsewhere in the country. The Harding campaign had a small house built on the grounds, which still stands, for the use of the press covering him.

Behind the main house is the Warren G. Harding Presidential Library & Museum which, as any presidential museum does, tries to put a good face on its president and administration. I will give the place credit for mentioning the various scandals the period is known for, such as Teapot Dome.

It’s also forward in acknowledging that his mistress Nan Britton had a daughter with Harding, Elizabeth Ann Blaesing, who died only in 2005. As well it should, since DNA evidence in the 21st century has fingered then-Sen. Harding as the baby daddy.

As for his other known mistress, the married Carrie Fulton Phillips, the museum notes, “when she appeared at Harding’s front porch campaign, Republican party members paid for the Phillipses to take a lengthy trip abroad.”

Still, a triumphant Harding is in evidence. At least while in campaign mode. Not bad for a compromise candidate picked by the 1920 Republican National Convention.

Events could have gone another way. Leonard Wood could have been the nominee in 1920 and gone on to the presidency. Or Frank Lowden might have been tapped. Or, had TR lived a little longer (d. 1919), he might have captured the prize and returned to office (at my age, TR had been dead more than a year).

Harding might merely be an obscure senator buried in a more modest plot in Marion, rather than an increasingly obscure president in a grand tomb the likes of which is completely out of style. But that isn’t how it happened.

Historians roundly deride Harding, and I believe there’s some basis for it, but my own estimation of the man himself inched up a notch or two when I read, per the museum, that Harding and his wife were avid travelers well before they occupied the White House. That was part of the impetus for the famed long trip that he took as president in 1923, and which was interrupted by his death.

I didn’t know that Harding called it “The Voyage of Understanding.” Quite a route.

Some of the museum’s artifacts are odder than others, including this one from the Voyage.

That’s a papier-mache potato, about a yard long, that the citizens of Idaho Falls, Idaho gave to President Harding when he passed through in 1923.

Hot Springs NP, 2007

Posted on March 12, 2023 by admin

Even though it was a digital camera, and a fairly good one when I acquired it ca. 2001, my Nikon Coolpix 4300 had its limits. Mainly, memory. At least compared to the vast memories of current devices.

So that might account for the fact that I only have one image at Hot Springs National Park in March 2007. Or maybe I wasn’t much in the mood for using a camera there. It’s good to put the camera down for a while sometimes, no matter how photogenic the place you find yourself.

This is it, the Hernando de Soto statue at Fordyce Bathhouse. The image itself is only passable.

The sculpture is in the former men’s bath hall and was a centerpiece of a fountain.

The Fordyce Bathhouse is a building of exceptional beauty in its public spaces and state-of-the-art health and fitness equipment of the roaring ’20s in its bath spaces.

“The Fordyce is now the park’s visitor center, and offers tours of its elaborate facilities – self-guided, but at a good price, free,” I wrote at the time. “The building style, Spanish Renaissance Revival, is supposed to pay tribute to Hernando de Soto, who supposedly came this way. No fancy bath houses were necessary for passing Spaniards, Indians or other early visitors, however, who apparently soaked in pools fed by the springs wherever they found them.”

That That Nation Myglue is All Together Sitting

Posted on March 9, 2023 by admin

Sometimes I use an automated transcription service. I feed it an audio recording – say, of an interview – and it spits out a transcript. The service touts the power of its AI. All the rage these days.

I found a reading of the Gettysburg Address by Orson Welles on YouTube. Obviously, it’s an analog recording with some imperfections. I recorded it as I would a phone conversation – producing a tape that isn’t high fidelity, but easily understandable for an English speaker. Then I let the transcription service have it.

Started out OK, then…

Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated.
We met on a great faculty have
come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who hear, feed their lives, that that nation myglue
is all together sitting, we should do this.
In a larger sense,
we cannot dedicate,
we cannot consecrate
we cannot tell
the brave men living and
consecrated far above our power to add or detract.
The world will little note nor long remember what we say here.
I can never forget
it is for us, the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which failed here.
far so nobly advanced.
It is shrouded for us to be here dedicated to the great past remaining before us.
Honored
to take increased devotion for that was
the last measure of devotion.
We hired to resolve
these debts from outside in
this nation
shall have a new freedom
government
by the people,
for the people

Still a few bugs in the system, looks like.

To be fair, when I did this test again, but with the service transcribing the speech as it “listened” to the video play, the results were much better. Not flawless, but not bad.

Windmills of Batavia

Posted on February 14, 2023 by admin

This is the Fabyan Windmill in Kane County, near the Fox River.

Nearly 15 years ago, we saw the Fabyan Windmill, which was brought to the site by the whim of a wealthy local resident years earlier. It’s still there. But we didn’t visit on Saturday, though it’s only a little north of where we went in Batavia.

We saw other windmills last weekend, all collected near the river in Batavia. None of them were Dutch-style. Instead, they were the kind you used to find, and still find, on North American farms and ranches.

Such as the Pearl Steel windmill, made ca. 1900 by the Batavia Wind Mill Co.

A plain sort of design. The people’s windmill, you might say.

In the late 19th- and early 20th centuries, Batavia was a hub of windmill manufacturing – a supplier of the technology to the nation. By mid-century, that was done, and Batavia moved past its windmill days until the 1990s. Then local citizens made an effort to find, acquire and erect Batavia-made windmills, mostly on the peninsula in the Fox River that we strolled around last weekend.

Another example: a Challenge Vaneless Model 1913 windmill. I like the floral aesthetics of this one.

A Goodhue Special, Appleton Manufacturing Co., early 20th century.

A Challenge 27 windmill, by the Challenge Wind Mill and Feed Mill Co., which is a later example (immediate pre-WWII years) and apparently a great success as a culmination of earlier cool Machine Age technology.

“As a self-oiling mill, the main casting served as its own oil reservoir,” the sign in front of the Challenge 27 mill explains. “Two large crank gears lifted the oil out of the reservoir and and carried it to both the pinion gears and an oil trough located at the base of the guide rods. From here the oil was lifted to lubricate the crosshead and then transmitted during every revolution of the wheel to the front main bearing under the wheel’s hub. From here, the oil flowed back to the reservoir through the force of gravity.”

Two more (among several others): Challenge OK Windmill, also by Challenge, but of less certain date, ca. 1900.

And a U.S. Model E.

Early 20th century again, made by the U.S. Wind Engine and Pump Co.

Excellent restorations, though they seem to be fixed in place, and so don’t turn with the wind anymore. Probably a preservation strategy. Still, windmill enthusiasts (there must be some) are advised to visit Batavia, and also to take a look at this handy guide to the machines rising over park land in that village.

Along the Fox River, Batavia

Posted on February 13, 2023 by admin

We’re having a few days of faux spring. I ate lunch on the deck today, and noticed that the croci in the back yard are just beginning to push upward. That’s in contrast to last year, when that happened well into March, and no there were blooms until early April.

Temps were in the upper 40s on Saturday, and there was no threat of rain, so we took a walk along the Fox River in Batavia, Illinois.

Not so warm that there still isn’t a film of ice. Faux spring, after all, is still winter.

We walked along a peninsula that juts into the river. It’s partly parkland, with an easy trail near the edge of the water all the way around.

At the northern tip of the peninsula is a gazebo. Called a “pavilion” on the signs, but I know a gazebo when I see one.

The Challenge Dam.

There’s been a dam of some kind on the site since the 1830s, originally providing water power for various small factories along the river (flour, ice, lumber, paper, stone), a function long relegated to the past. The current concrete dam is a bit more than 100 years old, taking its name from the Challenge Wind Mill and Feed Mill Co., whose building was next to the dam. More prosaically, it’s also called Batavia Dam, and there seem to be long-term plans in the works to remove it.

The former wind mill (and feed mill) building.

I didn’t take a closer look, but the Batavia Historical Society says the building is in use even now, “partially filled with various, small companies.”

The city of Batavia has a building on the peninsula.

And a bulldog statue.

The Bulldogs are the local high school mascot, and 15 painted bulldogs were to be found in Batavia in the warm months of 2018.

Face to Face With a Short Snorter for the First Time

Posted on February 7, 2023 by admin

After our walk in the forest on Sunday, we dropped by an antique mall that we visit occasionally, and I saw something I’d read about years earlier, but had never actually seen. And I mean many years ago – maybe as long ago as junior high in the mid-70s, when I was browsing through one of the dictionaries we had at home, as one did before the Internet. I did, anyway.

By chance one day, I happened across the term short snorter. Occasionally afterward I’d mention it to someone else, and no one had ever heard of it. But I didn’t forget. That’s the kind of obscurity worth treasuring. In more recent years, I found mention of them online.

There under glass on Sunday – which accounts for the glare – was a short snorter.

Evidently, this silver certificate began its career as a short snorter on July 11, 1944 at Crumlin, near Lough Neagh, in County Antrim, Northern Ireland.

In our time, naturally, there are web sites devoted to short snorters. Even so, I’m sure that most people still haven’t heard of them, since they seem to have faded after WWII, as lost to time time as A cards.

“A short snorter is a banknote which was signed by various persons traveling together or meeting up at different events and records who was met,” the Short Snorter Project says. “The tradition was started by bush pilots in Alaska in the 1920s and subsequently spread through the growth of military and commercial aviation. If you signed a short snorter and that person could not produce it upon request, they owed you a dollar or a drink.”

Not only was it a real thing, there are short snorters with names, as the page details, such as the General Hoyt Vandenberg Snorter, the Harry Hopkins Snorter and the Yalta Snorter, among others.

The page also claims that “short snorters come to light at coins shops and coin shows where most dealers pay very little for them as they are heavily worn and ‘not very collectible.’ ”

Tell that to the antique dealer offering the note I saw. The asking price: $95. Obscurity worth treasuring, maybe, but I wasn’t inclined to pay that much.

Groundhog Day Without Groundhogs

Posted on February 5, 2023 by admin

Last Thursday temps were around freezing during the day, which is pretty good in Illinois for that oddity of an occasion, Groundhog Day.

The day shares more than one might think with Christmas, though of course it isn’t an all-consuming religious and cultural event in much of the world, just a relatively minor one. Still, it has pagan taproots connected to astronomical lore in northern Europe, an association with a Christian holiday (Candlemass), folklore imported from German-speaking lands, Victorians putting it in its modern form, a universal appearance on North American calendars (Canadians take note of the day too), and famed representations in mass media in the 20th century (e.g., Groundhog Day).

The closest show-marmot event to where we live seems to be the one involving Woodstock Willie, whose effigy I saw in the warmer month of July. We weren’t inclined to trudge all the way to exurban Woodstock on Thursday for the event, however.

Rather, we loaded ourselves and the dog in the car for the less than 10-minute drive to Schaumburg Town Square for a walkabout, after certain other errands. We knew that Friday was to be bitterly cold, so wanted to get out in the tolerable temps (still around freezing) before that happened.

No festivities going on there. In fact, no one else was there at all. Still plenty of ice on the pond and snow on the ground.

A Polar Trac stands ready to deal with more snow.

No venturing out onto the ice. Of course. I didn’t need a red flag to tell me that.

Hard to believe, but this patch of ground, a garden —

— is going to have an entirely different character –

— in only about four months.

Two Bloomington Churches

Posted on February 2, 2023 by admin

Before leaving Bloomington on Sunday, I took a quick look at a couple of churches. Holy Trinity is an imposing brick edifice at Main and Chestnut not far from downtown. Walkable distance, in fact, except on a cold day, so I drove from near the former courthouse and parked across the street for my look.

Closed on Sunday afternoon, so I didn’t see the inside.

It’s a 1930s art deco replacement for a 19th-century structure that burned down early on the morning of March 8, 1932. I found a digitized book, History of Holy Trinity Parish by the Rt. Rev. Msgr. S.N. Moore (1952), that describes the event.

“It would be hard to say how the fire started, but there were suspicious circumstances,” he wrote, then mentioning other fires in town all within a few days of the burning of the church, including ones at a dance pavilion and another at a grade school.

“At this time, because of the depression, the Communists were very active in Bloomington. The fires in Bloomington did follow a certain pattern – the church, the school, both of which of necessity be soon replaced.”

Reds, huh? Well, maybe. Insurance paid for the current building, designed by A.F. Moratz, a busy local architect, according to the always informative Pantagraph.

Less than a mile to the west is Historic Saint Patrick’s, dating from the late 19th century and not the site of a fire that I know of, communist-set or otherwise. I assume the church was originally built for the area’s Irish population.

I went inside. A mass was in progress, so I didn’t take pictures. A fellow named Kevin did, and it’s a nice collection.

Not the First Street Paved With Bricks

Posted on February 1, 2023 by admin

One more thing caught my attention near the former McLean County Courthouse on Sunday: a plaque set in bricks.

Center Street

Site

First brick pavement in the United States

Innovation to modern highways

Installed 1877 by Napoleon B. Heafer

This plaque set in original paving brick and

presented to the city of Bloomington May 11, 1968

By Bloomington Junior High School students

Their participation in Illinois

sesquicentennial observance.

A small thing of note, if true. A small amount of investigation reveals, however, that it isn’t true, at least according to Bill Kemp of the McLean County Museum of History, and I’m inclined to believe him rather than a class of junior high kids from 50+ years ago (and I’ve cited Kemp before).

“This stubborn, well-worn myth has been around for nearly a century, if not longer, though as often is the case with local legends and lore, there is some truth to the story,” the Pentagraph reported in 2012 in an article by Kemp. “The plaque correctly states that Napoleon B. Heafer ‘installed’ a stretch of brick pavement in 1877, and it’s mostly correct in that this represented an ‘innovation to modern highways’ (though ‘streets’ would be a more appropriate word choice than ‘highways’).

“The first U.S. patent for brick paving dates to 1868, and some claim Charleston, W. Va., laid the nation’s first brick street in 1873.”

Just another example of origination folklore, looks like. In the same category as the first hamburger or the invention of baseball. I’d say the story of Napoleon B. Heafer himself is much more interesting than the assertion that he did the first brick paving of a street (he’s pictured to the right, image borrowed from the museum).

A failed prospector out west, Heafer’s one of those 19th-century businessmen that came out of nowhere and by dint of imagination and his own hard work – or luck and the toil of his employees, take your pick – made a fortune supplying something urgently needed right then by the growing nation.

“In 1861, Heafer and James McGregor established a brick yard at the corner of Hannah Street and Croxton Avenue [in Bloomington],” the museum explains. “Over the next 23 years, N.B. Heafer and Co. expanded to include seven acres of ground and multiple brick yards as well as a large pond that was often used for swimming parties. By 1883 Heafer claimed that it was the largest clay tile factory in the United States.

“In the late 1880s, the brick and tile industry peaked due to an incredibly high demand from farmers needing a way to drain their swampy fields… after much experimentation, Heafer made his first brick tile pipe in 1879. It was a round tile with a diameter of about 3 inches. Later he made them as large as 24-30 inches in diameter, which was more effective. Eventually nearly every farm in the county was drained to some extent, employing clay tiles.”

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: US History