There was industry in Akron before rubber. There was a thriving clay manufacturing trade but other towns were churning out pottery and more of it. There was a bustling mill community, especially under Ferdinand Schumacher, the Oatmeal King, but other emerging grain processors were closer to the vast wheat fields being settled on the Great Plains. Few towns are as closely associated with a single product as Akron is to rubber but there was plenty of serendipity on the path to Akron becoming the Rubber Capital of the World.
The first bit of providence occurred with the discovery of vulcanized rubber itself back in 1839 when Charles Goodyear accidentally dropped rubber and sulphur onto his kitchen stove. In 1870 Dr. Benjamin Goodrich was operating a small rubber plant in Melrose, New York when he decided to break clean with New York and establish the first rubber plant west of the Alleghenies, out where there was power, transportation, fresh labor and a fast developing country. He did not have an idea where to build such a plant, however, and on the train west for his scouting mission Goodrich met a stranger who spoke so glowingly of a town in Ohio called Akron that he decided to pay a visit. The new rubber plant caused scarcely a ripple on the economic waters of Akron. The enterprise attracted a small band of investors to get going with $13,600 but there were few commercial uses for rubber. Dr. Goodrich contented himself with manufacturing cotton-covered rubber fire hoses and the like. Goodrich died prematurely in 1888 at the age of 47 four years before the racing trotter Nancy Hanks lowered the world speed record by four seconds. The six-year old mare had been fast before 1892 but that year she was hitched to a new bike sulky - one with pneumatic tires. Suddenly the demand for rubber tires for carriages and the new-fangled bicycle on America’s streets exploded. And in 1896 the Goodrich Company made the first rubber tire for an even more revolutionary contraption - the automobile.
The founding of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Akron in 1898 was every bit as whimsical. That year Frank A. Seibering was nearly insolvent and was in Chicago to liquidate his failed business holdings when he happened upon an Ohio business acquaintance looking to dispose of a seven-acre strawboard plant whose main assets were a small power plant and two dilapidated buildings facing each other on opposite banks of Akron’s Little Cuyahoga River. He had invested $140,000 in the property, he said, but was seeking only $50,000. The desperate buyer accepted Seibering’s offer of $13,500. Seibering returned to Akron wondering what he was going to do with the old plant and how he was going to pay for it. He borrowed the down payment from his brother-in-law and other relatives loaned him money to start a rubber company like his father had once operated. Within 18 years Goodyear was the largest tire company in the world and every dollar invested in Goodyear in the beginning was then worth $100.
Harvey Firestone left his Ohio family farm in 1890 when he was 22 to work in an uncle’s buggy company as a salesman and shortly was put in charge of the Michigan district. One day in 1895 he sold a set of rubber carriage tires to a machinist fiddling with gasoline engines named Henry Ford. Five years later Firestone, armed with a patent for attaching rubber tires to rims, came to the new rubber mecca in Akron to start the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company. By that time his old customer had started an automobile company of his own and Henry Ford placed an order for 2,000 sets of tires to carry his new runabouts. It was the largest single order for tires ever placed by an auto manufacturer and as the Ford Motor Company became the biggest car maker in the world most of those Fords came equipped with Firestone tires.
With the three tire companies in place, no town in America grew like Akron. The population of 70,000 in 1910 tripled to 210,000 in 1920. To keep up Akron swallowed rival communities and buildings were seemingly erected overnight. Most of the significant buildings seen today were constructed during that boom time until 1931, recasting the Akron streetscape from its origins as a canal town founded in 1825. Our walking tour will start hard by the vestiges of that Erie & Ohio Canal, at the high point on the historic waterway that gave birth to a town named for the Greek word akros, meaning “high place”...
Today Canton is best known to the outside world as the home of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. But contemporary histories of Canton in the mid-1900s made no mention of Jim Thorpe and the Canton Bulldogs and an organizational meeting in the downtown Hupmobile dealership in 1920 that spawned what was to become the National Football League. Before there was an NFL, Canton was known for harvesting tools and ball bearings and bricks and William McKinley, 25th President of the United States.
Bezaleel wells laid out the town in 1805 in the flood plain where three branches of the Nimshillen Creek come together. Wells did future typesetters a favor and passed on calling the new settlement “Bezaleelville” and instead named the village after the town in China as a memorial to a trader named John O’Donnell, whom Wells admired. The nascent town was dealt an early blow when the great Ohio and Erie Canal was routed eight miles to the west through Massillon in the 1820s. But the canal age was destined to be short-lived and Canton’s lack of water access to the Great Lakes and the Ohio River was rendered meaningless by the coming of the railroad.
Canton began making things in the early going - in the days before the Civil War as many as six kinds of reapers were manufactured in Stark County. Its industrial heritage placed the town in good stead when northeastern Ohio became a bustling center of the Steel Age. Town workers became skilled shapers of steel products, a reputation that convinced Henry H. Timken, a carriage manufacturer from St. Louis to build a factory in Canton to produce his new tapered roller bearings in 1898. Canton had its largest employer and became the world’s biggest manufacturer of roller bearings.
As its manufacturing economy eroded Canton became an enthusiastic player in urban renewal. Our walking tour of the downtown core will pass many blocks that have been cleared on our quest for landmarks but we will start in a space that was always planned to be open...
Cincinnati was the first town in the American heartland with aspirations to equal the great cities of the East Coast. By the 1830 census Cincinnati, which had been settled in 1788, had already cracked the Top Ten of most populous United States cities and would remain there for the remainder of the century.
Along the way Cincinnati picked up a host of nicknames. There was the “City of Seven Hills” for the progression of protrusions between the Miami River and the Little Miami River in which the early settlers nestled. There was “Porkopolis” which the town earned in the 1830s when pigs roamed the streets and Cincinnati was packing more hogs than anywhere on earth. Most of the pork was shipped south to New Orleans and, in the days before railroads, sold in markets back up North.
The most enduring nickname was “Queen City” which arose in the mid-19th century as outsiders began to sing the praises of the Ohio River town. Even English author Charles Dickens who was miserly with his commendation of American cities on an 1840s tour wrote favorably of Cincinnati as “a place that commends itself...favorably and pleasantly to a stranger.”
Nothing remains 170 years later in downtown Cincinnati that Dickens would recognize but our walking tour will investigate if the spirt of his words lives on and we will begin at the city’s spiritual heart...
The Ohio River was the original gateway into the state of Ohio. Those who found their way to the mouth of the Cuyahoga River at Lake Erie made their way upstream to high ground and left the swampy lowlands to small bands of settlers led by Lorenzo Carter. By the 1820s there were still less than a 1,000 people in Cleaveland, which had been incorporated in 1814 and still had its first “A.” Legend has it that the pesky vowel was dropped in the 1830s so fit the town name into a newspaper masthead.
Then New York state finished its Erie Canal that provided a water course from the Atlantic Ocean to the western banks of Lake Erie. Work began to connect the Ohio River to Lake Erie as well and competition to become the Great Lakes terminus for the Ohio & Erie Canal was furious. Alfred Kelley, Cleveland’s first practicing attorney, landed the plum assignment for the town and its future was assured. The population went from 1,000 to 6,000 in the 1830s and by the time the canal era ended in the 1850s Kelley had made sure the town was amply connected to the nation’s burgeoning railroad system.
The second half of the 20th century saw Cleveland explode with the shipping of iron ore, the fabrication of metal and the building of ships. John Rockefeller and his lieutenant Henry Flagler not only made Cleveland the center of America’s new oil business but a financial and corporate center to rival the established Eastern cities. The town’s industrial area known as The Flats spawned mills, factories and endless rows of immense warehouses. As Cleveland fanned out along the Lake Erie shore it brushed aside Cincinnati as Ohio’s largest city by the end of the 19th century.
Most of the buildings from that era are gone. The Cleveland streetscape seen today is partly the result of the Cleveland Group Plan in the early 1900s that was the town’s stab at the City Beautiful movement that swept America at the time. Most such plans never materialized but Cleveland’s was more successful than most. Thousands and thousands of buildings were razed in Cleveland in its drive for “beauty for beauty’s sake.” Its centerpiece was the Cleveland Mall that extended from the main business area to the lake. Combined with the nearby Public Square that Moses Cleaveland had plotted as a ten-acre central park, downtown Cleveland has an abundance of open air.
It is not only the proletarian buildings that met the wrecking ball. Euclid Avenue that runs east out of town from Public Square was known nationwide as “millionaire’s Row” where Cleveland’s titans of industry built elegant homes. Out-of-town writers would come to Cleveland and gush over “the most beautiful street in the world.” Today Euclid Avenue has been shorn of most of its landmark residences. Our walking tour of Cleveland, where heritage structures stand cheek-to-jowl with modern skyscrapers, will check in on Euclid Avenue but first we will begin where Moses Cleaveland rowed his boat to shore and stepped out into the swampy morass while swatting away flying insects...
After a decade of bickering among Ohio legislators following its elevation to statehood in 1803 a search party went out looking for a spot to build a new capital city. They settled on a dense forestland on the east bank of the Scioto River that had been used only as a hunting ground. The site had the advantage of being centrally located with access to river transportation but carried the wilderness burdens of swamp-borne disease and conflicts over land ownership. Founded on February 14, 1812 and named for Christopher Columbus, the town stumbled along until the swamps were drained and a feeder canal tapped into the Ohio and Erie Canal in 1831.
Ever since, the population of Columbus has grown every decade. Unlike other American cities that were founded specifically to be state capitals Columbus was never satisfied with being just a government town. By 1875 five railroads were servicing the town as Columbus became the leading industrial and commercial town in central Ohio.
Of the many manufacturing concerns that sprung up in Columbus none was more important than making buggies. There were more than twenty buggyworks in town, earning Columbus the sobriquet of “Buggy Capital of the World.” By the 20th century the buggies had been forgotten and the diversified economic base laid the foundation for growth that made Columbus America’s 15th largest city and fourth biggest state capital.
Just as you don’t see any buggies on Columbus streets you won’t see many buildings the horse-drawn transports rode past either. Landmarks as old as a hundred years are few and far between on the Columbus streetscape but we will start our walking tour at one that has seen just about all of them come and go...
A settling party from Cincinnati came here in 1796, seven years before Ohio achieved statehood. The names of the original owners of the land resonate on the town’s streets today: Arthur St. Clair, James Wilkinson, Israel Ludlow and the name-giver, Johnathan Dayton. Dayton, a New Jersey politician and major land speculator in Ohio, never set foot in the area but Ludlow laid out the new town. He is credited with surveying more land in Ohio than any early settler and Ludlow got his share of towns and streams named for him as well.
Dayton’s location at the forks of the Great Miami River where the Mad River joined and streams drained from the surrounding hills foretold a future as a shipping center for the rich surrounding farmland. Town pioneers pursued that course early on with the construction of the Dayton-Cincinnati Canal in 1827. The complexion of the community began to change with John Patterson, who once collected tolls on the Miami and Erie Canal. In 1884 Patterson and his brother bought James Riddy’s small business where he manufactured “incorruptible” cash registers. To mass produce the machines for his newly named National Cash Register (NCR) company Patterson needed to recruit highly skilled workers capable of precision workmanship. The term wasn’t in use 125 years ago but Dayton became one of the first high-tech centers in the United States.
There was no higher technology in the waning days of the 19th century than man’s quest for flight and it took two Dayton bicycle machinists, whose only training in aerodynamics came from reading everything they could find on the subject in the Dayton public library, to conquer the skies. Orville and Wilbur Wright established an experimental airplane factory in town, joining a handful of automobile pioneers already operating in Dayton. One mechanic, Charles F. Kettering came to link Dayton’s high-tech industries when he built a quick-starting electric motor for the cash register and then quit his job at NCR to adapt the invention as an automobile self-starter. Kettering went on to found the influential Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company known world-wide as Delco.
While Dayton engineers were busy toppling the barriers of physics they received a reminder of the power of the natural world in 1913 when a four-day downpour sent the muddy waters of the Great Miami roiling over protective levees with the most disastrous flooding in the town’s history. The levees were raised and the Miami subdued but the impact on Dayton remains nearly a century later. Many buildings were lost forever, some companies remained and rebuilt in the downtown core and others abandoned the floodplain for other areas, stimulating growth in suburban communities. Our walking tour of “Gem City” will start by the banks of the Great Miami where the river today looks tame and docile...
Toledo coagulated in the 1830s from a smattering of communities along the Maumee River. In those early days settlers had to contend with cholera epidemics intensified by the swampy environs, a drought so bad it killed trees and a financial panic sweeping the country. If that wasn’t enough to overcome there was the state of Michigan calling out the militia to seize the town in a border dispute. Before actual fighting could heat up in the “Toledo War,” however, President Andrew Jackson convinced Michigan to give up Toledo and, with a lot of grumbling and long faces from the Michigan side, take the Upper Peninsula instead. The harbor at the west end of Lake Erie looked like a better bargain then; the vast iron deposits and recreational opportunities of the Upper Peninsula probably look more appealing today.
With a militaristic Michigan out of their hair Toledo incorporated as a city in 1837 and set about developing itself as a trading center at Lake Erie for the canals that were being dug into the resource-rich regions of western Ohio and eastern Indiana. Toledo spread out along the Maumee River as the population blew up from 4,000 to 50,000 in just 25 years between 1850 and 1875. Toledo developed into the third largest port on the Great Lakes and the world’s greatest shipper of bituminous coal. The business district was pushed eight miles south of Maumee Bay.
In 1888 Toledo got its first great industry when Edward Drummond Libbey closed his glass factory in Cambridge, Massachusetts and brought his 100 craftsmen to Toledo. At first Libbey specialized in high-grade crystal and lamp globes but when he hired master glass-blower Michael Owens from West Virginia to oversee the plant Libbey Glass was soon the leading supplier of glass bottles in the country. In 1896 Edward Ford, son of America’s pioneer plate-glass manufacturer came to Toledo and built one of the largest plate-glass factories in the world on the east bank of the Maumee River.
As “Glass City,” Toledo evolved into a cultural center as well as a manufacturing and trade hub. In 1899 the Toledo Zoo started with a woodchuck, which was thought to be a bear, two badgers and a golden eagle. In 1901 Edward Libbey founded the Toledo Museum of Art and funded it with a large chunk of his fortune. Both institutions would evolve into one of America’s best of their kind.
Toledo’s economy in the 20th century was driven by the automobile. It began with auto parts and quickly blossomed into car manufacturing. Willys-Overland Motors, best known for its design and production of military Jeeps, began in Toledo in 1908 and from 1912 to 1918, Willys was the second largest producer of automobiles in the United States after Ford Motor Company. By 1970 and the beginning of the decline of the American auto industry Toledo had grown into the 34th largest city in the United States.
Today most of the people in Toledo work in the healthcare field or education and government, not in the automobile assembly plants and glass factories. Downtown, many buildings have been taken down as a result, leaving gaping holes in once solid urban canyons. Our walking tour will begin down by the Maumee River where the docks have been replaced by walking trails and benches...
John Young was a native New Yorker who purchased 15,560 acres of land from the Western Reserve Land Company for a little more than a dollar an acre in 1797. He surveyed the area and laid out a village and was gone by 1803. Young got immortalized by the town name but James and Daniel Heaton set the course for Youngstown’s future in 1802 when they set up a crude smelter on Yellow Creek, reducing the native bog ores with furnaces stoked by the endless hardwoods in the virgin forests.
By the mid-19th century the Mahoning Valley was speckled with several iron foundries and Youngstown was its metropolis. With the coming of the 1900s steel was king and the Mahoning River was lined with Bessemer converters, open-hearth furnaces, strip and rolling mills, pipe plants and manufactories of steel accessories. If you weren’t making steel in Youngstown your business was not far removed from the industry in Steel Valley.
The result was there was not the diversification in the local economy that was found in larger industrial cities such as Pittsburgh or Cleveland. And when the steel industry declined the “rust belt” tightened more securely on Youngstown than elsewhere. From a population peak of 170,000 in 1930 the town has lost more than 100,000 citizens and is learning to adjust to life as a small city where the major employer is a university.
The impact on the Youngstown streetscape is a time warp of sorts where the skyline is unaffected by modernization. Some blocks have been cleared and some buildings have been re-adapted but there is much a time-traveler from 75 years ago would recognize today, especially where we will start our walking tour in the heart of downtown...