Tadmor, Ohio

Located at Taylorsville Metropark in Vandalia, the village of Tadmor was an important transportation hub during much of the 19th century. It was located at the center of the three major transportation methods of its time, on foot or by wagon on the National Road, by water on Miami-Erie Canal and by rail on the Dayton & Michigan line. The National Road in particular was important not just for Tadmor, but to the state of Ohio. It was a major route for settlers to get to Ohio from the east, as well as for the movement of trade goods and mail.

The National Road and the canal fell out of favor for the same reason; the rail could carry people and goods further, faster and more cheaply. However, it was the 1913 flood that inundated Dayton that ended the village of Tadmor. The flood destroyed most of the village as well as the canal. The National Road, which once cut across the Great Miami River on a covered bridge, was re-routed after the construction of the Taylorsville Dam. The rail line was also re-routed so that it would be further away from the river.

There is little interpretation at the site currently and is mainly used for outdoor recreation. Bicycling and hiking are common there today. There are a handful of interpretive signs though they offer little detail.

This one says "National Road"

There are other signs at the site that offer more detail than the one pictured but they are still very broad in scope. Much of the site is overgrown with existing foundations of structures such as the sluice gate for the canal crumbling. I am seeking, with my classmates, to turn things around at Tadmor by creating and presenting an interpretive plan that, if implemented, will re-vitalize the site and teach people about this little-known part of local history.

Source: Materials at Vandalia Historical Society

Christmas Gifts!

Gifts. Tons of gifts. Billions of gifts. Some may think that Christmas and its gift-centric celebration is a modern phenomenon. Yes, we do give very different gifts now in 2015 than were given in 1915, or even 1315, but gifts have always been given on Christmas. 

It all started with the Three Wise Men bringing gifts to baby Jesus. Remember them?  Then when Christianity became a religion and people celebrated the birth of Christ, they also gave gifts.  It started as a way to imitate the wise men and their celebration of Jesus’s birth.  Now obviously, with the advent of Santa Claus, things took a more dramatic turn.

Saint Nicholas was a saint who lived in the 4^th century in Myra in present-day Turkey.  He got his reputation as a gift-giver because of a story about three young women and their poor father who could not provide a dowry for them. Without said dowries, the girls would not be able to get married and they might have ended up as “ladies of the night” to make ends meet, if ya know what I mean. So Nicholas, under the cover of night so as not to embarrass the family by directly giving them charity and to be modest himself, threw pouches of gold coins through the home’s open window.  Saint Nicholas Night is the tradition that came from this story and is celebrated worldwide, but most popular in Europe. The English-speaking world gets the name Santa Claus from a mispronunciation of the Dutch “Sinterklass,” which also happens to be a mispronunciation of “Saint Nikolaos.”

So we all give gifts on Christmas because of a dude in Turkey who was super nice and threw money in people’s windows. #blessed #localhistory

So as you are getting ready to ship loads of gifts to friends and family across the globe, take a minute and check out the history of gift giving. Here is a picture of just a small amount of Christmas gifts and mail going through the mail in New York City to the American Expeditionary Forces in 1918:

So maybe send a little something to someone in the Armed Forces this Christmas season like these folks were doing in 1918.

Sources:
Records of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer Collection, National Archives.
http://www.stnicholascenter.org/pages/who-is-st-nicholas/

Hartzell Propellers and Orville Wright

A boy named John Hartzell began selling lightning rods from his wagon in 1860s Indiana. By 1875 he started his own company, Hartzell Farm Wagon Company.  His son George joined the family business by 1890 and they continued to mill lumber and make quality farm wagons.  George eventually took over the business from his father, John, and moved it from Greenville to Piqua, Ohio. 

Original Hartzell residence in Oakwood

In 1906, George Hartzell moved his family to a little village called Oakwood and used the property’s workshop to innovate his business.  About a decade later, Hartzell’s home burned down but he rebuilt a glorious new home and workshop for his family.  Orville Wright lived just a block away from the Hartzell family in his Hawthorn Hill estate. When World War I began there was a demand for manufacturing and Hartzell’s company machined and produced gun stocks for the war effort. 

George’s son Robert was interested in flight and was taking family business when his neighbor and friend, Orville, mentioned to him that he should make propellers out of walnut wood for planes.  This conversation happened in 1917, right when the United States entered the war.  Robert Hartzell jumped on this idea and began producing walnut propellers in at the family’s factory. 

Orville's home in red, Hartzell's in blue

Robert founded the Hartzell Walnut Propeller Company in Piqua, and even began making his own planes.  The planes he designed, built, and flew won many air races around the country in the 1920s, but decided to stop manufacturing aircraft as he didn’t want to compete with the companies he was making propellers for.  Hartzell continued on in the propeller business, switching to metal with the advent of new technology.  The company is still producing propellers today.  It is fun to think that from one suggestion of a neighbor, albeit a famous genius neighbor, a company changed paths and is still successful today.

Source:

http://hartzellprop.com/about/history/

Dayton Car Works and the rail-less railway cars

In 1849 Eliam Barney and Ebenezer Thresher formed the Dayton Car Works which built railcars for the burgeoning rail companies.  Barney and Thresher met each other through the Baptist church and became fast friends.  Barney was a teacher and Thresher was a Baptist minister, but they decided that they wanted to go into the railcar business.  They soon bought some land, hired an expert in car manufacturing, and started their business!

In 1849, railroads were just starting to take off and Dayton didn’t even have any rail or street lines, but that didn’t stop Barney and Thresher from making cars.  The only issue was how to get them out of Dayton and to places in the country that had rails.  So they shipped their cars by boat.

The expert that they hired to start their business died unexpectedly in 1850, but Barney and Thresher carried on.  They had hired a good team of employees and couldn’t be stopped. Their company had so many name changes it was ridiculous.  They were Dayton Car Works, then Thresher, Packard, and Company, then E. Thresher and Co. and became Barney, Parker, and Company when Thresher’s health began to fail and they brought in a new partner, Parker.  The company continued on and eventually started making top of the line sleeper cars for the major rail companies.

Although the Civil War hurt their business with southern companies, business eventually boomed again with the need for railcars for the Union Army. The company name was changed again when Parker retired and sold all his shares to Preserved Smith; it was then called Barney, Smith, and Company. And it changed again later to Barney and Smith Manufacturing Company. Although a flood of the Mad River in 1866 destroyed the factory and a lot of its merchandise, Barney and his company kept pressing on and was the biggest car manufacturer until Pullman opened a huge factory in Chicago.

Barney and Smith Co. had a very long history in Dayton and helped the Dayton economy to grow, and by 1890 they had more than 2,000 employees. They were known for their craftsmanship and luxury.  Unfortunately, damage after the 1913 flood, and government seizure of the rails post-WWI, combined with some slow business decisions took a toll on the company and it slowly fizzled out. 

Damage to Barney and Smith drawbridge after 1913 flood

Velocipede: It's not what it sounds like

Before there was the bicycle, there was the "Velocipede." It sounds like some kind of freakish hybrid cross between a velociraptor and a centipede, but it definitely isn’t. And I am glad because that kind of horrendous monster shouldn’t exist.

Styles of German velocipedes

The name was coined by the Frenchman Nicéphore Niépce, who also was one of the forefathers of photography.  The term velocipede is a general term used to describe any of the precursors to the bicycle bewtween 1817 and the 1880s.  Early velocipedes could have anywhere from one to five wheels and were generally made of wooden frames and metal wheels.  It must have hurt horribly to ride one down a cobblestone street…They even got the nickname “boneshaker” because of the horrible jostling that would take place when ridden. 

Patent for velocipede

Eventually, the two-wheeled design won out and we get the term “bicycle.”  “Ordinaries,” or the ones with the huge front wheel, were soon replaced by “safety bicycles” which are similar to the bikes we ride today.  Dayton was a bicyclist’s dream.  It had wide avenues and nicely constructed roads and paths, and it seemed like everyone had a bike.

 The Wright Brothers loved them some bikes too.  As we all, hopefully, know, the Wrights had a cycle shop in which they sold parts and accessories, repaired bikes, and built some of their own.  When Orville was younger he entered and won a lot of bicycle races around Dayton. Between his bike racing, airplane flying, and excessive automobile speeds in Oakwood, Orville was clearly quite the speed-demon.

Ed Sines and Orville workin' on some bikes 

Cycling is making quite the comeback in larger cities around the nation, including Dayton.  With the implementation of the Link bicycle system, you don’t even need your own bike to ride around Dayton in style. Make sure you pack your bowler hat and mustache for the ride!

Sources:

Records of the Patent and Trademark Office, National Archives.

A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...

"Ted, the only people in the universe who have never seen Star Wars are the characters in Star Wars and that's cause they lived them Ted, that's cause they lived the Star Wars." - Marshall, How I Met Your Mother

Though the above quote is probably not true, it certainly feels true. The original trilogy, composed of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, and Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, was created in the 1970s and 1980s. In these releases, George Lucas created a cinematic universe, one that has attracted die-hard fans for decades.

The films have become classics. Movies that everyone knows and loves, though some more reluctantly than others. But more importantly, they have become cinematic heirlooms for the next generation. No, not The Next Generation, with capital letters. That’s Star Trek.

A great example is my family. In 1977, on opening weekend, my father begged my grandfather to take him to the movie theater to see A New Hope. He had seen posters for it and had heard rumblings that it was going to be an amazing science fiction experience, which is exactly what his nerdy eight year old self wanted. It was a Webb male bonding experience. Though the reel snapped, my Dad and Grandpa had held on to their ticket stubs (the only ones in the audience to do so).  They later went back to the theater and received a complimentary movie experience.

Years later, 29 of them to be exact, my sister and I were sitting in my Aunt Lena’s Oklahoma living room, complaining that we were bored. It was a weekend, so my father was home from training. He told us that he had a “princess movie” to show us. What he put in to the DVD player was most definitely not a princess movie. There was a princess in the movie, but I think most people won’t argue the fact that Leia is not the primary character. It was my first experience to a movie that helped shape my father’s childhood.

One of the things that local historians study is local families. The people in an area that help shape that area, that create the history that will later be studied. One of the most important things that make a family what it is are the traditions that those family members uphold. Sometimes those traditions are immediately putting the Christmas Tree up the day after Thanksgiving. Sometimes it’s going out at 3 AM to go shopping on Black Friday. But sometimes traditions are quieter than that. Sometimes they are simply a shared cinematic experience.

Oakwood and the A-bomb

You may not have ever heard about it, but Dayton was instrumental in the creation of the atomic bombs that ended World War II.  The Manhattan Project was the research and creation of atomic weapons and under this nuclear umbrella was the Dayton Project. The Dayton Project was operated by Monsanto chemical company and had multiple project sites in the Dayton area.

One of these sites was in Oakwood, a suburb of Dayton.  The Runnymede Playhouse was a large community center that included an outdoor pool, tennis courts, a ballroom, and a stage and auditorium.  It was on the Talbott family’s property and was a popular hangout for Oakwood residents.  The Thomas and Hochwalt Laboratories conducted researched on the initiation process for the atomic bomb under the auspices of Monsanto after the large company purchased their lab.  Charles Thomas was married to Margaret Talbott and he worked to gain the permission of the Oakwood City Council and the Talbott family to use it for a government project.  But the US Government seized it anyway under the Emergency Powers Act and stated that it was going to be used as a film laboratory… Yeah, sure it was.

The Playhouse in its glory days:

Work began at the Runnymede Playhouse to find a stable initiation to detonate the atomic bomb that the rest of the Manhattan Project was creating.  Polonium was the key.  In 1944, the first shipment of the extracted Polonium left Runnymede in a lead-lined suitcase and made its way to Los Alamos, the testing site for the bombs. The bomb initiation worked and World War II came to an end with the help of uncredited scientists who transformed the playhouse into a high-security, secret government facility in the middle of residential estates.

An eyewitness report from someone who saw the bomb test at Los Alamos:

Initially, it was thought that Runnymede Playhouse would be able to be decontaminated and returned to its former glory.  However, the site was too irradiated and had to be torn down.  The torn-down building was buried underground at a site in New Mexico along with all of the cobblestones from the driveway and seven feet of soil from underneath the site.  There is a new house there now, but it has always been a difficult property to sell because of the fear of continued radioactive contamination. 

Sources:

Records of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, National Archives