“You Know Not How Much I Think Of You”

Detail of a letter written by Betsey Webster Manley DeWolf (1798-1879) in July, 1822. Author’s collection.

Two hundred years ago, probably no more than a mile from where I now sit, a young woman living in a log cabin penned a letter to family and friends in Massachusetts, to reassure them she was alive and well. In a strange way, this post serves a similar function. I have somehow managed to produce only one addition to this blog since the pandemic began nearly two years ago. But I recently acquired the extraordinary, double-sided note Betsey Manley wrote that day in July, 1822 and it was too wonderful not to share.

It has been so long since I wrote something like this that I had to go back and remind myself of all the things I knew and forgot about Betsey Manley. She was born in Otis, Massachusetts in the early summer of 1798, a deacon’s daughter. Regular readers of the blog may remember that most of the earliest settlers of Wellington came from the Berkshire region of Massachusetts. In 1816, Betsey married Josiah Manley, who went by his middle name, Butler. After five years of marriage and with three small boys in tow, they set out by oxen-team to settle in what is now northeast Ohio. They spent three years doing the back-breaking labor of clearing a “heavy timbered farm,” until disaster struck.

According to Betsey’s lengthy obituary in the Wellington Enterprise, “Sickness with its blighting hand, spread a veil of sadness over this once happy household. Mr. and Mrs. Manley were both stricken down. Dr. Johns was their attending physician. Mr. Manley died August 21st, 1823, at the early age of 32 years, his being the first death that occurred among the settlers in Wellington. At the time of his death, Mrs. Manley was so ill the fact of her husbands [sic] death was kept from her for a week” (5-15-1879, pg. 3). Josiah Manley’s headstone, and a biographical sketch later published about their son, Frederick, both indicate this first death took place in 1824.

Josiah Butler Manley’s 1824 headstone in the Pioneer Cemetery, supposedly Wellington’s first death. Manley is also listed on his wife’s later headstone in Greenwood Cemetery. Photo by author.

But all of that was yet to come when Betsey took up her pen on a July day in 1822. I have transcribed both densely-written pages, including notes in the margins, adding a few bracketed punctuation marks where I felt the text was otherwise confusing. It reads as follows:

                                                                        Wellington July ^th 22 1822

Dear Friends Although separated from you the distance of several hundred miles my mind often takes wing and in imagination I view you enjoying all the necessary blessings of this life at your pleasant dwellings but cannot realize that I am never more to enjoy your agreeable company[.] I think much more about going dear friends since I have lived here in the wilderness than ever before in my life. I will proceed to give you a short account of our circumstances here in the woods[.] We have a good log house much more comfortable than I expected a house of the kind could be made[.] had one hundred weight of shugar [sic] and two pails full of Molasses the first of April[.] Milked a cow through the winter have three cows this summer[.] have wheat flour in our Chamber to supply our family till late in the fall as good as I ever saw[.] have had seven hundred [pounds?] of good Pork & a plenty of Lard. A plenty of wild fruit Abounds in the woods[.] in short we have lived far more comfortable than I expected when I left Otis. I was pleased with the Idea of moving here & do not lament the pains we have taken to get here[.] We have a very good society Meetings regularly Attended every Sabbath[,] every other week within a quarter of a mile of us. We seldom have preaching but are hoping for better days have as flattering prospects as could be expected in [scratch out] so new a settlement[.] there has never been but a little sickness in the town before the present year some instances have occurred by reason of wounds[.] Capt Joseph [illeg] has had a leg taken off was brought very low [illeg] hours to human appearance beyond all hopes of recovery[.] he is now so far recovered as to begin to walk with Crutches. I take much satisfaction visiting with our Otis Neighbors do not feel myself among strangers but living with those with whom I have ever been intimately acquainted. Our Nearest Neighbor was formerly from Lee Mass. they are people of considerable property live in good style & as good kind obliging neighbors as I ever saw without exception a great blessing indeed[.]

[Upside down on upper right header margin] Please to send this letter to Bolton when an opportunity presents.

[Along left margin] Excuse my writing Oliver assists by holding my pen

Butler is making calculation for rolling up a Log barn this week his wheat is harvested & stands in stacks in the field[.] he has corn much taller now than any I ever saw in Mass. have had a good supply of green sauce since the fourth July have a very good Garden[.] have had twelve pounds flax this spring to make into Cloth A Crop of flax in the field but some injured by the worms and drouth [sic][.] Wool will be an article which we shall much need before we shall be able to keep sheep on account of the wolves which are very plenty[.] Butler has much the same health that he has enjoyed for some years past[,] not as good as I could wish to begin a new heavy timbered farm with but should his limbs or health be taken as in the Case of Capt. R. our flattering prospects would cease to shine our little property would not defray the expenses of such an instance but a few weeks [scratch out/blot] 150 dollars in one week to his physicians. Russel [Webster, Betsey’s brother] has not as good health as he had last summer but keeps to work calculates to go to making potash this fall his respects to you all & calculates to visit you a year from this time[.] I have enjoyed remarkable good health the most of the time since I have been in this wilderness[.] have staid [sic] a good many nights with my little Children (Butler & R[ussel] gone from home) not alarmed by being awoke with the howling wolves[.] My work is much harder than ever before have Considerable company & a large family[.] We board a little Girl to go to school with Frederick & Henry one mile & a quarter through the woods[.] they are as healthy as I ever saw Children little Oliver has lately had a very severe sore mouth the worst that I ever saw he is getting well fast. Uncle Jeremiah I should be very much pleased to see you with your family here should you think of moving into the woods[.] the Land which Uncle Elder & Cousin William own is good & very profitable you could [illeg] with them if you should think it best[.] I think of a great many things that I should be glad to write but have not time[.] I write to you all as one accept my best wishes for your prosperity [illeg] my sincerest thanks for numberless favors do not fail of writing to me you know not how much I think of you & My Dear Parents Brothers Sisters &c. When at Cazenovia [New York] last fall Uncle made me a present of one dollar[,] Aunt a flannel sheet[.] O that I could be sent thankful to my Earthly friends for blessings & to my God who grants them he moves hearts

Betsey Manley

[Along left margin] Butlers best Love to you all[.] I enjoy myself as well as ever I did in my life but no substantial happiness

A fabric sample identified as “spun and woven by Betsey Manly in 1822. Flax grown by her husband, Butler Manly, one of the first settlers of Wellington.” Read more about this object. Author’s collection.

There is so much to unpick in this fantastically evocative and maddeningly contradictory letter. Betsey feels nothing by half-measures. Her neighbors are as “obliging…as I ever saw”; her children “as healthy as I ever saw,” but also one is suffering from “a very severe sore mouth the worst that I ever saw.” Perhaps most intriguingly, she feels strongly enough to end the letter with a note in the margin that claims she is both enjoying herself “as well as ever I did in my life” but then adds the disclaimer “but no substantial happiness.” She takes great care to reassure her loved ones that her family is comfortably settled and well provided for, but doesn’t shy away from mentioning–more than once–the wolves that sometimes wake her in the night with their howling.

There are few mentions of other people in the settlement, all frustratingly vague. Betsey tells her readers she is boarding a girl who attends the nearby school with her oldest boys, Frederick and Henry, but we learn neither the girl’s given name nor with which family she emigrated. We hear that a Captain Joseph has had a leg amputated due to unspecified injury. That name does not appear in either the 1820 or 1830 census records for Wellington.

Perhaps most intriguingly, Betsey describes her nearest neighbors as people “of considerable property” from Lee, Massachusetts. She spends three lines praising them without once noting their family name. Her 1879 obituary indicates that when the Manleys first arrived in the settlement, they “shared the hospitalities of Mr. and Mrs. Bradley, whilest their new cabin was being finished.” I have written at some length about the Howk family of Lee–of which Fiche Howk Bradley was a daughter–and the possible financial decline that led to their emigration west. If they were the near neighbors Betsey so admired, that likely puts the Manley homestead somewhere in the northwestern quadrant of the town. Fiche and Josiah Bradley most likely lived along what is today Route 18W, on a bluff near the modern intersection with Pitts Road.

As I sit here this cold January day, typing on a laptop while exchanging texts via smartphone with my own sister back home in Massachusetts, Betsey’s 1822 wilderness existence seems very far away. Then again, my son is underfoot, home from school due to the severe cold and I find my eyes returning again and again to my favorite line of the letter, a small addendum in the margin that references Betsey’s infant son. “Excuse my writing Oliver assists by holding my pen.” Perhaps some human experiences–love, loneliness, the joys and frustrations of parenthood–transcend the centuries.

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Sacred Cow

“HOLSTEIN HEIFER, 2 years old.” Hand-colored engraving printed ca. 1880.

I recently received an inquiry from a longtime reader of the blog. What did I know about Wellington’s most famous bovine citizen, the nineteenth-century Holstein cow called Molly Bawn? I had to confess that I did not know much. A quick Google search uncovered a parcel of self-described “legends” about the animal. Local cheese dealer Charles Horr went on a trip to Europe, where he discovered that Holstein cows produce much higher volumes of milk than their American counterparts. Impressed, he bought a two-year-old specimen called Molly Bawn (or Mollie Baun, or any combination of variant spellings) and brought her back across the ocean. Horr thereby introduced Holstein cows to America/Ohio/Lorain County…you get the idea. Molly went on to produce record-breaking amounts of milk, perhaps the most milk ever produced by a cow, and that is why Wellington became famous for cheese production–and why we still remember Molly to this day. The trouble is, existing historical documentation does not support any of those assertions.

Holstein Friesian cows (rather confusingly known as Holsteins in America, but Friesians in Europe) are the highest-production dairy animals in the world. The breed originated in the northern provinces of what we today call the Netherlands, namely North Holland and Friesland. The enormous black-and-white or red-and-white animals were being shipped to America as early as the 1600s, when Dutch settlers in New York brought or sent for “Dutch cows” to fill their pastures. The Holstein Herd Book, first published in 1872, noted that the initial import of “pureblood” breeding stock occurred with the shipment of a single cow to Massachusetts in 1852 (pg. 19).

Map of the northern provinces of the Netherlands, showing Holland and Friesland. Holstein Friesian cows originated as a breed in this region, and Molly Bawn was born here.

The first eight volumes of the Holstein Herd Book are available digitally, spanning the years from 1872 until 1885. Every breeding-stock Holstein cow or bull that was registered by its owner is found in the Herd Book, described in great detail and assigned a unique and sequential identifying number. Examining the first two volumes, I was able to determine that by 1875, there were nationally-registered Holstein cows in fourteen of the thirty-seven states then in existence. They grazed from Maine to California, though admittedly were predominantly concentrated in the northeastern quadrant of the nation. So Molly Bawn was certainly not America’s first Holstein, by two centuries or more. What about Ohio, then? I’m afraid not. The same series of volumes shows that by 1880, these overachieving milch cows could be found in at least fifteen different communities across the state, including Wooster, Franklin, Xenia, Toledo, Canton, Painesville and Hudson.

Charles Horr was a very successful businessman who made his fortune selling other people’s cheese and butter after the Civil War. His company, which had multiple names over the years but is most often referred to as Horr-Warner, at its high-water mark managed thirty cheese and butter factories in the region. The most visible signs of Horr’s status were luxurious offices in the busy commercial district of the village and an enormous estate on its still-rural outskirts. Horr visited Europe in 1877 and “made permanent arrangements for an export trade” of Ohio cheeses to foreign shores (Wellington Enterprise, 10/10/1894, pg. 1). While he certainly already knew about Holstein cows and their reputation for stupendous and reliable milk production, it is possible that Horr took a side-trip to Holland to see a few in person. As we have already established, though, there were multiple specimens a great deal closer to home.

One thing is certain: Charles Horr did not see Molly Bawn on this 1877 European trip, nor did he purchase her there or bring her back to Ohio. Molly was not “calved,” or born, until February 24, 1880. This is reflected in both her official Herd Book entry, and in another volume called the Holstein-Friesian Advanced Registry.

Though Molly did enter the world in North Holland, six months later she was on her way across the ocean, courtesy of a breeding operation called Smiths & Powell, based in Syracuse, New York. It was from Smiths & Powell that Charles Horr purchased Molly, along with two of the three other animals that made up his initial Holstein herd. The fourth cow, graced with the lyrical name Lady Ethelind, was purchased in Painesville, Ohio.

The name “Molly Bawn,” incidentally, probably originated from an Irish folk song–alternatively sung “Polly Vaughn”–commonly known since the late eighteenth century. A popular novel had also been published under that title in 1878, by Irish writer Margaret Wolfe Hungerford. (The novel was later made into a silent film in 1916.) Charles Horr christened his opulent home Bawndale–or Baundale–and while we know that construction on the house was completed in late 1872, we do not know if Horr named the house after the cow, or vice versa.

This magnificent wood-frame barn, possibly once home to Molly Bawn, stood behind the Horr residence at 563 South Main Street. It was dismantled in the mid-twentieth century and relocated to the Hayden family farm, 1.5 miles north of the village. Photo courtesy of the Southern Lorain County Historical Society, “The Spirit of ’76” Museum.

In 1883, the Wellington Enterprise published an editorial about getting the maximum return on investment possible from cattle purchases. Choose the breed best suited to the task at hand, the paper advised. Holsteins were well understood to be superior milch cows. The Enterprise offered as an example C. W. Horr’s three-year-old “Mollie Bawn” who had birthed a calf of her own that winter and was reliably yielding more than sixty pounds of milk per day. In the following week’s edition, “to answer the many questions” that resulted from the previous report, a table was printed showing Molly’s production tallies for the first ten days of May. It was nearly seven hundred pounds of milk.

I believe this editorial and follow-up piece may be where Molly’s fame was born, not necessarily in the nineteenth century but perhaps in the twentieth. Ernst Henes, the editor of the Enterprise in the mid-1900s, liked to scan old issues of the newspaper and write about what he found, both in special commemorative issues and in print publications. I would hazard a guess that it was Henes’ work that ensured Molly Bawn a place in the current memory of the town. (She also served as de facto mascot of the now-defunct Wellington Cheese Festival for nearly two decades.) Charles Horr gave a lengthy speech to the Ohio State Board of Agriculture in 1891, describing how he had built a herd of 130 exceptional Holsteins over a decade. He mentioned several animals by name, but Molly was not one of them. When he wished to advertise the sale of cattle from his “Bawndale Herd,” it was not Molly’s image Horr published in the paper, but instead a cow called Nundine. In another advertisement, Molly’s name was one among many “celebrated” breeders including Aaggie, Lady Netherland, Sadie Vale and Saapke.

So Molly was not America’s first Holstein. Nor Ohio’s. Nor even Lorain County’s. Oberlin’s Ohio Weekly News is filled with early 1880s notices and advertisements referencing Holsteins with thoroughbred status and the Herd Book numbers to prove it. But surely Molly must have been Wellington’s first Holstein? Charles Horr must have been the first person from Wellington to import the breed? In fact, he was not. According to the 1881 Herd Book, O. P. Chapman, a breeders association member, was the first Wellington resident to register a Holstein. His bull, Captain John, was purchased in Painesville, Ohio sometime after its birth in 1880 and was the 619th registered in the country. (Horr’s first Holstein bull, Syracuse, was 822nd on the list.) Chapman’s cow, Queen Anne, was born in North Holland in 1880 but bought from the same operation in New York patronized by Horr. Queen Anne was the 1,256th female Holstein registered in America. The 1,292nd spot belonged to Chapman’s cow Mildred. Horr’s Molly Bawn occupied slot 1,298.

The most wonderful thing about this, at least from my perspective, is that O. P. Chapman spent a quarter-century living in the house next door to my current home. He built the carriage house that is now part of my property. When it was completed in the spring of 1883, the Enterprise noted, “O. P. Chapman has the best arranged and finest finished horse and stock barn on his place on South Main St. we ever saw. It will pay any admirer of good things to call and see it. He has also some very fine blooded stock, and is giving special attention to their growth and improvement” (5-9-1883, pg. 3). I never realized that our cattle stalls once housed Wellington’s first Holsteins. Queen Anne, Mildred and Captain John may well have lived out their lives in my backyard.

O. P. Chapman’s carriage house. Originally built as part of the property for 318 South Main Street, it is now included in the parcel for 326 South Main Street. Photo by author.

Charles Horr spent nearly fifteen years building up a renowned collection of what he termed “deep milkers.” Initially he imported animals from locations in North Holland and Friesland with names like Purmer, Hoorn, Bovencarspel, Westwoud, Beemster, Wieringerwaard, Schermerhorn and Harwerd. But soon he felt that the quality of his stock was advanced enough that he no longer required outside blood. While in volume one of the Holstein Advanced Register, for the year 1886, he imported eleven of the fourteen cows listed, by volume two (1887 to 1889) he “owned and bred” twelve of the nineteen submissions.

He entered members of his herds (Horr also raised Ayrshires, Durhams, Herefords and Aberdeens) in cattle shows and agricultural fairs; served as president of the Holstein-Friesian Association of America; and was an organizer of the National Dairy Union. After Horr’s untimely death in 1894, the Enterprise commented on the speed with which his Holsteins were being purchased and shipped around the country. But the Bawndale Stock Farm endured under the leadership of his son, also called Charles, who continued to breed, sell, and host annual visits of faculty and students from the agricultural department at Purdue University in Indiana.

I suspect Charles Horr would be amused by the mythology that has grown up around the humble animal known as Molly Bawn. It was Horr’s considered opinion, after all, that “a dairy cow should be regarded as a machine designed for the conversion of food, air and water into milk” (Enterprise, 1/21/1891, pg. 4).  Whatever else may be said about Molly, the milk-producing machine discharged her duties exceptionally well.

UPDATE: I just finished rereading Frank Chapman Van Cleef’s excellent article, “The Rise and Decline of the Cheese Industry in Lorain County,” published in 1960. Van Cleef’s father was a longtime employee of Charles Horr, and the author himself also worked in the local cheese industry. In his twenty-five page examination of what made Wellington a national hub of cheese production, Van Cleef never mentions Holstein cows. In fact, he argues persuasively that the industry peaked in the late 1870s, and was already in decline by the time Molly Bawn and her herdmates came to town. Van Cleef also mentions Charles Horr’s 1877 trip to Europe. As the result of a visit to Wellington by a provisions dealer from Glasgow, Scotland, Horr-Warner agreed to produce five to eight hundred boxes of cheese for weekly or semi-weekly shipment overseas. Later that year, Horr made a reciprocal visit, to Glasgow and Liverpool. No day trips to the Netherlands to shop for cattle are mentioned.

Big Cheese

Receipt for cheese purchased from Horr, Warner & Co., dated September 7, 1886. Author’s collection.

I recently came into possession of a few pieces of Wellington-related ephemera that I wanted to share with you. “Ephemera” in archival terms refers to those pieces of printed material that were never intended to be saved, disposable items such as play bills, ticket stubs, and receipts. Such items can be highly collectible due to their rarity, and more importantly, can be wonderful research tools. I mentioned in an earlier post that a collection of ephemera related to John Watson Wilbur’s hardware store–including invoices, checks, business correspondence, and railroad shipping receipts–is now held by Winterthur, one of the preeminent decorative arts museums and archives in the country.

I have two very similar receipts for cheese purchases, both made by the same wholesale grocery business in Circleville, Ohio. In 1886, Weaver & Shulze purchased ten boxes of cheese from Horr, Warner & Co. for a price of $30.42. A handwritten note on the receipt informs that “Eastern buyers are making free inquiries for cheese and are bidding up to get them,” which was apparently inflating the local price. If Weaver & Shulze were hoping to get a better deal elsewhere in Wellington, they did not find it when they purchased ten boxes of “Nickel Plate F” cheese from J. P. Eidt seven months later. He charged them $36.24 and noted unapologetically, “These are old Cheese. New ones not In yet.”

Receipt for cheese purchased from J. P. Eidt, dated April 16, 1887. Author’s collection.

Prior to his days as a manufacturer and wholesale dealer in cheese, John Peter Eidt had run a business on the east side of North Main Street. It was located in the same building (no longer standing) where Wah Sing would later move his laundry operation after the American House was torn down at the turn of the twentieth century. I have found two lengthy descriptions of Eidt’s shop in The Wellington Enterprise, and I want to include one in full because I think it gives a wonderful sense of the availability of goods and services in the village. This was written in 1879, but you may be surprised by how very modern it sounds. “J. P. Eidt. Bakery and Lunch Room, North Main St., is one of the necessary institutions of Wellington business life. Mr. Eidt succeeded L. G. Black in this establishment, two years ago, since which time he has succeeded admirably. He is a practical baker and a thoroughly competent business man. The sales-room in front is filled with a choice stock of Fancy Groceries such as Spices, Flavoring Extracts, Canned Goods, Teas, Coffees, etc., while in the line of Confectionery, a complete assortment is kept, from the fine French Candies to the Taffy, Stick, and Pan Candies. Mr. Eidt manufactures these goods himself. A full line of Cigars and Tobacco is also kept. The show-cases are filled with all kinds of Pastry, Bread, Cakes, Rods, Lunns, Pies, Crackers, etc. Back of the sales-room is a lunch-room neatly fitted up, where a Hot Meal, Oyster-Stew, or Cold Lunch can be had at any hour and the satisfaction that it has given has gained for the proprietor a lucrative custom. Back of this room is the Bake-Shop, which is supplied with all the necessary fixtures for doing baking and is always neat and tidy. Since Mr. Eidt took possession of the establishment he has made some decided improvements in its arrangements and it is now one of the best places in town to drop into and get a good cup of tea or coffee or a lunch. All kinds of Fruits are dealt in and Ice-Cream in its season. We wish the proprietor success for he deserves it” (2-6-1879, pg. 3).

John P. Eidt. From “Atlas and Directory of Lorain County, Ohio. Illustrated. 1896.” Pg. 136. Photo by author.

A notice-cum-advertisement published in October of the same year informed the public that Eidt was receiving oysters directly from Baltimore, Maryland two times per week. “Persons who wish to get them in large quantities for parties and social gatherings of any kind, will find it to their interest to get them of him. Give him two days notice (the time it takes to get them) and he will get them for you in good order” (10-30-1879, pg. 3). The businessman also used clever and novel advertising techniques, such as publishing a correspondence purportedly between himself and one “Mr. Santa Claus” to announce that Eidt would once again be Santa’s “headquarters” for the Wellington Christmas trade (12-11-1879, pg. 3).

In April 1879, Eidt married Ermina (Minnie) Roser, the daughter of local cheese dealer John Roser. Two years later, the baker sold his stock, rented out his facility, and entered the cheese business with his father-in-law. The industry must have seemed lucrative and secure to Eidt, still in his twenties; nearly eight million pounds of cheese and more than one million pounds of butter were shipped through Wellington in 1879, the high-water mark of production. But even as Eidt and others ventured into the trade, they could not know that within thirty years, Wellington would no longer have a single cheese factory, nor would the region produce a single pound of cheese.

Headstone shared by J. P. and Ermina Eidt, and her parents, John and Caroline Roser. Greenwood Cemetery, Wellington, Ohio. Eidt seems to have gone by the name Peter, as it is inscribed on both this stone and also his individual marker. Photo by author.

Sereno and Mary Bacon

“Residence of S. D. Bacon, Wellington, Ohio.” From “History of Lorain County, Ohio” (1879), opposite pg. 349. A caption notes that the engraved images are taken from photographs by William F. Sawtell.

On April 8, 1889–almost exactly 125 years ago–Noah and Ermina Huckins sold their house, barn and two adjoining lots fronting Lincoln Street to local farmer S. D. Bacon for $2,750. Regular readers of the blog will recall that one of my unanswered questions about Huckins is why he chose to sell all his properties and businesses in Wellington to become junior partner in an Oberlin hardware store.

I had always assumed that when Huckins sold the Italianate house he built on family land in 1876, he immediately departed with his wife and children. But I recently discovered notices in The Wellington Enterprise that suggest only Huckins left the village right away. “Mr. N. Huckins who is now engaged in business in Oberlin returns occasionally to visit his family and friends,” the paper reported on April 17, 1889. I took that to mean he was visiting extended family; his wife’s siblings still lived in Wellington.

But nearly three months after the sale of the house, this notice appeared in the Oberlin notes section of the Wellington paper: “N. Huckins, of the firm of Carter & Huckins, has rented the residence of Mrs. Mary Jewett, No. 18 East Lorain street, and will remove his family from Wellington to this place about August 1st” (6-26-1889, pg.5). From what I can determine, the Jewett home stood on the present day site of a park across from the Allen Memorial Art Museum and is no longer standing.

Undated image of East Lorain Street, Oberlin, Ohio. The house at the left of the frame is likely the Jewett home rented by Noah Huckins in 1889. Image courtesy of “Oberlin in the Past” Facebook page.

Where was Huckins’ family living while he started over in Oberlin? I do not know, but the most likely scenario is that they temporarily moved back into the Adams family homestead, then occupied by Ermina Huckins’ twin brother Erwin and his wife, Mary Emma Mallory Adams. The Adams homestead was just north of the Huckins’ house on Main Street. Why Noah Huckins would sell everything and move less than ten miles away without already having another home in which to settle his family is a mystery. His son Howard was then fifteen; daughter Ibla was eleven. Perhaps Huckins wanted to allow them to complete the school year. I know only that the family did not purchase a home in Oberlin until 1890, when they bought a modest dwelling at 151 Forest Street from Mary Humphrey.

Meanwhile, my Italianate had its second owners. Sereno Dwight Bacon had been born in Vermont in 1825 but emigrated with his family to Lorain County in 1842. He married Mary Ann Bailey in 1846; she was born in New York but was adopted after her mother’s early death and moved to Medina as a child. The Bacons bought a two hundred acre farm in Wellington Township in 1851 and raised three children there.

The 1860 federal agricultural census recorded that Bacon owned eighty-two milch cows and thirty-four sheep, as well as swine and horses. (An 1879 newspaper notice indicates that his sheep flock had grown to more than 260 animals just two decades later.) That year, his farming operation had produced 1,300 pounds of butter and 10,800 pounds of cheese. This is six years before the first cheese factory opened in Huntington, Ohio; the Bacon farm produced five-and-a-half tons of cheese onsite, in addition to all its other crop and livestock management.

(L) Detail of the Bacon farm, from “History of Lorain County, Ohio” (1879), opposite pg. 349. (R) Photo by author of private residence on Pitts Road, 2013.

By the time the Bacons purchased my house, it was clearly their retirement home. Sereno Bacon was sixty-four years old and had done very well financially; tax records indicate that he ranked among the wealthiest individuals in Wellington throughout his years of residence in town. One of the things I find most interesting about the Italianate’s first two owners is that both made their fortunes from the so-called Cheese Boom, but in very different ways. Bacon was a dairy farmer, producing the milk that (after the mid-1860s) middlemen made into cheese in a nearby factory. Huckins felled trees and built thousands of wooden boxes to ship that cheese to far-away markets.

The Bacons’ living children were grown and married by the time Sereno and Mary left their farm on Pitts Road and moved three miles to the “Cheese City.” The 1890 census records do not survive, so I do not know the composition of the household when they first moved into town. I do know that their grandson, Aaron Lynn Bacon, born in 1881, moved in with them after his mother’s death. Aaron Lynn was therefore the third child to live in the Italianate, after Howard and Ibla.

The Bacons rarely appeared in the newspaper, in stark contrast to Noah Huckins’ hundreds of mentions. My walk-through of the Italianate with architectural historian Shawn Godwin suggested that the Bacons probably wired the house for electricity soon after moving in, but otherwise changed it very little. (I subsequently learned that electricity was first available in the village in August, 1896.) I am tempted to characterize this as “a quiet life.”

Sereno Bacon died in 1901, shortly after the couple’s fifty-fifth wedding anniversary. Mary Ann Bacon survived until 1909, though tax records continued to record the house as belonging to her deceased husband for those eight remaining years of her life. The Bacons are buried in Greenwood Cemetery with a daughter and infant grandchild who predeceased them. The two surviving Bacon children sold the Italianate shortly after their mother’s death.

Headstone of Sereno and Mary Bacon, Greenwood Cemetery, Wellington, Ohio. Photo by author.

Aaron Lynn Bacon inherited the family farm on Pitts Road and had just finished renovating his grandparents’ 1861 brick homestead (pictured above) when he was tragically killed. The accident occurred only a few years after his grandmother passed away. “KILLED BY INFURIATED BULL,” screamed the Enterprise headline. The young farmer was feeding the animal early on a Sunday morning when it charged him, breaking his legs and ribs. He “suffered much from his injuries” and died the next night, September 3, 1912. He was not yet thirty-one years old. Aaron Lynn Bacon is also interred in Greenwood Cemetery.

Aaron Lynn Bacon. From “Standard History of Lorain County, Ohio, Volume 1” (1916) by G. Frederick Wright, opposite pg. 899.

Headstone of Aaron Lynn Bacon at Greenwood Cemetery, Wellington, Ohio. Bacon is buried with his aunt and uncle, Ada Bacon Harris and Hugh Harris. Hugh owned a shoe store in Wellington but later moved to Elyria and became Lorain County Treasurer. Photo by author.

While conducting this research into the history of our house and its owners, we made a discovery. The story of Aaron Lynn being trampled by the bull sparked memories of a similar incident in my husband’s family history. It turns out that my husband is related to the Bacons. Since he grew up in the area, it is not terribly surprising to learn that we are connected to a previous occupant of the house. But imagining that other, ill-fated little boy bounding down our floating staircase makes it all the more poignant to watch my own son, his great-great-great nephew, growing up.

Serendipity and Ice Harvesting, Revisited

Men cutting ice at West Lake Park, date unknown. Photo 970553 of “Wellington Family Album” Collection, Herrick Memorial Library. Permission to display generously granted by the library.

“Huckins and Horr having taken a contract to furnish the W. and L. E. railroad with water at this station for five years, are making a pond just across the street from J. S. Case’s residence, west of town. The excavation and dam are nearly completed. The upper end of the pond extends quite or nearly to the railroad. They will cut the ice from it in the winter to supply their warehouse” (The Wellington Enterprise, 10-26-1881, pg. 2).

Readers of this blog will recall how excited I was several months ago to locate evidence of a large ice harvesting pond north of the Wellington Fairgrounds. I wrote about piecing the evidence together here, and then documented the location as it exists today here. So you can imagine how delighted I was to find the above notice in the newspaper recently, which confirmed something I had long suspected, namely that Noah Huckins, builder of my house, also built the pond.

To be certain, I looked up John Seward Case’s tax records for 1881. They confirm the transfer that year of a parcel of land on the western side of town to N. Huckins & Co.

Detail of 1881 Wellington Corporation tax record for John S. Case. Note the recorded transfer of land to N. Huckins & Co.

I also checked an 1874 map of Wellington. It clearly shows the location of Case’s residence and tannery as being directly across Liberty Street, now West Herrick Avenue, from the future site of the pond.

Detail of Wellington Village map showing residence of J. S. Case just north of Liberty Street, now West Herrick Avenue. The empty acreage between his house and the fairgrounds (shown in green) would be the future site of N. Huckins & Co.’s ice harvesting pond. From “Atlas of Lorain County, Ohio. 1874.” Pg. 61. Photo by author.

The pond made its way into the newspaper again in the summer of 1882. Young Levi Pitts, grandson of one of Noah Huckins’ neighbors and living in her house on North Main Street, drowned in a pond northwest of town that belonged to dry-goods store Baldwin, Laundon & Co. A vivid account of Pitts’ tragic death was published on June 28th and the same edition carried an editorial on the dangers of venturing into water, particularly if one does not know how to swim. It concluded, “We are informed that C. W. Horr’s pond south of town and N. Huckins & Co’s west of town are each 10 or 12 feet in depth in places and are equally unsafe as the one where the accident occurred, and we have been requested to warn parents against allowing their children to bathe in them” (pg. 2).

Noah Huckins transferred all of his real estate holdings in the village to Charles Horr–except the house on North Main Street, which he sold to farmer Sereno D. Bacon–when he moved his family to Oberlin in 1889. Horr died just five years later. This is why the 1896 map details I included in my previous post label the pond as belonging to E. A. Horr, i.e. Charles Horr’s widow Esther.

The deeper I dig into the nineteenth-century history of Wellington, the more connections I find to Noah Huckins. It seems incredible to me that he has been so utterly forgotten by this town.

UPDATE: When it rains, it pours. Since publishing this post, I have found yet another notice about the pond. “The water has been pumped out of N. Huckins & Co’s new pond and the work of excavation is being pushed as rapidly as possible. It will be when finished quite a respectable little lake lying along side the Fair ground and we hear is to have small row boats on it the coming season for the accomodation [sic] of visitors” (The Wellington Enterprise, 10-24-1883, pg. 3). Row boats on the lake! I love this! It reminds me of the paddle boats available to the public today on the lake at Wellington Reservation Metro Park. What a genteel little village this was in the late nineteenth century.

Cheese Workers of Wellington, Unite!

Undated image of workers at a local cheese house. Photo 970539 of “Wellington Family Album” Collection, Herrick Memorial Library. Permission to display generously granted by the library.

“Wellington did not dominate the production of cheese during the years in question. Wellington’s claim to fame rested more with its position as the center of trade and market activity” (King of Cheese, pg. 20).

I haven’t posted in a few days because I have been working my way through a dense but very interesting paper about nineteenth-century Wellington. It is an Oberlin student thesis written by Jon Clark in 1992 entitled, King of Cheese: Growth and Modernization in Wellington, Ohio, 1850-1880. I would like to thank the Southern Lorain County Historical Society for allowing me access to their copy of the paper. It is also available through the Oberlin College Archives, if others would like the opportunity to read it.

Clark undertook the monumental task of quantifying four decades of federal census records in a database, capturing personal information for thousands of Wellington residents of the mid-1800s. He then performed various statistical analyses to better understand the demographic trends affecting the village in the period. His goal was to “discover the impact which economic growth and modernization had on the nature and structure of Wellington society between 1850 and 1880” (pg. 9).

Though Clark believed at the beginning of his project that he would be observing a town transformed by agricultural manufacturing, what he found was somewhat different, and surprising to him. “It was not the cheese industry which thrived in Wellington in the nineteenth century (although it certainly had its share of factories) but rather the cheese trade. It was not factories that so much dominated the local landscape as it was warehouses and stores. Consequently, the story that is told in the following pages is not so much a story of the transition from farm to factory as it is of commercial growth in the countryside” (pg. 10).

The federal census data clearly indicates that Wellington was a boom town in this era. A few statistics illustrate the point. From 1850 to 1870, the value of the town’s real estate grew from $460,625 to $1,327,630–almost two hundred percent higher in just twenty years (pg. 25). Residents of the town nearly doubled in the decades from 1860 to 1880; the male labor force alone increased 69% in the same period. Employment seems to have kept pace with population expansion; according to the 1880 census, only seven men out of 533 experienced unemployment for more than five months in the year (pg. 37).

Image taken October 21, 1871 at the Horr, Warner & Co. barn on South Main Street. Photo 970096 of “Wellington Family Album” Collection, Herrick Memorial Library. Permission to display generously granted by the library.

While I cannot speak to the accuracy of the mathematical models employed, I can say that Clark’s results seem, in the main, to match the evidence I have uncovered through written records of the time. He found that a steady rate of approximately 15% of the population was foreign-born from 1850 to 1880, but could find no evidence of segregation or systemic discrimination. “Those who were native born do not appear to have formed a community apart from those who were foreign born” (pg. 54). There was a relatively high turnover rate for residents from decade to decade; Clark breaks the populace into “persisters” and “non-persisters,” in other words, those who appeared in more than one census and those who disappeared from the records in a single ten-year period. The only significant differences he could find between any groups in the village–in categories such as elected offices held, likelihood of voting, likelihood of being a boarder vs. owning one’s own home–were between these two groups.

Clark notes that both the percentage of the overall population living as boarders, as well as the average number of boarders kept by individual property owners, fell significantly in the years from 1860 to 1880. This makes sense considering the surge in new real estate construction, expressly intended to create inexpensive housing and rental units across the village, which I have mentioned previously.

Those most likely to be “non-persisters” were workers who arrived each time a railroad construction project was underway. Clark writes, “The railroad changed the face of the town…Its very construction made residents aware of the existence and lifestyles of Americans very different from themselves. As 213 railroad workers, most of them Irish immigrants, set to work laying tracks through the town, Wellingtonians were introduced for the first time to an immigrant laboring population. These workers, who lived in shanties on the town’s outskirts and who attended their own Catholic Church, were a different sort than most Wellington residents were used to associating with” (pg. 15). While I understand the point Clark is trying to make, I think his conclusions are somewhat overstated. I don’t believe he is taking into account the fact that in 1850, nearly everyone in the town was an immigrant, either from another region of the United States or another country. Virtually every resident was what might today be termed “working class,” i.e. one dependent on physical labor to produce economic value. As a group, the population was not as homogeneous nor as provincial as Clark seems to suggest. And I have never seen any written references to “shanties” anywhere in the town.

Undated image of workers at the W. R. Santley sawmill on Magyar Street. Photo 970799 of “Wellington Family Album” Collection, Herrick Memorial Library. Permission to display generously granted by the library.

One interesting idea raised by the paper is the suggestion that temperance organizations such as the Murphy Movement–of which Noah Huckins was at one time the local chapter president–were often driven by employers who wanted to create a more reliable (i.e. teetotaling) workforce. The Murphy Movement caught on in Wellington during the Depression of the 1870s. It was promoted in The Wellington Enterprise because the newspaper’s editors, the Houghtons, were committed supporters of temperance. One of the goals of the group was to obtain participants’ signatures on pledges that they would abstain from all drinking. Clark suggests that employers “may have used the Murphy Movement pledge cards to identify non-drinkers” who would then be given preferred status for future employment (pg. 87). Since Huckins was running a large-scale manufacturing operation on behalf of C. W. Horr, it’s an intriguing notion.

While I disagree with some of Clark’s conclusions, I applaud his efforts to get a clearer sense of what life was like for those whose stories are not recorded in Wellington’s written records. He himself concedes that whatever “economic inequality” there was in the village over the three decades of his study, it was “a very narrow gap when compared to the polarization…in contemporary American cities” (pg. 91). He also allows that there was “a growing sense of community” based, at least in part, on a shared pride in the town’s new national reputation as “The Cheese City.” In the end, I don’t believe the overarching story of nineteenth-century Wellington is one of oppression, exclusion, or exploitation. It is a story of diverse groups of people who chose to come together to form a new community, to their mutual benefit and yes, profit.

Prospecting for Ice (Ponds)

Wellington Ice Storage Barn, dated 1906. Photo 970011 of “Wellington Family Album” Collection, Herrick Memorial Library. Permission to display generously granted by the library.

I spent today engaged in one of my favorite pastimes: historical sleuthing. I was hunting for evidence of long-forgotten ice harvesting ponds. This abbreviated post is really an addendum to yesterday’s installment.

First, I headed to Wellington’s Greenwood Cemetery to seek evidence of the Horr farm ice pond. What I found was a long ditch running between the neighborhood on Monstrose Way and the modern northern boundary of the cemetery.

Ditch running parallel to northern boundary of Greenwood Cemetery. Photo by author.

The ditch terminates in a large depression at the north-east corner of the cemetery. I don’t know if this is a naturally occurring geological feature, or the remains of the 1 1/2 acre ice pond that Charles Horr constructed on his farm in 1880. The pond was five feet deep, and this change in elevation does not appear to be much deeper than that.

Depression at the north-east corner of Greenwood Cemetery. Photo by author.

Next, I headed down West Herrick Avenue, to the section of town that the 1896 map shows with an ice house and large pond. I have been working under the assumption that the northernmost pond on the map was the one referred to as Westlake Pond or Park. Author Robert Walden noted, “It was named and the grounds about it developed largely through the vision and untiring efforts of Mayor Charles Gott while he was chairman of the Board of Public Affairs” (Robert Walden Notebook, #A63). That piece of land is now occupied by the Village of Wellington Department of Public Works. What appears from the street to be a small grassy hill is, in fact, a circular berm that runs around the perimeter of the DPW buildings and vehicle parking lot. This was the edge of the nineteenth-century pond. It was difficult to photograph the berm clearly since it is so large, but here is one side view.

Side view of grassy berm encircling the Village of Wellington Department of Public Works. Photo by author.

Readers of yesterday’s post will recall that an ice house stood north of the pond, fronting what is now West Herrick Avenue; Walden claimed that the storage facility served Horr, Warner & Co., then later was run by a man named Lewis Dibble. The photograph below shows that same plot of land today, a plain strip of mowed grass with a flagpole and welcome sign for the village.

West Herrick Avenue, southern side. Photo by author.

I searched to see if I could locate any additional images pertaining to ice harvesting, and found the historic photograph at the top of this post. It was named, “Wellington Ice Storage Barn around 1906,” but had no location recorded, so I was not certain it had any connection to the places I have been writing about. However, a note was attached identifying the people in the image: Mr. Burlingame, Mr. Doan, Lewis Dibble and young Gertrude Dibble. Since Lewis Dibble ran the ice house just north of Westlake, it seems likely that this image depicts the very building that once stood on now-empty land in front of the DPW.

I don’t mind telling you, dear reader, that I was pretty pleased with myself by the end of my adventures. Then later today I spoke with my father-in-law, who grew up not far from here and is very interested in local history himself. Oh yes, he knew about Westlake and the ice ponds; and yes, those were the correct locations. Thus was I reminded of an important fact that any historical sleuth needs to keep always in mind: just because I don’t know something, that doesn’t mean it isn’t known.

Serendipity and Ice Harvesting

Men cutting ice at West Lake Park, date unknown. Photo 970553 of “Wellington Family Album” Collection, Herrick Memorial Library. Permission to display generously granted by the library.

I was not planning to post today, but I found something that tickled me so much I felt compelled to share it. I was browsing through some photocopied articles from the so-called “Robert Walden Notebook” held in the Herrick Memorial Library’s local history collection. Walden (1868-1964) was a highly respected lawyer, author, and for two years editor of The Wellington Enterprise. In the 1950s, Walden began writing a regular column for the newspaper that was titled, “Wellington Vignettes,” “That and This,” and finally “Once Upon a Time.” In the column, he offered detailed descriptions of the places and people he had known growing up in the town. The dates are not always totally accurate, but they are amazingly close given that they were recalled by an 80-year-old man reflecting back on the century past.

While paging through articles looking for something else, I came across one I had not read closely called, “Cheese, Ice Ponds and Tragedy in Two Parts.” Since the individual columns are not dated in the notebook, it is difficult to determine when this was published, but it is number A63 in the series. From it, I learned that the pond Charles W. Horr added to his property, which I mentioned in passing in the post on his life, was not ornamental nor even for fire suppression, as I had theorized. Its purpose was to provide ice for his cold storage facilities. I’ll quote Walden at length:

“Development of the cheese industry here necessitated storage and ice refrigeration, since electric power was not to be made available for about a quarter of a century. Some large buildings were erected for storing ice. One of the largest of these was a frame building located in the hollow between Herrick Ave., west and Westlake pond. It was known then as Ice House Pond and by others as the Horr, Warner Pond. After ice was no longer required for the refrigeration of cheese by its owners, because cheese was no longer manufactured in the Wellington district, ice still was harvested from the pond and stored in the ice house by Charles West and Lewis Dibble then by Dibble after West had retired from the business.”

Detail of Wellington Village map from “Atlas and Directory of Lorain County, Ohio. Illustrated. 1896.” Pgs. 100-101. Photo by author.

The above detail of an 1896 Wellington map shows the ice house that Walden mentions, south of West Herrick Avenue–then called West Main or Liberty Street–and north of two large ice-harvesting ponds, both labelled “E. A. Horr” because Charles W. Horr died two years prior to the publication of this atlas. (Esther A. Horr was his widow.) The undated photograph I featured at the top of the post shows men cutting blocks of ice with handsaws at “West Lake Park.” I believe this is the northernmost of the two ponds shown on the map.

A few paragraphs later, Walden writes, “The largest ice refrigeration and storage building for cheese is the square brick building between Depot st. and the Big Four depot, built by Horr, Warner & Co.” I included a photograph of this building in the Horr biographical post; it still stood at the time of Walden’s publication but burned to the ground in 2007. He concludes, “Ice was harvested from a number of large ponds in or near the village. It furnished seasonal employment each ice-producing year for many horses, sleds and men. Three large ponds were constructed by Horr, Warner & Co. for the ice they would produce. One of them was on the farm of Charles W. Horr, father of the present Charles W. Horr, Sr.” (Charles W. Horr, son of the cheese entrepreneur, died in 1954.) A detail from the same map shows the thirty-six acre Horr property, with the ice pond visible directly north of Greenwood Cemetery. Comparing the 1896 map to today, I believe that Montrose Way skirts just north of the area once occupied by the pond.

Detail of Wellington Village map from “Atlas and Directory of Lorain County, Ohio. Illustrated. 1896.” Pgs. 100-101. Photo by author.

This is a testament to how savvy a businessman Charles W. Horr was. He planned a pond that would add beauty and value to his property, provide a measure of security against the threat of fire, and could be endlessly harvested for a naturally-renewable resource of which he required enormous (and otherwise costly) quantities. But he didn’t stop there: why waste perfectly good dirt if you can reap a profit from it? I found a notice in the May 6, 1880 The Wellington Enterprise which read, “C. W. Horr is making a large reservoir on his farm east of his house to cover 1 1/2 acres of land and to be five ft. deep. M. V. Webster has contracted to take out 150 loads of earth each day until some time in September, and is delivering it in the village to purchasers for purposes of grading” (pg. 3). The man was a genius.

I can’t tell you how delighted I am to have stumbled upon this answer to a question I did not know I had. This is exactly the kind of serendipitous discovery that makes me love studying history. There are nearly 250 columns penned by Walden and it makes me wonder what other “mysteries” are actually hiding in plain sight?

Sidney Sardus Warner (1829-1908)

The S. S. Warner House, now Norton-Eastman Funeral Home. Located at 370 South Main Street, Wellington, Ohio. Photo by author.

If you have ever visited Wellington, no doubt you remember the Warner mansion. It has been the largest, most magnificent house in town for a century and a half. Though no longer a private residence–it is now the Norton-Eastman Funeral Home–it sits like a jewel on impressive South Main Street grounds, just steps away from the grand home of Warner’s business partner, C. W. Horr.

I know less about S. S. Warner than I do about his partner. Perhaps because Warner’s interests called him so often to the state and even national political stage, I have not found him crossing the paths of the far-less-wealthy people that are the main focus of my research. Most of what I know about him comes from two sources: 1) Commemorative Biographical Record of the Counties of Huron and Lorain, Ohio (1894); 2) the brief biographical sketch attached to a collection of his papers held by the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center.

S. S. Warner. From “Commemorative Biographical Record of the Counties of Huron and Lorain, Ohio” (1894), pg. 725.

Sidney Warner was born in Suffield, Connecticut in 1829. Many of the early settlers to Lorain County emigrated from New England in the early nineteenth century. At age ten, he moved with his family to Huntington, Ohio, where he lived until relocating to Wellington nearly thirty years later. He married Margaret Anna Bradner of Huntington in 1855 and they eventually produced four children.

Warner was involved in numerous business ventures, including the organization of the First National Bank of Wellington in 1864. He was elected its first president and held that position for four decades. Readers of earlier posts will recall that Frank Chapman Van Cleef argued the creation of the bank, and subsequent increase in credit and available capital, was one of the factors essential to producing the “Cheese Boom.”

The businessman also held a number of political offices, including two terms as Lorain County representative to the General Assembly of Ohio, three terms as State Treasurer of Ohio, and even candidacy for the governorship of Ohio. He was president and trustee of a number of civic organizations, such as the Citizens Mutual Relief Association and the Cleveland Hospital for the Insane.

I have not looked as deeply at Horr and Warner as I have the people I will describe in later posts. They are important figures in the history of town, but I offer them here as background for the more detailed story I hope to tell. So when I suggest that Charles Horr was the driving force behind Horr, Warner & Co., and that Sidney Warner’s primary contribution was as a financial backer, it is purely speculation on my part.

Warner’s fortune was clearly secure even prior to entering into the profitable partnership; he built his enormous, elegant home upon moving to Wellington in 1868, the same year the company formed and only two years after the first cheese factory was opened in Huntington by the Horr brothers. The Lorain County News had reported in 1867: “Hon. S. S. Warner is putting up a dwelling on the lot next south of Thos. Kirk’s, on Main Street. This we understand is to be occupied by his father, Chauncey Warner, and that next season Mr. W. will erect another just south of this for himself” (10-23-1867, pg. 3).

Warner had a financial stake in both the cheese and vegetable sides of the business; each was extremely successful. According to A Standard History of Lorain County, Vol. 2, “The farm department [was] conducted by Wean, Horr, Warner & Company and the cheese department under the title of Horr, Warner & Company. In 1897 both departments were consolidated as Horr-Warner Company…” (pg. 979). “Wean” was Watson R. Wean, Sidney Warner’s son-in-law by virtue of marriage to his only daughter, Orrie Louisa Warner Wean. In addition to Wean’s business ventures, he also worked as superintendent of Wellington schools for nearly a decade, was mayor of the town from 1884 to 1887, and served on the Building Committee for the 1885 Town Hall. In 1878, the Weans built a home only slightly less opulent than the Warner house, on the lot directly adjacent to its south. That house still stands today at 380 South Main Street.

The Watson Wean House, date unknown. Located at 380 South Main Street, Wellington, Ohio. Photo 970056 of “Wellington Family Album” Collection, Herrick Memorial Library. Permission to display generously granted by the library.

Sidney S. Warner died in 1908, aged 79. The cheese manufacturing division of Horr-Warner Co. survived only four years longer. Warner and his wife Margaret are buried under an impressive obelisk in Wellington’s Greenwood Cemetery; in death, as in life, they are next to the Weans.

Charles William Horr (1837-1894)

Former headquarters of Horr, Warner & Co., built in 1872. Located at 134 West Herrick Avenue, Wellington, Ohio. Photo by author.

If there is one man to whom Wellington owes a debt of gratitude, it is C. W. Horr. He was the driving force behind the introduction of the “factory” system of cheese production, and was so successful at it that he created an economic climate in which dozens of subsidiary business ventures were able to thrive. He left an indelible mark on the town, by helping to create wealth that funded a flurry of grand residential and commercial construction, still impressing visitors to this day.

Charles W. Horr. Photo courtesy of the Southern Lorain County Historical Society, “The Spirit of ’76” Museum.

Of all the individuals I have been researching, Horr has probably had the most written about his life and accomplishments. He has an extensive biography, for example, in Commemorative Biographical Record of the Counties of Huron and Lorain, Ohio (1894), a source I mentioned in an earlier post as available free-of-charge via GoogleBooks. In other ways, however, Horr continues to elude me. I have been unable to locate his personal papers, nor have I been able to locate any extant business records for Horr, Warner & Co., despite its extensive interests across the county.

Horr was born in Avon, Ohio on January 25, 1837. As with many of the men I have studied from this town in this period, he was “self-made” and took pride in having built a fortune from humble beginnings. After a childhood spent living on a farm and intermittent education around planting and harvesting times, he set out for the closest urban area of Cleveland when he was 16 years old. Two years later, after briefly returning home to Lorain County, he relocated to Nashville, Tennessee and worked as a teacher. By age 21, he was a principal in Napoleon, Ohio.

While serving as a principal, he furthered his own academic credentials at Antioch College. He graduated in 1860 and very shortly after, married Esther A. Lang of Huntington, Ohio. They eventually produced five children, all boys. Charles and Esther moved to Illinois shortly after their marriage, but the Civil War interrupted Horr’s second tenure as a public school principal. While Charles served in the army, Esther returned home to Ohio.

When the war ended, Charles decided to settle in Huntington. He and his brother, J. C. Horr, realized that centralizing production of cheese into “factories” could minimize the inefficiencies of home production and maximize profits. In an era before refrigerated train cars, it was not possible to transport milk long distances before it spoiled. Turning the milk into cheese allowed much longer storage times and enabled farmers–or their new middlemen–to market products that might previously have been wasted.

Depot Street Cheese Warehouse, date unknown. Photo courtesy of the Southern Lorain County Historical Society, “The Spirit of ’76” Museum.

The Horr brothers started the first cheese factory in Huntington in April 1866. Charles Horr joined financial resources with Sidney Warner to form Horr & Warner in 1869, and three years later added E. F. Webster to become the firm of Horr, Warner & Co. In 1872, the company opened a large brick headquarters opposite the railroad line; the Lorain County News called it “by far the most elegant office in the county” (9-26-1872, pg. 2). Within a decade, they erected a state-of-the-art, three-story cold storage warehouse; employees harvested winter ice to fill it in nearby company ice ponds. At the peak of the “Cheese Boom” in 1879, nearly eight million pounds of cheese shipped through the town (Wellington Enterprise, 3-29-1911, pg. 7).

Horr amassed a great personal fortune. In 1872, he built a large Italianate house on the southern edge of Wellington. In the spring of 1883, it was the third private residence in the town to have a telephone installed. The Atlas of Lorain County, Ohio (1874) shows thirty acres of land behind the house on South Main Street; by Horr’s death there were thirty-six acres, a large barn, and a 1.5 acre water reservoir. Today, the house is as magnificent as ever, but it is surrounded by other residences and a portion of its former parcel is owned by the adjacent town cemetery. The reservoir is now a quiet neighborhood.

The C. W. Horr House. Located at 563 South Main Street, Wellington, Ohio. Photo by author.

The introduction of refrigerated train cars made it more profitable for local farmers to sell their milk directly to urban centers like Cleveland, rather than processing it into cheese. Horr, Warner & Co. closed its last factory in 1912 and transitioned into growing vegetables around Lodi, Ohio. “They were the largest growers of onions in the United States and exported vegetables throughout the country and abroad. They also grew potatoes, cabbage, and enough celery ‘to make nerve tonic for the world'” on four farms totaling 1,200 acres (McKiernan and King, Building a Firm Foundation: Medina County Architecture, 1811-1900, pg. 127).

In 1894, Charles W. Horr died in his home at age 57. According to a death notice in The New York Daily Standard, “Mrs. Caroline [Turner Horr] Robinson, the aged mother of ex-Congressman Roswell G. Horr, died at her home in Wellington, O., Wednesday, at the age of 90 years. She was one of the oldest women in that part of the state. A few hours later her son, Charles W. Horr, of Wellington, also died from diabetes and heart failure, after an illness of only five days. Roswell G. Horr was present at the death-beds of his mother and brother.” Sadly, Horr’s granddaughter, Olive, and brother, Rollin, also died the same year. All (except Charles’ parents, buried in Avon) are interred in the large family plot in Wellington’s Greenwood Cemetery.