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Lake Erie commerce has played a central role in the development of Huron. Important among Huron’s maritime industries were shipbuilding and commercial fishing. The city’s shipbuilding industry dates to the first decades of the nineteenth century. Shipyards were located on the Huron River’s west bank, slightly north of this marker, and also upstream at Fries Landing. Among the vessels built at Huron were the Great Western, constructed in 1838 and the first lake ship to have above-deck cabins, and the Golden Age, which, at 286 feet, was the largest craft on the Great Lakes when built in 1886. Huron shipbuilding declined as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Commercial fishing emerged thereafter, serving as Huron’s economic cornerstone for over fifty years. Huron’s fishing enterprises included the Huron, Kishman, Scott, and Zimmerman fish companies. By 1950, however, polluted lake waters ravished the once-lucrative industry. Although shipbuilding and commercial fishing are no longer a part of Huron’s daily life, they each had a profound effect upon the community’s growth for nearly two centuries.
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The William Lafferty Memorial Funeral and Carriage Collection shows the development of the funeral business since the mid-1800s through an exhibit of caskets, funeral clothing, and hearses collected and preserved by James William Lafferty (1912 – 1987). William was a member the fourth generation of Laffertys to serve West Union and Adams County. Characteristic of the early history of the profession, William Voris (W.V.) Lafferty (1830-1922) founded the business in 1848 to meet the demand for caskets, which he, as a furniture and cabinetmaker, was often asked to build. (Continued on other side)
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“I thought of the great bandits of the old West [like] the James Brothers…They knocked over trains, and I was going to pull the same stunt,” exclaimed notorious gangster Alvin “Creepy” Karpis. On November 7, 1935, Karpis and his bandits held up Erie Train #626 at this former location of the Garrettsville Train Depot, escaping with over $46,000 in cash and securities. Because of this last great train heist in American history, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his Government Men (G-Men) improved their surveillance methods to capture Karpis. Once labeled “Public Enemy Number One,” Alvin Karpis became Hoover’s first arrest on May 1, 1936. Local legend holds that FBI agents flooded this town searching for Karpis and his accomplices, and this led the James A. Garfield School District to adopt the G-Men as the mascot for its athletic teams.
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Site of the first Findlay Field Office for what was to become a world-wide oil company, formerly locally owned and operated. 1887: The Ohio Oil Company was incorporated by five independent oil producers in the Lima field. 1901: J.C. Donnell elected President of the Ohio Oil Company. Company’s ‘big well,’ the “Hugh McMurray,” comes in. 1929: Construction begins on new office building at South Main Street and Hardin Streets. 1962: Name changed to Marathon Oil Company to reflect international operations.
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William Holmes McGuffey (1800-1873) was a Miami University faculty member in 1836 when he compiled the first edition of the McGuffey Eclectic Reader in this house. His Reader taught lessons in reading, spelling, and civic education by using memorable stories of honesty, hard work, thrift, personal respect, and moral and ethical standards alongside illustrative selections from literary works. The six-edition series increased in difficulty and was developed with the help of his brother Alexander Hamilton McGuffey. After the Civil War the Readers were the basic schoolbooks in thirty-seven states and by 1920 sold an estimated 122 million copies, reshaping American public school curriculum and becoming one of the nation’s most influential publications. (Continued on other side)
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The Hotel Ashtabula was built in 1920 during an economic boom that lasted most of that decade. Architecturally, it represents a combination of Second Renaissance Revival and Georgian Revival styles. The H.L. Stevens and Company of Chicago and New York designed and built the hotel and others like it in Cleveland, Dayton, and Warren, Ohio and throughout the Midwest. The building included a ball room accommodating 300, a dining room that could seat 125, and club meeting and social rooms. A prominent structure of this downtown street, the Hotel Ashtabula was a hub for social activity. (Continued other side)
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Ellamae Simmons, born and raised in Mount Vernon, became the first African American woman physician to specialize in asthma, allergy, and immunology in the country. Graduating in the top of her high school class, she dreamed of attending Ohio State University to become a nurse but was rejected as that program “did not have the facilities for training” the young black girl. Whenever Simmons encountered a barrier in life she refused to accept rejection, tenaciously steered the course of her own life, and blazed new trails for others. She ultimately earned degrees in nursing (Hampton, 1940), pre-med biological sciences (OSU, 1948), social work (OSU, 1950), and medicine (Howard University, 1959). Dr. Simmons again broke gender and racial barriers when hired by Kaiser Permanente in 1965. She practiced there until retiring in 1989. Simmons died aged 101.
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Established in 1873, Lakeside is a pioneer of the American Chautauqua Movement, one of the greatest revival movements in United States history which flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Founded by the Methodist Church, Lakeside is one of the few existing Chautauqua communities that remain and thrive today. Each summer, the late-Victorian community provides spiritual, cultural, intellectual, and recreational programs designed to nurture the mind, body, and spirit. It draws visitors from across the country and around the world for its Chautauqua program. Lakeside is recognized on the National Register of Historic Places.