Side A: Reverend Lorenzo Langstroth, renowned as “The Father of American Beekeeping,” lived in this simple two-story, eight-room house with his wife, Anne, and their three children from 1858 to 1887. Unchanged externally, the Greek Revival cottage features brick pilasters and pediments and a fan-shaped front window. In his garden workshop, Langstroth made experimental beehives, established an apiary, and on the ten acres that surrounded his home, grew buckwheat, clover, an apple orchard, and a “honey garden” of flowers. He imported Italian queen bees in efforts to improve native bees and shipped his queens to keepers across the United States and around the world. The Langstroth Cottage was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1982. (Continued from other side)
Side B: (Continued from other side) Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth was born in Philadelphia on December 25, 1810. Although educated at Yale to be a clergyman and teacher, he achieved international fame as an inventor and author. Fascinated from childhood by the intricate and orderly kingdom of honeybees, he discovered “bee space,” an open space of not more than three-eighths of an inch which bees would not fill to bond their combs to hives. From this came the world’s first moveable frame beehive, patented in 1852, which revolutionized beekeeping and the honey industry. His book, Langstroth on the Hive and Honeybee (1853) provided practical advice of bee management and is still in use. Langstroth died on October 6, 1895 in Dayton, Ohio. Appropriately, his tombstone in Woodlawn Cemetery reads “The Father of American Beekeeping.”
Sponsors: Ohio Bicentennial Commission, The Longaberger Company, Miami University, and The Ohio Historical Society
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