Traditional mortise and tenon joints support the roof.

A new corn crib at Huston-Brumbaugh Nature Center, combining old barn timbers and new siding, will soon educate visitors on the historical side of the former Huston farm. Campbell Brothers farms of Washington Township donated an old barn that stood along Salem Church Street, and some of that wood has found a new home in the small corn crib, which will help to interpret Ohio farming methods.
J.A. Mehl Restoration Inc. of Washington Township is building the crib. Owner Jim Mehl said the barn timbers date to the 1860s or 1870s.
Mehl and his crew — Ed Znosko and Bud Murphy — sawed the main timbers at Mehl’s shop to make them the proper size for the crib and assembled them there using the traditional mortise and tenon joining technique, in which wooden pegs are pounded into holes in the beams, attaching angled supports to connect the vertical and horizontal members. They will leave hand-hewn timbers exposed — Mehl said the hand hewing is one factor he uses to date a barn. Read the rest of this entry »

Photos of Ohio riverside cities in late March 1913 show buildings surrounded by water, where water should not have been. The tremendous Easter weekend flood, part of a storm that brought tornadoes and high water to the U.S. from Nebraska to the East Coast and down the Mississippi valley, caused 752 deaths in Ohio, and it ended once and for all — and in one city with a blast — the state’s canal system.
Ohio’s canals opened the state to economic development in the mid-1800s. The Ohio and Erie Canal broke ground south of Newark in 1825, and the first stretch opened from Cleveland to Akron in 1827, reaching Stark County soon after. The canals brought prosperity to a state that had been isolated and struggling. But by 1900 canals were in decline, giving way to the railroads, and a series of improvements to locks in the early 1900s in the northern portion of the O&E were a last-ditch effort to save the canals in their last gasp of usefulness. That work was proven pointless a few years later when the flood hit the state. Read the rest of this entry »

  My primary purpose in visiting Winona recently was to see the 1838 Friends meeting house, which the Winona Area Historical Society (WAHS) had recently moved, a big project handled by a small group of unpaid volunteers working for the love of their small hometown. Some of my relatives on my mother’s side of the family helped to found the WAHS, and one, Uncle Robert, aka Bob, gave me a personal walking tour of the town after I photographed both the 1838 meeting house and its “new” replacement, the 1895 meeting house, where WAHS holds its monthly meetings. My trip to photograph a meeting house yielded much more, including a wealth of Winona history and even stories of storm damage. (The picture above shows the 1895 building reflected in a window of the 1838 building.) Read the rest of this entry »

While searching for information on the “Hartville swamps,” I encountered a minor mystery in “Combination Atlas Map of Stark County,” published in 1875 and republished in 1995. A small creek, a tributary to Middle Branch of Nimishillen Creek now called Swartz Ditch, was named Warner Ditch in 1875. But as I said, it was only a minor mystery — the oversize book includes the names of landowners in its delineation of the geographical features of Stark County and shows Warner Ditch flowing through land owned by Jonas Swartz in the Big Swamp. Read the rest of this entry »

Ohio was, in the 18th century, the American West, and it changed flags, at least on paper, many times while whites argued with words and guns over its ownership, disregarding, of course, the fact that many Indian tribes called the land west of the Appalachians and north of the Ohio River home and believed the land could not be owned but was granted them for their careful use by the Great Spirit, Moneto. Ohio was claimed by both England and France but for a short time was, on British Crown documents, a part of Canada under a parliamentary act that was one of several acts designed to punish the intractable colonists.
The acts were Britain’s response to the damage inflicted by the Boston Tea Party, when Massachusetts men thinly disguised as Indians on Dec. 16, 1773, broke open and dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston harbor in a response to Britain’s granting of a tea monopoly to the East India Co. Those laws became known as the Intolerable or Coercive Acts. Read the rest of this entry »

This ran in the Alliance Review on Dec. 3, 2002

Dale Shaffer writes of the qualities that made his hometown the unique place it is today, telling stories of the Underground Railroad, women’s suffrage and nearly two centuries of Salem history in “Salem A Quaker City History.”
Published by Arcadia Publishing, the work portrays in words and photographs the stories that make Salem unique and is the one of several books by the prodigal Salem son who returned home and wholeheartedly embraced his town’s past.
Born in Salem in 1929, Shaffer joined the Air Force after high school and earned a B.S. in business from Kent State and an M.B.A. from Ohio State University. After working for General Electric in Chicago for four years, he decided that the business world was not his style, so he took up teaching business and economics in West Virginia and in Toms River, N.J., at Ocean City College, which he helped found. He retired as director of the library from Capitol University in Columbus. Read the rest of this entry »

I visited the Alliance Amtrak station to photograph the old and new stations. I added some of those photographs to a post from last summer, “A dark night…” Here are some others.

The new Amtrak station. Read the rest of this entry »

“Look out for the drop-off,” Donny warned as we waded in Guilford Lake, near Winona. It was one of those perfect summer days — not too hot, not too cold, not too humid. My family had joined my uncle’s family for a picnic, and Donny, with dark hair and dark half-Italian complexion, and I, with blonde hair reflecting the sun, waded in the shallow water while waiting for lunch. The water was clear, and we could see the bottom, part sand, part pebbles, as we cautiously inched forward, watching for dark water that signaled that lurking lake monster. Read the rest of this entry »

I explored the canal towpath north of Clinton on April 30, 1989, stopping where the canal crossed the Tuscarawas River when it was a viable means of transportation, and 22 1/2 years later I returned to the area and crossed the river using a new bridge and a new trail that followed the canal. I began studying and hiking the Ohio and Erie Canal in 1986. I followed the canal and photographed every lock I could reach from the north end of Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area (now National Park) to Coshocton, but the stretch north from Clinton in southern Summit County had been clogged with briars at one place, the river crossing was not bridged, and as far as I knew the path in southern Summit was nonexistent. About the time I began exploring the canal, a group of northeast Ohio movers and shakers convinced Ralph Regula to win funding for a canal heritage corridor, and since the early 1990s the former towpath has been developed into a trail for walkers and bikers, and communities along the route have spiffed up their sections of canal-front property. Read the rest of this entry »