New Year, new fascinating history to share from the Sherman Room!
They say all roads lead to Rome and it seems all history leads to Ohio.
Okay, so maybe not all history leads to Ohio but there is certainly no shortage of interesting history in Ohio and particularly in Mansfield. For our first post of 2024, we’d like to focus on the newest addition to the Sherman Room . . . me!
My name is Chandler and I am the new Sherman Room librarian. I was born and raised in Fort Collins, Colorado. I got my Bachelor’s degree at the Savannah College of Art and Design, I have a Master’s degree from Columbia University, and I have a dual Master’s in American History/Archival Studies from Louisiana State University. I am a trained oral historian and I spent the previous three years working as a branch librarian for the Ascension Parish Library in south Louisiana where I helped them begin work on a local history collection. In August 2023, an oral history interview I did in Ascension with artist Malaika Favorite became the first oral history added to JSTOR’s Reveal Digital collection which seeks to document “under-represented 20th-century voices of dissent.”1
So, if I’m not a native Mansfielder or even Ohioan, what brings me to Ohio? History, of course! Family history. My great grandmother was a dedicated photo album and scrapbook maker with an eye for historic preservation – she kept meticulous notes with her photos and other heirloom pieces. I really believe that she had an eye for the future and knew I would be the one to take over the family history when she passed away. I was only five years old when she died, but, as a curious child, I loved going through the boxes in my parent’s basement and I found many things left there by my great grandmother, including letters written by my grandfather to my grandmother while he was serving in the Navy and an envelope with my name on it, among other things.
My great grandmother, Clara Rosetta Everett, was born February 13, 1904 in Toledo, Ohio. She was the third of possibly seven children to Thomas Sample Everett and Ella Mae Robinson (family records aren’t entirely clear on how many siblings Clara had; her grandchildren only remember it was “a lot”). On July 25, 1925, Clara married Manford Comstock; they were both twenty-one years old. Manford was at least one of three children to Cash Manford Comstock and Martha A. Comstock. Although they were living in Sylvania, Ohio at the time, Clara and Manford’s wedding was held in Michigan. On both the Everett and Comstock sides, the family had settled in Sylvania by the mid-1800s. In fact, both of Manford’s paternal grandparents, Miles Edwin Comstock and Mary E. Cooper, were born in Sylvania, Mary in 1840 and Miles in 1846. On Clara’s side, her maternal grandmother, Rosett Augusta Showler, was born in Sylvania in 1847. Earlier generations had been brought up in New York and Vermont but something called them to Ohio. From a postcard in my great grandmother’s collection dated 1900, we know that her great grandparents, William Everett and Catherine Ball, owned a place on Centennial and Sylvania Avenue where they ran a grocery store out of the front. On Manford’s side, the family had also made a simple living as farmers. Manford himself went on to build a career as a buyer and seller of livestock. Sadly, Manford died from a heart attack in 1954, four years after seeing his youngest daughter, my grandmother, get married.
My grandmother, Clarabelle Comstock, was born on November 7, 1930, in Toledo, Ohio just like her mother before her. She was the youngest of three children. She met my grandfather, John Herbert Beach, at Burnham High School in Sylvania where they graduated in 1948. John was born on August 17, 1930, in Michigan. He was the youngest of four boys to Durwood/Derwood G. Beach and Esther Spiegel. The Spiegel side can trace its roots back to Germany and Ukraine and they immigrated to the United States somewhere in the mid to late 1800s. Durwood was born in Sylvania in 1906 and Esther was born in Michigan in 1903. According to the 1930 census, Durwood and Esther were living in Blissfield, Michigan where Durwood was working as a serviceman for Toledo Scales.3 By 1940, the Beach family had moved to Sylvania where Durwood found work in refrigeration.4 Durwood died in 1993 while Esther lived to the incredible age of 101 and passed away in 2004.
My grandparents were married on August 26, 1950, at the First Evangelical Brethren Church in Sylvania shortly after my grandfather returned from two years of service in the Navy. His first job was sampling and inspecting grain for the Toledo Board of Trade. For a brief time, his work in the grain industry took him to Buffalo, New York; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Maumee, Ohio before he was transferred to Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1956. He became General Foreman of the Cargill grain elevator in 1961 and quickly moved up to Director of the New Orleans Public Grain Elevator by the end of the year. In 1975, the New Orleans Public Grain Elevator found itself in the middle of an FBI investigation in which it was discovered that grain inspection and shipment reports had been falsified. As the elevator director, John was, of course, interviewed by the FBI but it was found that he had no involvement in the general scheme. This scandal on the docks became the basis of my LSU Master’s thesis and ongoing project documenting the history of the grain industry in Louisiana (see louisianagrainhistory.com for more).
I love that it was a small comment in a family oral history project that inspired me as a historian to become one of the primary Louisiana grain historians living today but the family influence (and Ohio connection) doesn’t stop there.
On the Comstock side of my family, we share a distant relative with the Anthony Comstock of Comstock Act fame, Christopher Comstock (1635-1702). It is believed Christopher’s father, William Comstock (1595-1683) was the first Comstock in the United States. The family line diverges with Christopher’s sons, Daniel (1664-1694) and Moses (1685-1766). Anthony Comstock was the great-great grandson of Moses and my great grandmother married into the family seven generations after the tree split. While Anthony is not on my direct family line, I think it’s fantastic that a woman vaguely somewhat sort of related to him has been challenging his views on censorship and women. He was notoriously anti-suffrage and dead set against women having access to contraception or any literature about it whatsoever. One of the most recent books about good ol’ Anthony is Amy Sohn’s The Man Who Hated Women, which tells you just a little bit about this man’s personal politics.
While studying at Columbia University, I began working on a research project focused on women who worked as local film censors in the early twentieth century. At the time, I didn’t know about this overlap with my kind of sort of distant relative but now I think it’s a fascinating and ironic connection. My research into female censors led me to Maude Murray Miller who was the first female film censor in the United States. Miller was born in Alabama, married John P. Murray of Kentucky, and made her way to Columbus, Ohio where she worked as a feature writer for The Columbus Dispatch for 21 years. In August 1913, Governor James Cox appointed Miller to the newly formed state board of motion picture censors. That’s right, the first female film censor came from Ohio. In fact, the Bucyrus Evening Telegraph noted this very fact in their report of her appointment, complete with a photo of Mrs. Miller.6 Miller held her position on the board of censors for seven years and she was not always the film industry’s favorite person. When Miller left the board in 1920, she was replaced by Evalyn Snow who was the first woman to run for governor of Ohio. Maude Murray Miller kicked off a trend of having women on these state censor boards to, more often than not, offer “motherly guidance” and credibility to the board. When Louisiana established their first statewide board of film censorship in 1935, Governor Huey Long took a slightly different approach, appointing someone with more of an intimate knowledge of the silver screen as opposed to the traditional outspoken housewife.
Marguerite Clark was a silent film star whose popularity often placed her in direct competition with Mary Pickford. Besides serving as Louisiana’s first female film censor (a role few biographies acknowledge), Marguerite is famous for having originated the role of Snow White on both stage and screen. In 1918, Marguerite settled in Patterson, Louisiana, after marrying local lumber magnate, Harry Palmerston Williams. Marguerite watched her husband establish a successful airline business with his partner, Jimmie Wedell. When Jimmie and Harry both died in separate plane crashes within a short span of time (Jimmie died in 1934 and Harry in 1936), Marguerite briefly took over the Wedell-Williams Air Service before selling the company to another airline. She spent the remainder of her life ensuring her husband’s legacy was preserved. Her efforts (and possibly her money) ultimately led to the establishment of the Wedell-Williams Aviation Museum in 1975. But before dazzling audiences under the lights of Broadway and charming locals along the bayou, Marguerite was a child of Cincinnati, having been born there on February 22, 1883. The Wedell-Williams Museum gave me a large portrait of Marguerite after I gave a talk about her life and career for them. I like to think when I moved to Mansfield to become the new Sherman Room librarian, I was able to bring Marguerite home in a way.
So, while not all history may lead to Ohio, a lot of history (both family and academic) has led me to Ohio and I am excited to share more fascinating history with you from the Sherman Room!
- Reveal Digital, 2024, https://about.jstor.org/revealdigital/. ↩︎
- U.S. Census Bureau (1930) Fifteenth Census of the United States, Lenawee County, Michigan. Retrieved from Ancestry.com. ↩︎
- U.S. Census Bureau (1940) Sixteenth Census of the United States, Lucas County, Ohio. Retrieved from Ancestry.com. ↩︎
- Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library. “Anthony Comstock, secretary” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed January 26, 2024. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/5a6cb140-86d6-0131-1768-58d385a7b928. ↩︎
- “Mrs. Maude Murray Miller,” The Bucyrus Evening Telegraph, August 26, 1913, p. 1. ↩︎
The Sherman Room at MRCPL 