Category Archives: Local History

And I Would Walk 5,000 Miles . . . To the Pacific Coast

Posted on by under Local History

There are several groups on Facebook dedicated to sharing images, stories, and memories of the history of Mansfield, Ohio. It was in a group called Abandoned Mansfield that I first saw a post about Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald. The original poster shared the photo shown below whose caption reads, “Mr. and Mrs. R.S. Fitzgerald. Walking from Mansfield, O. to the Pacific Coast. Started September 5, 1910.” According to the poster, “It’s unknown why they would want to do this. No word if they ever made it.”1 That sounds like a mystery for the Sherman Room!

Photo of Mr. and Mrs. R.S. Fitzgerald with their novel two-wheeled cart. Original photographer and source unknown.

The Fitzgeralds Come to Mansfield

Robert Stevens Fitzgerald was born October 18,1871, in Sedalia, Missouri to Joseph Hawkins Fitzgerald and Mary/Maria Overarcher (Booth/Mitchell) Fitzgerald.2 According to Presbyterian Church records, Robert was baptized in Worthington, Indiana, on January 28, 1877.3 From his earliest years, Robert and his family were frequently on the move. Some sources indicate Robert’s father passed away on April 11, 1877, in San Antonio, Texas and was buried in Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati.4 No evidence has been located to confirm whether Robert was in Texas when his father died. The next record we have for Robert’s potential whereabouts is an 1880 census record for Dayton, Ohio that show Robet [Robert] Fitzgerald living with Mariah and William Mitchell; Robert is listed as William’s step-son, suggesting his mother had remarried.5

In 1908, Robert was still in Dayton where he married Clara J. (Dawson) McKay on December 3 at the Third Street Presbyterian Church.6 According to The Dayton Herald, Robert was a thirty-seven-year-old advertising solicitor at the time of his wedding.7

The 1909 Dayton city directory shows Robert working as the president of The Fitzgerald Company, a group incorporated in Columbus in early July with a capital stock of $25,000.8 Prior to this, Robert spent time as general manager for Business Letter Company in Dayton and the Herald cites Robert and Clara as being linked to Two Fitzgerald Advertising Company.9 In March 1909, the Herald published a short noted from J.N. Hess addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald. In the note, Hess states that a “Schantz Lily Water cooler” the Fitzgeralds had installed in office suite 27 of the Christian Association building must be removed and “should you insist on retaining it in said office you are hereby notified to pay rent and vacate the above offices.”10 In a much longer article following the initial note, the Herald reports the issue seems to have arisen from a misguided belief that the water cooler was made by the Dayton brewing company; at this time, the Temperance Movement condemning the consumption of alcohol was gaining popular favor throughout the United States and in 1909, sixty-three counties in Ohio went dry.11

While Robert argued, “the simple use of a Lily Water cooler in our office is not a legal cause for an order to vacate the office,” he and his wife elected to move their business elsewhere, announcing their new location in the Gibbons Arcade on March 25, 1909.12 In an almost full-page announcement in The Dayton Herald, they called the Christian Publishing Association’s order to remove the water cooler “ridiculous and unreasonable” and went on to say, “We are temperate, law-abiding and liberty-loving people, and feel competent to conduct out business affairs without interference on the part of self-constituted censors of business morals.”13

Having spent much of his early life in Dayton, Robert and Clara were perhaps soured by the water cooler debacle and moved their talents to Mansfield in early 1910. According to a Mansfield News article from September, the couple had only been in Mansfield for six months, “having come here from Cincinnati.”14 It the Fitzgeralds spent any time in Cincinnati prior to their move to Mansfield, it was too short to be officially documented. The 1910 census, taken in mid-April, lists Robert as an advertising agent in Mansfield and Clara as just a “roomer” living in his house (the census taker used this distinction for several houses in the Fitzgerald’s neighborhood for reasons we will never know). Even stranger, though, is this census reports the pair had been married for eleven years; this is not the first complication in the marriage record of Robert and Clara Fitzgerald.15

Clara J. Dawson was born August 5, 1877, in Marengo, Iowa, the daughter of Samuel R. Dawson and Josephine Carman.16 Her father was involved with a coal mining business in 1887 and a manufacturer of “newly invented [articles] and other novelties” in 1895.17 Two of the latter’s “newly invented articles” were apparently a valuable process for hardening copper and another for making Damascus steel, both of which Samuel Dawson had locked away in a safety deposit vault in case of his death.18 According the The Zanesville Signal, “the Dawson family lived in an aristocratic neighborhood,” and as Clara approached adulthood, she became a very popular debutante.19 Clara married her first husband, Walter Scott, in December 1895, a marriage that lasted only one hour.20 The following year, she married Walter’s close friend, Willard McKay; she was twenty years old at the time. Clara and Willard briefly moved to Canada to live with his family, but they appear in the 1900 census living in Alpena, Michigan.21 At some point between the taking of that census and the fall of 1904, Clara and Willard separated and Willard married Jennie Dawson (no relation to Clara) on October 16, 1904, in Detroit.22

Clara J. Dawson and Walter Scott, married for one hour. “Romance and Tragedy,” The Zanesville Signal [Zanesville, Ohio], April 3, 1896, 7.

Clara retained her McKay name until she married Robert Fitzgerald in 1908. City directories indicate Clara took up work as a teacher and moved to Mount Vernon, Ohio by 1903.23 What brought Clara to Dayton and into the arms of Robert Fitzgerald remains unclear, but her early marriages indicate she was no stranger to drama and was a little bit of a show-woman. In January 1896, she sought to capitalize on the notoriety of her short marriage to Walter Scott by publishing a book chronicling their two-year courtship.24 Fourteen years after her book deal, Clara was once again a darling of the press as she and her newest husband undertook a long walk to the West coast. The Indianapolis Sun commented in October 1910, “Mrs. Fitzgerald is a good-looking young woman with handsome brown eyes . . . [She] created quite a sensation Wednesday morning on the downtown streets when she appeared in her walking costume of khaki with the skirt cut short for walking, leggings and a broad felt hat.”25 According to the paper, the couple decided to embark on this walk “just to be out of the ordinary.”26

To the Pacific Coast or Bust

The true novelty of the Fitzgeralds’ westward journey was the two-wheeled cart they planned to take with them. Weighing just 150 pounds or so, in its close state, the cart measured four and a half feet but could extend to six feet “to furnish sleeping accommodations” for the couple.27 The width of the cart, as reported by the Mansfield News, “is 30 inches and the balloon frame is covered with heavy canvas and is painted and varnished so as to render it waterproof.”28 Furnished with a cupboard at the front that could store several days’ worth of food and cooking supplies, the cart was “an oddity in the way of a vehicle” because it was a “complete home” – dining room, living room, bedroom, and kitchen combined!29 The Democratic Banner of Mount Vernon, Ohio, reported in late July 1910 that the cart’s construction was finishing up in Mansfield and it was “designed to meet any emergencis [sic] that may arise on the trip.”30 According to the paper, Robert had been planning the trip for several months, likely to allow enough time to design and construct their eye-catching home on wheels.31

The motivation behind their trip and even their final destination varies among reports of their travels. The Indianapolis Sun suggests the couple “decided they would migrate to the great northwest and picked out Washington as the state in which they would live.”32 Several papers, including The Pittsburgh Post, list San Francisco as their final destination while others simply conclude the Fitzgeralds were heading for the Pacific coast.33 Interestingly, Clara’s second husband, Willard McKay, was living in San Mateo, California (a brisk twenty miles from San Francisco by today’s standards) in 1910.34 While it is unlikely that Clara was following Willard, the connection is nevertheless intriguing. The press coverage dedicated to the Fitzgeralds’ jaunt typically cites their motivation as being “for pleasure and health;” the Mansfield News further specifies the trip was designed for “sightseeing and the walkers will take their time to it as they are in no hurry to reach their destination.”35

An approximation of the Fitzgeralds’ planned route to the Pacific coast. Map created using travelmap.net.

Setting off on the fifth or sixth of September the Mansfield News outlined their route as passing through “Marion, Kenton, Wapakoneta, and Celina [Ohio].”36 The couple was then expected to stop in Indianapolis before moving through “southwestern Indiana, touching Vincennes and going to Cairo, Ill., after which they will cross Kentucky and Tennessee into Louisiana. Leaving New Orleans, they will follow the Southern Pacific railroad through Texas, Arizona and New Mexico into Southern California.”37

The Fitzgeralds chose what could be called “the scenic route” to California so they could, understandably, avoid cold weather conditions that would hinder their pace and progress. It was also reported that they hoped to reach New Orleans in time for Mardi Gras in February.38 They expected the trop would take close to a year to complete as they anticipate walking “at a rate of about 400 miles per month.”39 Coverage of their walk estimated the total distance of their journey to be 5,000 miles; a more direct route with modern roads would only cover about 2,500 miles.40

Their first noted “stop” was in Bucyrus, Ohio, where they “walked into [the city on September 8] and walked out again.”41 At this early stage of the journey, the pair were averaging ten miles per day.42 They were next spotted in Marion, Ohio, around September 10, a distance of about eighteen miles by today’s standards. The Marion Daily Mirror described the travelers as “fresh as daisies” and quoted Mrs. Fitzgerald as telling a reporter, “You tell the people that all those who have not enjoyed a night out of doors that they have missed a great deal.”43 On Thursday, September 22, The Weekly News in Mansfield reported they had received a postcard from Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald which was “written in camp at Roundhead, Ohio, and was mailed at Waynesfield.”44 According to their postcard, the Fitzgeralds were “having a fine trip and enjoying it immensely,” although they had encountered “several hills and considerable mud.”45 Their next stop was said to be Celina, Ohio, where they would be able to receive any return mail.46 A week after sending the postcard to the News, the Fitzgeralds had covered 200 miles and passed through Richmond, Indiana on their way to Indianapolis.47 The Richmond Item indicates “their only means of making money [to sustain the trip] is by selling postcards with their pictures on them” – was it one of these novelty postcards they sent back to Mansfield? Only the recipients will ever know.48

By the first of October, another fifty-two miles had been covered as the pair spent several days in Eaton, Indiana, a rather odd northerly path to have followed from Richmond.49 From Eaton, they began moving south with their eyes set on New Orleans. They passed through Indianapolis before stopping east of Irvington, Indiana. On October 12, the Indianapolis Sun reported the couple planned to “move on until they reach Kansas City, where they propose to spend the winter, after which they will attack the Rocky mountains.”50 This is the last report of their trip’s progress.

The Fitzgeralds’ documented progress as recounted through newspaper coverage. Map created using travelmap.net.

Walk This Way

On September 30, 1910, the Lake Elsinore Valley Sun-Tribune of Lake Elsinore, California commented, “That eastern people are bound to get to California one way or another is shown by . . . Mr. and Mrs. R. S. Fitzgerald, who are walking through to the Pacific coast from Mansfield, Ohio.”51 Throughout the nineteenth century, from the Louisiana Purchas through the Gold Rush and beyond, there was a peculiar fascination with finding a way to California. Despite the 1890 census defining a “closure of the American frontier,” in that there was hardly a frontier left to explore or settle, there was still a strong westward draw for Americans living in the Midwest or the Northeast. What this meant for Robert and Clara Fitzgerald was their “long tramp” out West was not a new or novel idea, and they weren’t alone in hitching a ride on the shoe leather express in 1910.

C.A. Poling and J.M. Layer left Dayton in March on their own long tramp to San Francisco. Their trip was in answer to a $1,000 bet that said they could not make the journey in 100 days. Approximately thirty-four days into the trip, they had reached Luther, Oklahoma.52 Similarly, Isador Walchell and Lewis Keller set off from Philadelphia in May en route to San Francisco. According to the Valley Spirit of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, “these ocean-to-ocean walkers are not out after any records . . . [they] admitted that two Philadelphians had wagered bets upon the result of the walk, but that this didn’t bother them any as they were just going to keep on walking regardless of bets.”53 From Wichita, Kansas in May, “Two Muskogee women are walking to the Pacific coast for a purse of $25,000.”54 Another pair, Roy Fourbush Hansford and Terry Churchill Elmenderf, “two New York newspaper men who are on a twenty thousand-mile walk to the Pacific coast” left New York at the end of May, spending Christmas in Alabama with Frank S. Stone, the solicitor of Baldwin County.55 The final team to step onto the track to the coast in 1910 were Morris I. Roberts and Frank B. Surman (along with their English bulldog, Lady) who left Wilmington, Delaware, at the end of November, making their way to the Pacific coast “in the interest of the outdoor sports section of a New York city magazine.”56

A handful of the other people attempting to walk to the Pacific coast in 1910.

The Fitzgeralds, due to no fault of their own, were competing for press space in a pretty saturated field and the one thing designed to set them apart – their home on wheels – was not enough to garner prolonged attention. It is unfortunate as well that just as the Fitzgeralds were making progress towards Kansas City in October, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat announced: “Accompanied by a dog and horse, with a two-wheeled cart load of provision, Mr. and Mrs. Dwight Wolf of Kansas City, Kan., left last night on a 7500-mile walk.”57 Here was another married couple undertaking a long-distance walk with a two-wheeled cart. Of course, Dwight and Stella Wolf also had a dog and a horse, and they weren’t working their way to the Pacific coast. From Kansas City, the Wolfs were heading to Texas where they would then make their way eastward to Jacksonville, Florida for the winter before moving up the east coast to the Canadian border and round their way home to Kansas City through Minneapolis.58 The St. Louis paper notes this roundabout journey covering “two-thirds of the United States” was not the first long distance walking trip the pair had undertaken: “A few weeks ago the same couple, with the same outfit, walked from Kansas City to New York in ninety-five days.”59

The announcement of the Wolfs’ newest trip was published in newspapers from Georgia to California and even appeared in the Canadian press! They received a very large article on the second page of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle on June 30, 1911 (complete with photo similar to that of Robert and Clara Fitzgerald with their cart), indicating that there was popular interest in their journey and that they had made their way through Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, and on all the way to New York.60

And just like the Fitzgeralds who heralded their walk as “for pleasure and health,” the Brooklyn paper notes the Wolfs “started this walking back in 1909, and then mainly on account of Woolf’s [sic] health. Then he was weighing 107 pounds and so weak that at the end of the first day’s walk all he could do was get out [of] the cot and fall on it while his wife cooked supper.”61 The established track record of Dwight Wolf and his wife, having completed two walking journeys, was arguably a more reliable story for the press to cover when compared directly to the leisurely jaunt of the Fitzgeralds.

The trip from Kansas City to Canada was touted as “the longest walk a woman has ever taken,” but, surely, the reporter conveniently forgot all the women who crossed the country on foot out of necessity in the previous century.62 With the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 and the introduction of the Model T in 1908, long distance walking in 1910 was a luxury of those who had the time to do it. What set the Fitzgeralds and the Wolfs apart from the pack was that they were walking on their own terms as opposed to responding to a lucrative bet or seeking purposeful publicity – the California press expressly notes, “it is through no wager that [the Fitzgeralds] are making the trip, but simply taking the trip for the novelty of walking through.”63 The myriad of other pedestrians crisscrossing the country all had what could be seen as selfish motivations. But in pursuing monetary glory or notoriety, they were all following in the well-worn footsteps of the feats of endurance walking that had come before them. Yet another contender entering the already crowded walking space of 1910 was Edward Payson Weston, who, at a spry seventy-one years old, was endeavoring to walk from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic.64 It had only been fifty years since Weston had first proven he could make a name for himself through the exercise of walking, and he kick started what author Gary Yanker has dubbed “the Pedestrian Age.”65

To learn more about Weston and the pedestrianism craze, check out Algeo’s book which will be on display in the Sherman Room for the month of May.

According to Matthew Algeo, Weston’s rise to pedestrian fame “began with a wager.”66 The year was 1860 and the upcoming presidential election was a hot topic of conversation. Weston strongly believed Abraham Lincoln would lose the election while his friend, George Eddy, was convince Lincoln would win. Their casual debate turned into a bet – whoever’s stance was incorrect would have to walk from the State House in Boston to the Capital in Washington, a distance of almost 500 miles, in ten consecutive days to arrive in time for the inauguration on March 4. As history would have it, Lincoln won the election and Weston was on the hook for a few good miles of drudgery.

He left Boston on the morning of February 22 and had calculated his route to arrive in Washington on the morning of March 4.67 News of his journey appeared in papers from Bangor, Maine to California. The Morning Democrat of Davenport, Iowa, called him a fool and said, “if he succeeds in reaching Washington City by the evening of the 3d of March, his perseverance and pluck are to be rewarded with six quarts of peanuts.”68 Weston encountered crowds of excited spectators along the way as well as a few individuals looking to collect on debts owed to them and these distractions caused him to fall behind schedule. He finally arrived in Washington at 5:00pm on Monday, March 4, five hours after the inauguration.69 As Algeo notes, Weston, “had failed to pay off his bet but had won widespread admiration;” somehow on the eve of the American Civil War, Weston’s walk “south across the Mason-Dixon Line from New England to Washington . . . represented a rare and welcome symbol of unity in a nation about to be violently fractured.”70

Weston exhibited a remarkable stamina in this extended feat of endurance, and he volunteered his pedestrian prowess to the Union cause during the war. Although he declared in 1862 that he hoped “soon to enter a more laudable business than pedestrianism,” he spent much of his time in the coming decades making and taking bets to push his walking feats further, even taking his talents overseas to England.71 But not everyone was a fan or even impressed by his “exhibitionist walking” stunt. The Semi-Weekly Wisconsin in Milwaukee asked, “Seriously . . . what has Weston achieved that justifies all the fuss made over him? Has he exhibited any more noble, admirable, or praiseworthy qualities than the horse that performs an extraordinary feat of pedestrianism?”72 The only positive attribute the paper could find in Weston’s celebrity was “if it shall have the effect to popularize among Americans that much neglected species of exercise, pedestrianism.”73 As Algeo argues, Weston did indeed popularize pedestrianism on both an amateur and professional level, giving rise to America’s first spectator sport in which athletes competed in foot races akin to late NASCAR event where they set distance records by traversing circles around a track inside stadiums like Madison Square Garden in New York.74 To this point, author John Cumming has made the bold choice to label Weston “the man who invented walking.”75

As his seventieth birthday approached, Weston announced in January 1909 that he was “off for another good sized walk . . . going clear across the continent this time [with the] hope to set a mark even the youngsters won’t touch for a while.”76 This walk would take him from New York to San Francisco and, while Weston was not the first to attempt this feat, his widely publicized exploits of the past inspired many a copycat challenger to follow this same westward path in 1910.77 When Weston turned his sights to the opposite direction, The Mansfield News noted, “the spectacle of Weston, at 71 years of age, walking from the Pacific to the Atlantic coast . . . preaches a powerful sermon on the value of continued and careful exercise in the open.”78 Clara Fitzgerald and Stella Wolf certainly agreed, and both sang the praises of outdoor living, with Stella quoted in 1911 as saying, “I can hardly bear now to be under a roof for long. It seems stifling and unhealthy. I am always eager to go out again. I don’t know how I am ever going to be able to stop this tramping life.”79

What Happened to the Fitzgeralds?

When they set off in early September, the Fitzgeralds were likely unaware of how many others were also attempting to walk to the Pacific coast, but their ambitions were not to win any races or claim any records. So even if the press could not document every step of their journey, did they make it to California? The simple answer is most probably that they did not continue on past Indiana. Robert and Clara appear in the 1913 city directory for La Porte, Indiana, showing Robert working as an advertising department manager for M. Rumley Company and the couple’s residence is listed as 906 Tyler.80 Their story only gets more complicated from here. In July 1918, The Dayton Herald reported that Robert had been granted a divorce from Clara, but the pair appear in the 1920 census renting a house in Sausalito, California.81 A year later, they are listed in the city directory for Atlanta, Georgia, where Robert is working as a manager for Business Builders, an advertising company.82

These are all records linking Robert S. and Clara D. (Dawson) Fitzgerald and, of course, it is possible that there was more than one pair of Robert S. and Clara D. moving around the country together at this time. The consistency of Robert’s employment falling within advertising in each of these records gives some credibility to the idea that these are in fact the same Robert and Clara who wanted to push their home on wheels to California.

Why they would continue to live together and traverse the country if they had divorced in 1918 is unclear.

Adding to the complexity of the Fitzgeralds’ post-walk whereabouts is a marriage license application from Hancock, Indiana, dated August 5, 1924, listing Robert Stevens Fitzgerald and Clara Dawson Fitzgerald as the couple to be joined in matrimony. Both Robert and Clara completed their own copies of the application. In his application, Robert states that he had been married twice and his previous marriage ended in divorce in June 1924. Clara, on the other hand, says her previous marriage ended in July 1917.83 Given that census records and directory listings show the two living together as recently as 1921, it is difficult to believe Robert had married again and divorced by June 1924.84 It is most likely that these two either did not fully understand how to answer the questions on the application or were being purposefully misleading (we do not know if they filled the applications out in the presence of each other, but it would be off if they didn’t). For the question of how many times she had been married, Clara put twice even though her marriage to Robert in 1908 was already her third marriage.

In the Beauty Department with Clara D. Fitzgerald. The Cincinnati Enquirer, October 9, 1921, 27.

Newspaper clippings suggest there was a business and possible geographic separation between Robert and Clara by late 1921 as The Cincinnati Enquirer shows Clara running a beauty parlor in the city.85 On her 1924 marriage license application, Clara lists her occupation as “beauty parlor owner and operator,” she just doesn’t specify where her parlor was. According to the Greenville Daily News in Greenville, Ohio, Clara opened a new shop in that city in September 1922.86 Her shop changed name in 1926 and she continued in this line of work at least until 1930 when, one can only guess, Robert’s work took them to Tampa, Florida.87 The 1930 census shows them renting a house in the sunshine state where Robert was working as a printing salesman.88 By the 1940s, the pair had found their way back to Dayton where Robert found steady work as a salesman.89 The 1950 census lists them both working as salespeople for “specialties retail,” Robert in Business and Clara in Clothing.90 On November 19, 1953, Robert passed away at the Miami Valley hospital in Dayton.91 His funeral was held on November 22 and he was buried in Spring Grove Cemetery not far from his father, Joseph.92 Clara, not one to stay still for long, remarried one last time, tying the know with Raymond L. Hull in Indiana on July 21, 1956 – on her application for a marriage license, she says this is her first marriage but we know better, Clara!93 It is believed Clara passed away on May 25, 1965 at the age of eighty-seven.94

  1. Donn Mengert, 2024, “This photo shows a man and a woman on either side of a hand-drawn cart bearing the words: ‘Walking to the Pacific Coast.’,” Facebook, posted March 9, 2024. ↩︎
  2. Available records like Robert’s death certificate list his mother as Maria Mitchell, while his 1940 Social Security application lists her as Maria Booth and his 1924 marriage license lists her simply as Booth (the application for the license lists her as Mary Overarcher Mitchell). It is most likely that her maiden name was Booth and Mitchell became her surname when she remarried following Joseph’s death. See: “Ohio Deaths, 1908-1953,” database with images, FamilySearch (May 21, 2014), 1953 > 73401-76200 > image 3018 of 3168; “United States, Social Security Numerical Identification Files (NUMIDENT), 1936-2007”, database, FamilySearch (February 10, 2023), Robert Stevens Fitzgerald; “Indiana Marriages, 1811-2019”, FamilySearch (March 7, 2024), Entry for Robt S Fitsgerald and Joseph L Allen, 5 Aug 1924; “Indiana Marriages, 1780-1992”, FamilySearch  (January 13, 2020), Robert Stevens Fitzgerald, 1924. ↩︎
  3. “Robert Stevens Fitzgerald Baptism Record,” Presbyterian Historical Society; Philadelphia, PA, USA; US, Presbyterian Church Records, 1701-1907; Book Title: 1903-1918. Available on Ancestry.com. ↩︎
  4. “Joseph Hawkins Fitzgerald – Spring Grove Cemetery Burial Information for Joseph H. Fitzgerald,” Family Search, Individual Page with Sources, https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/sources/MYSJ-QBJ; “Search Results for ‘Joseph H Fitzgerald’,” Spring Grove, https://www.springgrove.org/locate-a-loved-one/spring-grove-cemetery/. ↩︎
  5. Year: 1880; Census Place: Dayton, Montgomery, Ohio; Roll: 1051; Page: 105a; Enumeration District: 151. Available on Ancestry.com. ↩︎
  6. “1908 Record of Marriage of Robert Stevens Fitzgerald and Clara J. McKay,” Presbyterian Historical Society; Philadelphia, PA, USA; US, Presbyterian Church Records, 1701-1907; Book Title: 1903-1918. Available on Ancestry.com. ↩︎
  7. “Wedding Bells,” The Dayton Herald, December 3, 1908, 8. ↩︎
  8. Williams’ Dayton City Directory (Cincinnati, OH: The Williams Directory Company, Publishers, 1909), 420. “New Concern to Promote Stocks,” The Dayton Herald, July 9, 1909, 15. ↩︎
  9. Williams’ Dayton City Directory (Cincinnati, OH: The Williams Directory Co. Publishers, 1908), 440. “Lily Water, Not Rent, Cause of Order to Move,” The Dayton Herald, July 29, 1910, 12. ↩︎
  10. The Dayton Herald, March 22, 1909, 2. ↩︎
  11. “Lily Water, Not Rent, Cause of Order to Move,” The Dayton Herald, July 29, 1910, 12. Lloyd Sponholtz, “The Politics of Temperance in Ohio, 1880-1912,” Ohio History Journal 85, No. 1 (Winter 1976): 9. ↩︎
  12. The Dayton Herald, March 25, 1909, 8. ↩︎
  13. Ibid. ↩︎
  14. “Will Start Tuesday Morning on Walk to the Pacific Coast,” Mansfield News, September 3, 1910, 5. ↩︎
  15. The 1910 Mansfield city directory shows Robert working as a representative for International Correspondence Schools and lists the Desoto Hotel as the Fitzgeralds’ residence. See Mansfield Official City Directory (Akron, OH: The Burch Directory Company, 1910): 172. “1910 Overview,” United States Census Bureau, https://www.census.gov/history/www/through_the_decades/overview/1910.html.Year: 1910; Census Place: Mansfield Ward 4, Richland, Ohio; Roll: T624_1225; Page: 5b; Enumeration District: 0188; FHL microfilm: 1375238. ↩︎
  16. “Clara D. Fitzgerald Marriage to Raymond L. Hull, 1956,” Indiana, U.S., Marriages, 1810-2001 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2014; “Clara J. Scott marriage to Willard L. McKay, 1896,” Iowa, U.S., Select Marriages Index, 1758-1996 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2014. ↩︎
  17. The Des Moines Register, September 2, 1887, 7; The Gazette [Cedar Rapids, Iowa], February 12, 1895, 1. ↩︎
  18. “Verdict of Coroner’s Jury,” Sioux City Journal [Sioux City, Iowa], December 27, 1895, 1. ↩︎
  19. “Romance and Tragedy,” The Zanesville Signal [Zanesville, Ohio], April 3, 1896, 7. ↩︎
  20. Ibid. ↩︎
  21. “Quite Romantic,” The Dayton Herald, November 17, 1896, 7. Year: 1900; Census Place: Alpena Ward 5, Alpena, Michigan; Roll: 699; Page: 5; Enumeration District: 0013. ↩︎
  22. “1904 Marriage Record for Willard L. McKay and Jennie Dawson,” Michigan Department of Community Health, Division of Vital Records and Health Statistics; Lansing, MI, USA; Michigan, Marriage Records, 1867-1952; Film: 83; Film Description: 1904 Saginaw-1905 Barry. ↩︎
  23. F.M. French’s Mt. Vernon City and Knox County Farmer’s Directory (F.M French, 1903):115. ↩︎
  24. “Romance of Real Life,” The Inter Ocean [Chicago, Illinois], January 21, 1896, 10. ↩︎
  25. “Taking Walk to Pacific Coast,” Indianapolis Sun, October 12, 1910, 2. ↩︎
  26. Ibid. ↩︎
  27. “Man and Wife Push Cart on Long Trip,” The Chronicle-Telegram [Elyria, Ohio], July 29, 1910, 7.  “Will Start Tuesday Morning on Walk to the Pacific Coast,” Mansfield News, September 3, 1910, 5. ↩︎
  28. “Will Start Tuesday Morning on Walk to the Pacific Coast,” Mansfield News, September 3, 1910, 5. ↩︎
  29. “Man and Wife Push Cart on Long Trip,” The Chronicle-Telegram [Elyria, Ohio], July 29, 1910, 7. ↩︎
  30. “Couple to Walk Across the Continent,” The Democratic Banner [Mount Vernon, Ohio], July 29, 1910, 5. ↩︎
  31. Ibid. ↩︎
  32. “Taking Walk to Pacific Coast,” Indianapolis Sun, October 12, 1910, 2. ↩︎
  33. “Carry a Complete Home with Them,” The Pittsburgh Post, September 12, 1910, 7. ↩︎
  34. Year: 1910; Census Place: Township 1, San Mateo, California; Roll: T624_104; Page: 27a; Enumeration District: 0048; FHL microfilm: 1374117. “Willard Leslie McKay World War I Draft Registration Card, 1918,” Available on Ancestry.com. By the end of the decade, Willard was working as a candy maker in San Francisco. See: Crocker-Langley San Francisco Directory (San Francisco, CA: H.S. Crocker Co., Inc., 1919): 1099. ↩︎
  35. The Greenville Journal notes the couple believed the long walk would “restore [Robert’s] health, failing under long indoor confinement.” See “Mansfield,” The Greenville Journal [Greenville, Ohio], September 1, 1910, 2. “Man and Wife Push Cart on Long Trip,” The Chronicle-Telegram [Elyria, Ohio], July 29, 1910, 7; “Couple to Walk Across the Continent,” The Democratic Banner [Mount Vernon, Ohio], July 29, 1910, 5; “Will Start Tuesday Morning on Walk to the Pacific Coast,” Mansfield News, September 3, 1910, 5. ↩︎
  36. “Will Start Tuesday Morning on Walk to the Pacific Coast,” Mansfield News, September 3, 1910, 5. ↩︎
  37. Ibid. ↩︎
  38. Ibid. ↩︎
  39. Ibid. ↩︎
  40. Ibid. ↩︎
  41. “Traveling to Pacific Coast,” The Bucyrus Evening Telegraph, September 9, 1910, 3; “Carry a Complete Home with Them,” The Pittsburgh Post, September 12, 1910, 7; “Pushing Their Home Ahead,” The Daily Times [New Philadelphia, Ohio], September 13, 1910, 2. If one is to believe the news out of Tacoma, Washington, they did not make it to Bucyrus until September 26. See “Transport Home on Small Cart,” The Tacoma Daily, September 28, 1910, 7. ↩︎
  42. “Carry a Complete Home with Them,” The Pittsburgh Post, September 12, 1910, 7. ↩︎
  43. “First Leg of a Long Tramp,” The Marion Daily Mirror, September 10, 1910, 8. ↩︎
  44. “Enjoying Their Trip,” The Weekly News, September 22, 1910, 10. ↩︎
  45. Ibid. ↩︎
  46. Ibid. ↩︎
  47. “Pedestrians Are in Richmond on Hike,” The Richmond Item [Richmond, Indiana], September 29, 1910, 1. ↩︎
  48. Ibid. ↩︎
  49. “To Pacific Coast,” Palladium-Item [Richmond, Indiana], October 1, 1910, 2. ↩︎
  50. “Taking Walk to Pacific Coast,” Indianapolis Sun, October 12, 1910, 2. ↩︎
  51. Lake Elsinore Valley Sun-Tribune, September 30, 1910, 8. ↩︎
  52. “To Start Long Tramp,” The Dayton Herald, March 24, 1910, 12. “Walking to Pacific Coast,” Antlers News-Record [Antlers, Oklahoma], May 13, 1910, 1. ↩︎
  53. “Ocean to Ocean Walkers, Harrisburg Daily Independent, May 17, 1910, 12. “Ocean to Ocean Walkers,” Valley Spirit (Weekly) [Chambersburg, Pennsylvania], May 25, 1910, 3. ↩︎
  54. The Wichita Eagle, May 24, 1910, 4. ↩︎
  55. “Newspaper Men Are Walking to Pacific,” The Huntsville Times [Huntsville, Alabama], December 28, 1910, 7 (emphasis added). “Two Young Men on Journey 20,000 Miles,” The Sentinel [Winston-Salem, North Carolina], October 25, 1910, 2. ↩︎
  56. “Walking to Pacific Coast,” The York Dispatch [York, Pennsylvania], December 2, 1910, 15. ↩︎
  57. “Couple Start on Long Walk,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, October 20, 1910, 4 (emphasis added). ↩︎
  58. Ibid. ↩︎
  59. Ibid. ↩︎
  60. “Man and Wife Here on 8,000-Mile Tramp,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 30, 1911, 2. ↩︎
  61. Ibid. ↩︎
  62. Ibid. ↩︎
  63. Lake Elsinore Valley Sun-Tribune, September 30, 1910, 8. ↩︎
  64. “Edward Payson Weston,” The Evening Mail [Stockton, California], February 16, 1910, 4. ↩︎
  65. Gary Yanker, Gary Yanker’s Sportwalking (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1987): 9. ↩︎
  66. Matthew Algeo, Pedestrianism: When Watching People Walk Was America’s Favorite Spectator Sport (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014): 1. ↩︎
  67. Algeo, 1, 5. ↩︎
  68. “A Fool on His Travels,” The Morning Democrat [Davenport, Iowa], March 2, 1861, 2. ↩︎
  69. Algeo, 11. ↩︎
  70. Algeo, 10-11. ↩︎
  71. Algeo, 12. ↩︎
  72. “The Latest Here,” Semi-Weekly Wisconsin, December 4, 1867, 1. Algeo, 15. ↩︎
  73. Ibid. ↩︎
  74. Matthew Algeo, Pedestrianism: When Watching People Walk Was America’s Favorite Spectator Sport. ↩︎
  75. John Cumming, Runners and Walkers: A Nineteenth Century Sports Chronicle (Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1981). ↩︎
  76. “Veteran Walker to Cross the Continent,” The Salt Lake Herald-Republican [Salt Lake City, Utah], January 23, 1909, 7. ↩︎
  77. One of the earliest documented attempts at walking to the Pacific coast “for fun” was in 1895 by B.H. Mills who began in Appleton, Wisconsin. He did not complete the trip after falling ill in Baraboo, Wisconsin. See Baraboo Republic, August 21, 1895, 5. In 1902, Harris Adonis made a wager with two gentlemen in Massachusetts that he would walk across the country to San Francisco pushing s wheelbarrow. To add to the adventurer’s challenge, Adonis was required to make $500 in cash along the way without begging and he was also required to get married. According to reports out of Kansas and New York, Adonis married a Kansas girl in that summer and they continued the walk to California, arriving in the golden state in December. See “A Fair One in Dayton,” Dayton Daily News, March 18, 1902, 2; “He Has Found Wife at Last,” The Topeka Daily Capital, June 22, 1902, 6; “Trundles Wheelbarrow Across the Continent,” The San Francisco Call and Post, December 20, 1902, 9. George Tisell, a “globe trotter” from Philadelphia took on the challenge in 1905 in response to a $2000 bet. Later reports indicate he did complete this feat, earning the “world’s record for pedestrianism.” See “Walking to Pacific Coast on $2000 Bet,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 21, 1905, 6; “George W. Tisell is Out on a 2,000 Mile Jaunt,” The Omaha Daily News, July 7, 1907, 22. ↩︎
  78. The Mansfield News, February 28, 1910, 6. ↩︎
  79. “Man and Wife Here on 8,000-Mile Tramp,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 30, 1911, 2. ↩︎
  80. Smith’s Directory of LaPorte, Indiana (Gary, IN: Edgar Smith, Publisher, 1913), 88. ↩︎
  81. “Divorce Records,” The Dayton Herald, July 24, 1918, 5. Year: 1920; Census Place: Sausalito, Marin, California; Roll: T625_120; Page: 8B; Enumeration District: 103.
    ↩︎
  82. Atlanta City Directory (Atlanta, GA: Atlanta City Directory, Co., 1921), 485. ↩︎
  83. “1924 Application for Marriage License, Robert Stevens Fitzgerald and Clara Dawson Fitzgerald,” Applications, V. 13 (from p. 150) 1923-1924 Applications, v. 14-15, 1924-1925. Available on FamilySearch. ↩︎
  84. No marriage license has been located for their 1908 wedding, there is just a list of wedding dates and names available from the Third Street Presbyterian Church. It is possible that Robert had been married prior to this date but no reliable evidence to that effect has been found thus far. See: “Robert Stevens Fitzgerald Baptism Record,” Presbyterian Historical Society; Philadelphia, PA, USA; US, Presbyterian Church Records, 1701-1907; Book Title: 1903-1918. Available on Ancestry.com. ↩︎
  85. “Beauty Department, Clara D. Fitzgerald – Advertisement,” The Cincinnati Enquirer, October 9, 1921, 27. ↩︎
  86. “To Whom it May Concern,” Greenville Daily News [Greenville, Ohio], September 5, 1922, 4. ↩︎
  87. The Daily Advocate [Greenville, Ohio], January 8, 1926, 5. Year: 1930; Census Place: Tampa, Hillsborough, Florida; Page: 10A; Enumeration District: 0017; FHL microfilm: 2340053. ↩︎
  88. Year: 1930; Census Place: Tampa, Hillsborough, Florida; Page: 10A; Enumeration District: 0017; FHL microfilm: 2340053. ↩︎
  89. Year: 1940; Census Place: Dayton, Montgomery, Ohio; Roll: m-t0627-03256; Page: 10A; Enumeration District: 94-188; Williams’ Dayton City Directory (Cincinnati, OH: The Williams Directory Company, Publishers, 1942), 563; Williams’ Dayton City Directory (Cincinnati, OH: The Williams Directory Company, Publishers, 1944), 418; Williams’ Dayton City Directory (Cincinnati, OH: The Williams Directory Company, Publishers, 1946), 422. ↩︎
  90. National Archives at Washington, DC; Washington, D.C.; Seventeenth Census of the United States, 1950; Year: 1950; Census Place: Van Buren, Montgomery, Ohio; Roll: 4212; Page: 73; Enumeration District: 57-188. ↩︎
  91. “Robert S. Fitzgerald – Obituary,” Dayton Daily News, November 22, 1953. ↩︎
  92. “Robert S. Fitzgerald – Obituary,” Dayton Daily News, November 22, 1953. “Search Results for ‘Joseph H Fitzgerald’, Nearby Burials” Spring Grove, https://www.springgrove.org/locate-a-loved-one/spring-grove-cemetery/. ↩︎
  93. “1956 Application for Marriage License, Clara D. Fitzgerald and Raymond L. Hull,” Marriage licenses, Circuit Court, Wayne County, Indiana, v. 225, May 26, 1956 – Jun 30, 1956. Available on FamilySearch. On the application she also says her previous marriage ended in death in 1953. ↩︎
  94. “Clara D. Hull in the Ohio, U.S., Death Records, 1908-1932, 1938-2018.” Available on Ancestry. ↩︎

Legends and Lore for Eclipse 2024

Posted on by under Festivals and Events, Legends, Local History
Richwood Gazette [Richwood, OH], June 22, 1876, 1.

We are one week away from the 2024 total solar eclipse. So, get out your smoked glass and let’s explore a few burning questions about this cosmic phenomenon!

What makes the eclipse on April 8, 2024, a “once-in-a-lifetime” event?

Every year, there are at least two solar eclipses and about every eighteen months, there is a total solar eclipse somewhere in the world. According to NASA, “it will take about a thousand years for every geographic location in the lower 48 states to be able to view a total solar eclipse” and scientists note these eclipses “recur only once every 360 to 410 years, on average, at any given place.”1 Based on these estimates, the next solar eclipse to travel across the continental United States from coast to coast will be in 2045 and the next total solar eclipse with visibility in Ohio won’t happen until 2099. Of course, these are averages and estimates used to predict the future (and astronomers have gotten quite good at that!), but if we look to the past, we can see just how rare next week’s eclipse is for Mansfield and Ohio.

Tecumseh
Tenskwatawa
William Henry Harrison

The last time a total solar eclipse was visible in Ohio was on June 16, 1806. Mansfield, established as a city in 1808, didn’t exist yet and Ohio’s statehood was only three years old. Also known as “Tecumseh’s Eclipse, the 1806 event marked a significant moment in settler and Native American relations on the frontier.2 The prevailing legend is that, with a fraught peace treaty governing the northwest corner of Ohio (the Greenville Treaty) and a group of Native Americans fighting that treaty agreement in the Indiana Territory, General William Henry Harrison took a direct challenge to Shawnee leaders Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa. Tecumseh and his brothers were very influential figures in this area. Tenskwatawa, a Shawnee prophet, had “hundreds of devotees who followed his every word.”3 Harrison, then governor of the Indiana Territory, challenged Tenskwatawa in a letter dated April 12, 1806, saying if Tenskwatawa could perform miracles, surely, he could “cause the sun to stand still, the moon to alter its course, the rivers to cease to flow or the dead to rise from the graves.”4 Harrison wanted to discredit the Shawnee leader but only embarrassed himself in the process. Several historical accounts assert that Tenskwatawa responded to Harrison’s challenge, proclaiming that “in exactly 50 days he would make the moon cover the sun and it would be dark as night.”5 We do not know exactly when Tenskwatawa delivered his response to Harrison or whether exactly fifty days had passed when the moon moved to block the sun just before noon on June 16, 1806 (Harrison’s letter was written sixty-five days before the eclipse). At this point, solar eclipses were nothing new to European and Asian scientists and observers, but there were almost thirty years between the first documented eclipse sighting in the United States and the 1806 event – the first eclipse observed in the infant country was on June 24, 1778, visible over modern-day Louisiana.6 Therefore, it is not a stretch to suggest that the 1806 eclipse was something settlers on the frontier had never seen before. Anyone, besides Harrison, who may have doubted Tenskwatawa’s prophetic authority were awestruck by the accuracy of his prediction. Those with connections outside the territory, however, may have been granted advance notice of the coming eclipse as announcements had been printed in newspapers in Kentucky, Virginia, Maryland, and elsewhere. In fact, author Paul Cozzens noted the coming of the eclipse was “common knowledge in Detroit where [Tecumseh’s] British allies camped.”7 Regardless how Tenskwatawa came to know about the eclipse (whether he used established scientific predictions to his advantage or not), Harrison, having failed in humiliating Tenskwatawa, only grew angrier and many believe the mutual animosity boiled over five years later in the 1811 Battle of Tippecanoe that ushered in the War of 1812.8

A reproduction of the path of the solar eclipse that passed over the United States on June 24, 1778. See “Total Solar Eclipse of 6/24/1778,” Solar-Eclipse.Info, https://www.solar-eclipse.info/en/eclipse/detail/1778-06-24/.

Another popular tale out of Medina County, Ohio, suggests it was a female member of the Wyandot tribe who predicted the 1806 eclipse. In May 1806, she told others in her tribe “that a great darkness would soon fall over the Earth.”9 Unlike the story of Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, it was not the settler population that did not trust the native woman, but, rather, her own tribe that turned against her. The tribe members considered her prediction to be “a dire threat” and they accused her of practicing witchcraft.10 According to historian Charles Neil, a council of tribe leaders decided she “should suffer death by strangulation by having invoked the powers of the evil one.”11 Her fate was sealed a few weeks before the eclipse and some of the tribe members responsible for her death may have believed the eclipse was an act of dark revenge from the witch on the other side.12 This nameless woman’s story is far less common in Ohio eclipse lore likely because the details are sparse and she went to the gallows unidentified, but she is representative of the prevailing wisdom of the time. In nearby Summit County, it is reported that citizens observing the eclipse were “greatly frightened, notwithstanding the event had been foretold by some of the squaws who apparently had gotten knowledge from more enlightened white people. The squaws were not believed and were put to death for witchcraft.”13

According to the Butler County Press, the 1806 eclipse was truly a memorable one.

The 1806 eclipse was regarded by astronomers for over half a century as the most memorable one because it was seen “over all parts of North America.”14 As The Butler County Press of Hamilton, Ohio, reported in 1917, “the day was a remarkably fine one, scarcely a cloud being visible in any part of the heavens.”15 An incredible sight, surely, for those educated in such astronomical phenomena. Michael E. Bakich notes that “before 1801, eclipse observations were largely descriptive in nature and primarily made to check to the mathematical calculations of astronomers.”16 By the middle of the nineteenth century, such observations relied less on written descriptions as they could now be visually represented in a more reliable way through photography. On July 28, 1851, Johan Julius Berkowski, a photographer at the Royal Observatory in Königsberg, Prussia, took the first successful photograph of an eclipse’s totality.17

In the 218 years since Ohio saw its last total solar eclipse, so much has changed! The brief moment of darkness that comes with the totality of the eclipse is now a marvel to behold instead of the harbinger of doom it was once thought to be.

One account of the 1806 solar eclipse: Darkness at Noon, or the Great Solar Eclipse of the 16th of June, 1806 by an Inhabitant of Boston.

Why do we wear special glasses to watch the eclipse?

In anticipation of a solar eclipse in August 1869, the Delaware Gazette in Delaware, Ohio, advised its readers, “in order to observe the eclipse a common opera-glass or small telescope of any kind, provided with a shade-glass to screen the eye will prove efficient. If nothing can be obtained, a bit of plain glass, smoked over a candle or lamp, in some parts more deeply shaded than in others, in order to suit the varying intensity of the sun’s rays, will give a good view of most of the phenomena.”18 Six decades after the notable eclipse of 1806, Ohioans were less inclined to believe the Earth had plunged into the darkness of night and now viewed solar eclipses with a healthy curiosity.

An 1897 newspaper illustration of eclipse observers using their smoked glass for safety. Cincinnati Post, July 29, 1897, 1.
Path of the 1869 eclipse as shown in Scientific American, August 21, 1869, 117.

The negative effects of looking directly at the sun had long been recognized by scientists, philosophers, and the educated elite. According to Nick Thieme, Ibn al-Haytham, an Egyptian scientist in the tenth century, used the first pinhole camera to view an eclipse.19 This “camera” in its most basic form is a box with a small pinhole in one end and a translucent screen at the other. The light produced by the eclipse (or any other object) would go through the pinhole where it would be inverted and projected onto the translucent screen.20 Instead of looking directly at the eclipse, you would essentially be observing the eclipse’s shadow; better for your eyes but maybe not the most satisfying for the curious astronomer. King Louis XIV of France is credited with first utilizing smoked glass to view a full solar eclipse around 1706 – the smoked glass covering the lens of his telescope worked to dilute the harmful ultraviolet light of the sun.21 A 1798 encyclopedia published in Philadelphia notes, “the sun, tho’ [sic] to human eyes so extremely bright and splendid, is yet frequently observed, even through a telescope of but very small powers, to have dark spots on his surface. These were entirely unknown before the invention of telescopes, though they are sometimes of sufficient magnitude to be discerned by the naked eye, only looking through a smoked glass to prevent the brightness of the luminary from destroying the sight.”22 Smoked glass, in this instance, not only protected the observer’s eyes, it allowed them to see new markings on the sun and this is noted as the moment of discovery of solar spots.23 Throughout the nineteenth century, British and American newspapers understandably predicted high demand for smoked glass whenever an eclipse was on the horizon.

Vintage 1932 Eclipse-O-Scope viewer. Image found on Brian DiMambro’s website: https://briandimambro.com/products/eclipse-o-scope-1932-novelty-promo-sunglasses-mailing-envelope-w-map?variant=48115941179671.
Vintage 1932 Viz-Eclipse viewer. Image found on Vintage-Ephemera.com: https://vintage-ephemera.com/product-detail/389100157.

By the turn of the twentieth century, smoked glass was becoming less popular and new forms of eclipse eyewear emerged alongside new trends like 3D glasses. Harvey and Lewis, a New England optical supply company, and other similar ventures began producing Eclipse-o-Scope viewers in the 1930s. These were cardboard “eyeglasses” with a small sheet of protective film covering the eyeholes. A 1932 pair marketed as “Viz-Eclipse,” includes a note saying, “this material developed by research expressly for visioning the sun over extended periods without injury to the eye. Approved by Eclipse committee of the American Astronomical Society.”24 But, much like smoked glass and 3D glasses of the time, a user would have to the Eclipse-o-Scope or other viewer in front of their face and while eclipse totality is nowhere near as long as any popular 3D film, the protection offered by these early eclipse glasses was limited. In fact, by the end of World War II, at least one California physician determined smoked glass, photographic film, or even dark sunglasses are not enough protection from the sun.25 Still, others working in the fields of astronomy and physics believed as recently as 1974 that solar eclipses could be “viewed safely through a photographic negative or smoked glass.”26 Today, eclipse glasses are made from a resin containing carbon particles and are certified to meet standards approved by NASA. Contemporary eclipse glasses that you can get for free from the library before April 8, 2024, are made to “reduce the sun’s brightness by about 500,000 times;” regular sunglasses only reduce that brightness by a factor of five.27 Only time will tell if the science and fashion of eclipse eyewear have been perfected but the current sleek design that sits comfortably on your face has been in style since the 1970s.28 As long as the filters remain undamaged, eclipse glasses can be used indefinitely, but any small scratch or tear renders them unusable and it is suggested these glasses be discarded after three years.29

“Eclipse-Gazers Warned,” Mansfield News-Journal, June 22, 1954, 4.

Does the Sherman Room have any eclipse materials in their collections?

Yes! We have a few pieces, including a 2020-2021 yearbook from Clear Fork High School with an eclipse theme. In the opening spread of the book, the editors talk about the Covid-19 pandemic and the atypical year it created, concluding that, like a solar eclipse, “even in the darkest of times, light remains.”30 Our collection also includes two pairs of eclipse glasses from the August 21, 2017, eclipse. Ohio was not in the path of totality for that eclipse, but these glasses commemorate what was dubbed “The Great American Solar Eclipse” since it was the first total solar eclipse visible from coast to coast in nearly a century. The News Journal also notes the 2017 eclipse was “the first total eclipse only visible in the United States since the nation’s founding.”31 Despite falling outside the path of totality in 2017, the Mansfield/Richland County Public Library still hosted programs to commemorate the event. Similarly, there has been an array of programs offered this year in anticipation of the April 8 eclipse. We have a copy of the March 2024 “At the Library” newsletter in our collection as well as three pairs of eclipse glasses marking both the April 8 total eclipse and an annular eclipse that took place on October 14, 2023.

A sampling of the Sherman Room’s very small collection of eclipse ephemera.

Since the major history of eclipses in Ohio predates the library – and even Mansfield itself – there is an opportunity to begin preserving this history now. We encourage you to take photos (with all safety precautions in mind) or otherwise document your eclipse experience to share with your friends and family in the future. You are also welcome to donate your eclipse ephemera to the Sherman Room should you so desire, but please note that current collection policy guidelines still apply and we will not be accepting any more eclipse glasses. With seventy-five years until the next eclipse will be visible in Ohio and ninety-three until the next transit of Venus, this is our chance to document a once-in-a-lifetime event!

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Total Solar Eclipse

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Transit of Venus

  1. “Eclipses: Frequently Asked Questions,” NASA, https://science.nasa.gov/eclipses/faq/; Renee Stockdale-Homick, “Science Books and Films Presents a Read-Around-A-Theme on Solar Eclipses,” American Association for the Advancement of Science, https://www.aaas.org/resources/science-books-and-films-presents-read-around-theme-solar-eclipses. ↩︎
  2. Pam Cottrel, “The Total Solar Eclipse of 1806: How a Prediction from ‘The Prophet’ Shaped U.S.-Native American Relations, Springfield News-Sun, March 20, 2024, https://www.springfieldnewssun.com/local/the-total-solar-eclipse-of-1806-how-a-prediction-from-the-prophet-shaped-us-native-american-relations/G2W236VTUFB2TA6AZXUPQQEK6Y/. ↩︎
  3. Ibid. ↩︎
  4. Seth Borenstein, “Eclipse Lore Full of Blood, Sex, Even Some Snacking,” The Lima News [Lima, OH], August 20, 2017, 3; Sheridan Hendrix, “Fear, Awe and Tecumseh: What Was Life Like in Ohio During the 1806 Total Solar Eclipse,” The Columbus Dispatch, April 4, 2024, https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/local/2024/04/04/how-tecumseh-used-the-1806-total-eclipse-in-ohio-to-his-advantage/72931327007/. ↩︎
  5. Cottrel, “The Total Solar Eclipse of 1806.” ↩︎
  6. Michael E. Bakich, “A History of Solar Eclipses,” Astronomy, April 5, 2023, https://www.astronomy.com/science/a-history-of-solar-eclipses/. ↩︎
  7. Cottrel, “The Total Solar Eclipse of 1806.” ↩︎
  8. Ibid. ↩︎
  9. Mark J. Price, “Solar Eclipse Proved Deadly Prophesy for Indian Woman,” Akron Beacon Journal, June 6, 2016, B001 and B004. ↩︎
  10. Ibid. ↩︎
  11. Ibid. ↩︎
  12. Ibid. ↩︎
  13. Harry L. Hale, “True Tales about Ohio,” The Bluffton News [Bluffton, OH], November 20, 1958, 7. ↩︎
  14. “A Memorable Eclipse,” The Butler County Press [Hamilton, OH], January 5, 1917, 1. ↩︎
  15. Ibid. ↩︎
  16. Bakich, “A History of Solar Eclipses.” ↩︎
  17. Ibid. ↩︎
  18. “The Eclipse,” Delaware Gazette [Delaware, OH], August 6, 1869, 3. ↩︎
  19. Nick Thieme, “A Brief History of Eclipse Glasses and the People Who Forgot to Wear Them,” Slate, August 18, 2017, https://slate.com/technology/2017/08/a-history-of-eclipse-glasses-and-injuries.html. ↩︎
  20. Keith Gibbs, “The Pinhole Camera,” SchoolPhysics, 2020, https://www.schoolphysics.co.uk/age11-14/Light/text/Pinhole_camera/index.html; “Pinhole Camera,” March 15, 2021, https://scalar.chapman.edu/scalar/ah-331-history-of-photography-spring-2021-compendium/trinity-hall-essay-1. ↩︎
  21. Thieme, “A Brief History of Eclipse Glasses and the People Who Forgot to Wear Them.” ↩︎
  22. Thomas Dobson, Colin Macfarquhar, and George Gleig, Encyclopedia: Or, A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Miscellaneous Literature . . . and an Account of the Lives of the Most Eminent Persons in Every Nation, from the Earliest Ages Down to the Present Times (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson at the Stone House, 1798): 433. ↩︎
  23. Ibid. ↩︎
  24. “1932 Eclipse-O-Scope – Harvey and Lewis Opticians,” Vintage-Ephemera.com, https://vintage-ephemera.com/product-detail/389100157. ↩︎
  25. Thieme, “A Brief History of Eclipse Glasses and the People Who Forgot to Wear Them.” ↩︎
  26. “Eclipse Can Be Seen,” The Akron Beacon Journal, December 10, 1974, 18. ↩︎
  27. Thieme, “A Brief History of Eclipse Glasses and the People Who Forgot to Wear Them.” ↩︎
  28. Roger Sarkis, “History of Eclipse Glasses,” Eclipse Glasses USA, August 10, 2023, https://eclipse23.com/blogs/eclipse-education/history-of-eclipse-glasses. ↩︎
  29. Mindy Weisberger, “Will Your Eclipse Glasses Still Be Safe to Use in 2024,” LiveScience, August 25, 2017, https://www.livescience.com/60237-do-solar-eclipse-glasses-expire.html. ↩︎
  30. Clear Fork High School, Eclipse (Bellville, OH: 2021), 3, Sherman Room.   ↩︎
  31. Courtney McNaull, “How to Safely View the Solar Eclipse,” News Journal, August 16, 2017, A1. ↩︎

Tappan Into the Eclipse

Posted on by under Biography, Local History, Photographers

One of the more prominent businesses to make its home in Mansfield was the Tappan Stove Company. But before the Tappan family found success under their own name, they were running the Eclipse Stove Company. This is not the story of that company, but, rather, the story that supposedly led to the inspired choice of Eclipse as the company’s name. Legend has it that after an 1889 fire destroyed their factory in Bellaire, Ohio, the decision was made to move the factory to Mansfield and rebrand with a nod to an astronomical phenomenon. In a 1966 News-Journal story, it is claimed that the Eclipse name was chosen to honor a late nineteenth century trip W.J. Tappan’s father, T.S., had taken to Siberia to photograph a solar eclipse.1 T.S. did indeed travel to Siberia but it was to photograph an eclipse of a different kind – the transit of Venus.

The Eclipse Stove Company manufacturing complex in Mansfield. Photo featured in Scott Schaut, Historic Mansfield: A Bicentennial History (San Antonio, TX: Historical Publishing Network, 2010): 28.
A group of Eclipse Stove Company factory workers posing outside one of the factory buildings. Photo featured in Scott Schaut, Historic Mansfield: A Bicentennial History (San Antonio, TX: Historical Publishing Network, 2010): 28.

According to an 1869 piece in Scientific American Magazine, “a transit is nothing less than an eclipse of the sun by an inferior planet, the passage of either Venus or Mercury directly between the earth and the sun, so that their disks partially obscure its face, and appear as round, dark spots upon it. Conventional usage has limited the term eclipse of the sun to the obscuration of its disk by the moon, and transit to the same effect produced by the passage of Venus and Mercury between the earth and the sun, although there is no essential difference in the nature of the phenomena.”2 In reporting on the anticipated eclipses of the twentieth century, The Mansfield News wrote in November 1899, “The total solar eclipses visible in the United States will occur in 1918, 1923, 1925, 1945, 1954, 1979, 1984, and 1994. There will be 12 transits of Mercury, the first in 1907; but the more important transit of Venus will not occur, its next date being June 8, 2004.”3 While there are at least two solar eclipses every year, the transit of Venus is a very rare event, occurring four times every 243 years in a predictable and easy to remember patter of 105.5 years, 8 years, 121.5 years, 8 years.4 That essentially means when Venus does show her lovely face to the Earth, she will do it twice in fairly close succession before disappearing again for a long stretch of time. When T.S. Tappan was sent to Siberia in 1874 (and to New Mexico in 1882) as part of a government expedition to study the transit of Venus, his photographs would be some of both the first and last physical photographs of the event. Prior observations of the transit of Venus predated the invention of photography and subsequent instances came after the shift to digital photography, or, as astronomer William Harkness put it in 1882, “When the last transit season occurred the intellectual world was awakening from the slumber of ages, and that wondrous scientific activity which has led to our present advanced knowledge was just beginning.”5 Venus made its most recent trips across the sun in 2004 and 2012, but, sadly, the next event of this kind is not predicted to occur until December 21176 and, just as Harkness knew in 1882, “not even our children’s children will live to take part in the astronomy of that day”7 (for many of us, it’s not very likely will still be around in ninety-three years to see the next transit).

Many of the men involved in the 1874 transit expeditions met in Washington, D.C. in the Spring of 1874 for a practice session to familiarize themselves with the equipment they would be using. From the Asaph Hall papers at the Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/93516258/.

As the first nineteenth century transit of Venus approached, there was great excitement in the global scientific community. For centuries, since the first predicted transit in December 1631, one of the greatest unsolved problems in the history of astronomy had been “the accurate determination of the distance of the Sun from the Earth, and thus the scale of the solar system.”8 It was hoped that advancements in technology, particularly the addition of photography, would allow more accurate measurements to be collected and, thus, an answer to the great question of the universe – the scale of the solar system – could finally be determined. Russia, Great Britain, the United States, France, Germany, Italy, and Holland all organized scientific expeditions to document and study the 1874 transit, with one nineteenth century scholar commenting, “Every country which had a reputation to keep or gain for scientific zeal was forward to co-operate in the great cosmopolitan enterprise of the transit.”9 Despite the Russian government investing in twenty-six expedition teams of their own, the United States still insisted on sending a team of researchers to Siberia. There may have been one shared mission at the heart of each country’s expedition plan, but this was by no means a cooperative endeavor amongst the seven countries preparing for the transit.

While the majority of the European countries with expedition teams devoted great attention to “securing the best photographs,” the American organizers sought to take measurements from the photographs themselves which would require a vastly different approach to setting up and working with the camera.10 Thus, the Americans set about equipping their teams with a fixed horizontal telescope with a 40-foot focal length that would direct sunlight to a heliostat (“a slowly turning mirror that kept the Sun’s image stationary with respect to the telescope”).11 The lens and heliostat mirror would be mounted on a four-foot iron pier embedded in concrete (imagine traveling with that!). The lens would create an image that was four inched in diameter and projected onto a photographic plate placed 38.5 feet away on another concrete mount.12 Compared to the solar eclipse coming up on April 8, 2024, which will last 2.5 hours with only four minutes and twenty-eight seconds of totality, the 1874 transit of Venus was anticipated to last close to four hours.13 Still, that is a small window of time for the work astronomers were hoping to complete.

The complexities of the specialized equipment made for the expeditions are shown here. “A weight driven heliostat directs the Sun’s rays through a lens, which focuses the image onto a photographic plate 38.5 feet away.” See Simon Newcomb, Popular Astronomy (New York: Haughton and Mifflin, 1878): 186.

On March 3, 1871, Congress approved a $2,000 expenditure for “preparing instruments” for an expedition.14 Superintendent of the U.S. Naval Observatory, Commodore B.F. Sands, petitioned Congress for an additional $150,000, stating that the transit of Venus was “one of the rarest and most interesting phenomena in astronomy” and an expedition for its observation “will afford our countrymen a peculiarly favorable opportunity to exercise their inventive ingenuity in the introduction of improved modes of observation.”15 In total, $177,000 was invested in the 1874 expedition, which included eight separate teams of astronomers and photographers.16 Not a single one of these groups was actually stationed on the continental United States – three teams were sent to Asia, four to Australia, and one to Antarctica. Otto Struve, an astronomer with the Russian Academy, wrote to Simon Newcomb in the United States in February 1873, recommending “the coast region [by] Wladivostok [sic] should be chosen as principal station on the part of the Americans.”17 Of the eight teams, there was no specified “principal expedition, but the Kansas City Weekly places the Valdivostock team including T.S. Tappan at the top of their list when reporting on the expeditions and the New York Daily Herald dedicated an entire page to this group and their work, giving special credence to the Siberian station.18 Headed by Professor Asaph Hall of the United States Navy, Tappan was appointed as the assistant photographer, bringing the desired skills of a “young gentleman of education . . . who had been practiced in chemical and photographic manipulation.”19 The group set sail for Vladivostock in July 1874, a journey that took a little over a month, to await the main event of December 9, 1874.20 Unfortunately, poor weather on the day of the transit meant the group only secured thirteen photographs but those were good enough to be fully reproduced in the New York Daily Herald in February 1875.21 When Tappan was called upon to photograph the transit of Venus again in 1882, he and principal photographer of the New Mexico expedition, D.C. Chapman, produced the highest volume of usable photographs of any expedition group that year, with a total of 216.22

Headline from the New York Daily Herald advertising the observations in Siberia and the photographs of Venus. New York Daily Herald, February 17, 1875.
Thirteen segment photos from Tappan’s 1874 expedition team as reproduced in the New York Daily Herald, February 17, 1875.

According to the Directory of Indiana Photographers, Thomas Shaw Tappan was born in Cincinnati, Hamilton County, Ohio on October 28, 1838, the youngest son of Benjamin Tappan and Elizabeth Shaw.23 It is said that Tappan “developed a remarkable reputation as a photographer in Cincinnati, then Wheeling [West Virginia]” and the Directory of Indiana Photographers lists him as owning three studios in Noblesville, Hamilton County, Indiana between 1861 and 1866.24 IRS tax assessments from 1863-1865 confirm Tappan was working as a photographer in Noblesville.25 The spelling of Tappan’s surname is inconsistent in these tax assessments and his various photography studios and businesses were commonly listed under “Tappin,” which makes a thorough record of his work and whereabouts difficult to produce with absolute certainty of its accuracy. In the summer of 1863, twenty-four-year-old Tappan’s name appears in a draft record for the U.S. Civil War.26 Family histories like Jay Tappan Gilbert’s 1969 book do not mention anything about Tappan serving in the war but Gilbert suggests that it was likely around this time that Tappan “became associated with Mr. Leon Van Loo,” a photographer and artist most famous for introducing the “ideal” style of photography in which images “were printed on zinc oxide and applied to blackened sheet-iron.”27 What had prompted Tappan’s move to Noblesville is uncertain but by 1873, he was once again in Cincinnati, being found in the city’s directory listed as an artist.28 Newspapers and other records of the time offer scant commentary on Tappan’s artistic credentials, but it would seem an association with the famous Van Loo could only have drawn interest to Tappan when the Venus expeditions were being planned. Tappan’s relationship with Van Loo was evidently so influential and important to him that he named his youngest son Leon Van Loo Tappan.29

This portrait of Thomas Tappan and a feathered friend was taken at either his Bellaire or Wheeling studio. See Jay Tappan Gilbert, Tappan Family History, 26.

Tappan wrote many letters during his time away from home in 1874 and the Sherman Room has a small collection of those letters in our collection. He appears to have developed a particular fascination with Japan where his group had briefly stayed before making the final leg of their journey to Vladivostock. According to The Cincinnati Daily Star, Tappan “found in Japan a Cincinnatian, who has established himself very successfully at Sepparo, Island of Yesso, in the manufacture of flour.”30 Even a decade later, and after observing another transit of Venus, Japan was still on Tappan’s mind when he was invited to give a lecture to the Columbia Club in Wheeling, West Virginia. He told those in attendance about “the country, its people, their manners and customs, their religion, etc.”31 He concluded his talk with a display of Japanese fireworks he had acquired on the trip (one can only hope the presentation was outdoors).32

By the time Tappan was called upon again to capture the transit of Venus in 1882, he and his family had relocated to Wheeling, West Virginia. The family is shown in Bellaire, Ohio in an 1880 census, but by the next year, The Dail Register of Wheeling was proudly proclaiming Tappan “our photographer.”33 With only five miles between the two cities, Tappan may have maintained businesses in both cities, and he gave each city a boost of notoriety when he left for New Mexico in 1882. He first traveled to Washington, D.C. to join the rest of the expedition but he showed particular excitement for what he might find out West. The Wheeling Daily Intelligencer reports he took a rifle with him should he encounter and prime buffalo, deer, or other such game.34 For his efforts and photographic expertise in New Mexico, Tappan would be paid “three dollars a day and five dollars for subsistence and all other personal expenses.”35 He was once again an assistant photographer on the expedition but the Las Cruces Sun-News in New Mexico notes he had the foresight to document to occasion for posterity, writing, “the assistant Photographer, Mr. T.S. Tappan, of Bellaire [?], arranged the whole party in a group with the queer-looking buildings and the whole country for a background, and there photographed us. It was a noble group (our majestic figure in near the centre [sic]) and represented Science supported by Literature, and protected by Military Force.”36 Though Tappan promised to furnish the paper with a print of the photo, no extant copy has been located to prove he kept his word.

A portrait of Mary Elizabeth Stuart Tappan ostensibly taken by her husband, Thomas Shaw Tappan. Jay Tappan Gilbert, Tappan Family History, 26.

Tappan married Mary Elizabeth Steward [Stuart] on December 7, 1858.37 Together, they had four children: William Jared (1860-1936), Thomas S. (1865-1945), Katie Lavonda (1872-1902), and Leon Van Loo (1879-1939).38 In 1881, William Jared, along with J.M. Maring and W.A. Gorby, purchased the Ohio Valley Foundry Company in Bellaire, Ohio. This company, specializing in the manufacture of cast iron stoves, was the earliest precursor to the Tappan Stove Company.39 After a devastating fire in 1889, the company relocated to Mansfield and The Evening News in Mansfield announced the company had” been granted a new charter under the new name of Eclipse Stove Company by which it will hereafter be known.”40 Eclipse Stove Company was incorporated in 1918 but William Jared and his business partners soon discovered there was another Eclipse Stove Company operating out of Illinois. In a mutual decision, both companies decided to change their names and in 1921, William Jared’s company was rebranded one final time as the Tappan Stove Company.41 Thomas Shaw Tappan had little, if any, direct involvement with his son’s stove company, but when he passed away in October 1906, the shops of the Eclipse Stove Company were closed for his funeral.42 Whether inspiring the branding of kitchenware or the work of astronomers of the twenty-first century and beyond, Thomas Shaw Tappan’s eclipse legacy is one that won’t soon be forgotten.

  1. Paul L. White, “This is the Mansfield That Was,” News Journal, May 15, 1966, 5. ↩︎
  2. “The Transits of Venus in 1874 and 1882,” Scientific American Magazine 20, No. 18(May 1869), 281. ↩︎
  3. The Mansfield News, November 19, 1899, 9. Emphasis added. ↩︎
  4. Michael E. Bakich, “What are Solar Eclipses and How Often Do They Occur,” Astronomy, March 20, 2024, https://www.astronomy.com/observing/how-often-do-solar-eclipses-occur/; Steven J. Dick, Sky and Ocean Joined: The U.S. Naval Observatory, 1830-2000 (Cambridge, U.K. and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003): 241. ↩︎
  5. William Harkness, “Address by William Harkness,” Proceedings of the AAAS 31st Meeting . . . August 1882 (Salem, 1883), 77 as quoted in Dick, Sky and Ocean Joined, 238. ↩︎
  6. “Transit of Venus,” Wikipedia, March 14, 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_of_Venus. ↩︎
  7. Harkness, “Address by William Harkness.” ↩︎
  8. Dick, Sky and Ocean Joined, 238. ↩︎
  9. Dick, Sky and Ocean Joined, 243. ↩︎
  10. Dick, Sky and Ocean Joined, 245. ↩︎
  11. Ibid. ↩︎
  12. Dick, Sky and Ocean Joined, 245-246. ↩︎
  13. NBC Chicago Staff, “How Long Will April’s Solar Eclipse Last? It Depends on Where You’re Located,” 5 Chicago, March 24, 2024, https://www.nbcchicago.com/solar-eclipse-illinois-2024/how-long-will-aprils-solar-eclipse-last-it-depends-on-where-youre-located/3391935/; “1874 Transit of Venus,” Wikipedia, February 7, 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1874_transit_of_Venus#cite_note-2. ↩︎
  14. Dick, Sky and Ocean Joined, 244. ↩︎
  15. Dick, Sky and Ocean Joined, 247. ↩︎
  16. According to data from Steven J. Dick, a minimum of $34,000 was spent to supply all 8 teams with the same specialized equipment. See Dick, Sky and Ocean Joined, 248. ↩︎
  17. Dick, Sky and Ocean Joined, 253, n.19. ↩︎
  18. “Venus,” Kansas City Journal, December 6, 1882, 5; “Transit of Venus,” New York Daily Herald, February 17, 1875, 3. ↩︎
  19. Dick, Sky and Ocean Joined, 253. ↩︎
  20. According to a letter dated September 14, 1874, the total journey from Ohio to Vladivostok took 56 days. See Jay Tappan Gilbert, Tappan Family History (Mansfield, OH, 1969): 27. ↩︎
  21. Dick, Sky and Ocean Joined, 259; “Transit of Venus,” New York Daily Herald, February 17, 1875. As of 2003, it is reported that none of the photographs from the 1874 transit expeditions survived. See Dick, Sky and Ocean Joined, 261. ↩︎
  22. Dick, Sky and Ocean Joined, 267. ↩︎
  23. “Tappin, Thomas Shaw, Sr.,” in Joan E. Hostetler, Directory of Indiana Photographers (Indianapolis, IN: The Indiana Album, Inc., 2021),np, https://indianaalbum.com/photographers/data/PersonData1-CATNUM-322.html; Jay Tappan Gilbert, Tappan Family History (Mansfield, OH, 1969): 10. ↩︎
  24. Hostetler, Directory of Indiana Photographers. ↩︎
  25. “U.S., IRS Tax Assessment Lists, 1962-1918 for Thomas S Tappan,” Indiana – District 11; Annual Lists; 1863. Available through Ancestry.com; “U.S., IRS Tax Assessment Lists, 1962-1918 for Thos S Tappin,” Indiana – District 11; Monthly Lists; Jan-July 1864. Available through Ancestry.com; “U.S., IRS Tax Assessment Lists, 1862-1918 for Thos S Tappen,” Indiana – District 11; Annual Lists; 1865. Available through Ancestry.com. ↩︎
  26. “U.S., Civil War Draft Registrations Records, 1863-1865 for Thomas S Tappin,” Indiana – 11th – Class 1, T-Z, Volume 3 of 6. Available through Ancestry.com. ↩︎
  27. Gilbert, Tappan Family History, 25; Alexandra Daniels, “Leon Van Loo: A Man of Many Talents,” Special Collections and University Archives, NKU, December 5, 2013, https://nkuarchives.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/leon-van-loo-a-man-of-many-talents/. ↩︎
  28. Williams’ Cincinnati Directory for 1872-73, 817. Available on Ancestry.com. ↩︎
  29. See Gilbert, Tappan Family History, 10; “U.S., World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918 for Leon Vanloo Tappan,” Ohio – Richland County – All – Draft Card T. Available on Ancestry.com. ↩︎
  30. The Cincinnati Daily Star, March 5, 1875, 4. ↩︎
  31. “An Interesting Lecture,” Wheeling Sunday Register, November 29, 1885, 3. ↩︎
  32. Ibid. ↩︎
  33. “1880 United States Federal Census for Thomas Tappan,” Ohio – Belmont – Bellaire – 026. Available on Ancestry.com; The Daily Register [Wheeling, W.V.], April 8, 1881, 4. ↩︎
  34. The Wheeling Daily Intelligencer, November 4, 1882, 4. ↩︎
  35. Gilbert, Tappan Family History, 27. ↩︎
  36. “Transit of Venus,” Las Cruces Sun-News [Las Cruces, NM], December 9, 1992, 3. ↩︎
  37. “Ohio, U.S., County Marriage Records, 1774-1993 for Thomas S. Tappin,” Hamilton – 1858-1860. Available on Ancestry.com. ↩︎
  38. Gilbert, Tappan Family History, 10. ↩︎
  39. Richard D. Witchey Jr. interview with P. R. Tappan, retired Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Tappan Company, May 22, 1964. See Richard D. Witchey Jr., “Industrial Growth of An Enterprise: A Study of the Tappan Company,” Master’s Thesis (Kent State University, 1966), 5. ↩︎
  40. “The City in Brief,” The Evening News [Mansfield, OH], January 20, 1891, 4. ↩︎
  41. Witchey Jr., “Industrial Growth of an Enterprise,”20. ↩︎
  42. “Closed for Funeral,” The Mansfield News, October 29, 1902, 6. ↩︎

From Mansfield to Mexico: Community Investment in the Pan American Planters Company

Posted on by under Industry, Local History

In early August 1916, Roy Antibus received a letter from an old friend, L. N. Loiselle, detailing the harrowing experience of Loiselle and his wife as they were “evacuated” from Vera Cruz, Mexico. According to Loiselle, “On June 20 they [Americans living in Vera Cruz] were all notified to go on shipboard [to the steamship Nebraska] for protection” where they were held for ten days.1 Loiselle and the other Americans had been instructed to take nothing with them except the clothes they were wearing, which resulted in Loiselle and his wife losing approximately $500 worth of valuables when their trunks were broken into at the large plantation house they had been living in. It was expected that war would be declared by the United States (not just to protect Loiselle and the other Americans in Mexico), but no such declaration was made and Loiselle tells Antibus that “a great amount of this pillage could have been stopped had President Wilson blockaded all the Mexican ports while the natives were fighting their differences among themselves.”2 Loiselle was writing from the front lines of the Mexican Revolution. In their report of this dramatic letter, The Mansfield News notes that Loiselle had left Mansfield in 1908 “to become manager of a plantation of 5,000 acres near Vera Cruz.”3 According to the newspaper’s editors, “all went well until the revolutions began.”4 Loiselle would only slightly disagree with this assessment, as he wrote in a 1917 affidavit for the American Consul in Mexico, “I came to Mexico in 1908 as General Manager of the Pan American Planters Co., a corporation then existing under the laws of the State of Indiana, on a ten years contract. The company gave me money to come to Mexico but failed to send any further funds. . . . I have been endeavoring to put through proceedings to sell the property which is located in a district controlled by the rebels.”5 So how did Loiselle find himself working for an Indiana company in the heart of Mexico at the height of the Mexican Revolution?

Louis Napoleon Loiselle in his 1920 passport photo
A clipping from The Mansfield News, June 24, 1910.
Loiselle’s Bakery as seen in The Mansfield News, December 17, 1899.

Louis Napoleon Loiselle was born in Montreal, Canada, on November 2, 1858, the first born of Edward and Rose Loiselle. The family immigrated to the United States in late 1862, settling in Keene, New Hampshire. According to A. J. Baughman’s 1901 Centennial Biographical History of Richland County, Loiselle came to Mansfield in 1885 where he spent several years traveling as a representative of John W. Wagner’s “wholesale hardware establishment.”6 Loiselle later became associated with Crawford & Taylor, proprietors of a wholesale bakery. By January 1893, Loiselle had fully invested in the baking business and purchased the Uhlich bakery at Main and Bloom.7 It is unclear how much training Loiselle received in the actual process of baking but he was apparently so confident in his products that he took out advertisements in the top right margin of every other page of the 1894 Mansfield city directory – that equates to 75 one-line advertisements. These ads boast about “all leading grocers sell[ing] Loiselle’s bread, buns and rolls” and announce that “Loiselle leads the procession in fine bread, pies, cakes, buns, etc.”8 They also indicate that the bakery had moved into a new location at 7-9-11 North Sugar Street and had a secondary space at 159-161 N. Main. Loiselle moved quickly in the world of confections! In January 1900, he catered a celebratory dinner for the employees of The Mansfield News9 and the bakery became a favored meeting place for the Mansfield Lyceum and the trustees of the city union.10 Loiselle was even appointed to the Weights and Measures committee of the Mansfield Chamber of Commerce in 1902. It is no wonder A.J. Baughman had called Loiselle “one of the most prominent, influential and successful citizens of Mansfield, Ohio” in 1901.11

Loiselle’s bakery in the 1894 city directory.

As Loiselle’s business continued to grow and expand into a leading producer of purified milk and quality ice cream, Loiselle joined Roy Antibus and Byron Balliett in organizing “a business men’s bicycle club” of which Loiselle was elected president.12 He and Balliett also helped make Gatton’s Rocks in Bellville, Ohio, “a favorite summer resort” in the late 1890s.13 It is entirely possible that Loiselle’s circle of prominent friends at this time brought him into contact with Silas Arthur Jennings who, in his capacity as cashier of the Citizens’ National Bank in Mansfield, had traveled to Mexico in 1904 to inspect the Santa Isabel plantation operated by the Pan American Planters Company.14

“Bicycle Club,” Richland Shield and Banner, May 2, 1896, 2.

In a talk given by Jennings in March 1904, he praised the work being done on the plantation and The Mansfield News noted that “many Mansfield people” held interest in the plantation. It is unclear when Loiselle first became involved with the Pan American Planters Company, but his wife, Sara, wrote in 1919 that her husband was a stockholder in the company prior to their move to Mexico.15 Perhaps it was Loiselle’s passion for bicycles that attracted him to this venture in rubber cultivation or perhaps he was enticed by advertisements promising “a real estate investment of absolute security.”16 As Irving S. Hoffman, general manager of the Mansfield Telephone Company, said in 1903, “rubber culture is still in its infancy in Mexico but it is going to become a great industry in the near future.”17 After traveling to the Santa Isabel plantation, Hoffman was reportedly “enthusiastic over the possibilities.”18 Unlike Hoffman, Loiselle was a silent investor at best since he made no public statements related to his interest in the company prior to be called to Mexico in 1908.

The Mansfield News, October 4, 1904.
Popular Mechanics 3, no. 20 (May 16, 1903): 319.

The Pan American Planters Company was certainly not alone in establishing a presence in Mexico. In fact, a Missouri company (incorporated under the laws of South Dakota) owned land adjacent to the Santa Isabel plantation. So close were the two properties they employed the same plantation manager, James Brydon.19 The Indianapolis Journal suggests Brydon was a Mexican citizen, which makes it difficult to track his professional work beyond the few trips he made to Elwood, Indiana; St. Joseph, Missouri; and Mansfield to promote the plantations he managed.20 The India Rubber World, a leading magazine for the rubber industry, says Brydon joined both plantation ventures with “ten years’ experience in Mexico” while The Mexican Herald notes Brydon’s “long residence on the Isthmus” helped him gain “an intimate knowledge of the conditions necessary to carry to a successful issue an enterprise of this nature. He is widely and favorably known among Isthmus planters.”21 Countless advertisements soliciting investors through local newspapers in Mansfield and Elwood, Indiana, put a lot of confidence behind Brydon, promising “experienced and honest management.”22

Prospective investors in Mansfield were also likely to find it reassuring that Mansfield and Ohio were prominently represented on the advertised board of the company. Counted among the top brass were Charles Foster, former Governor of Ohio and former Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, and Charles Henry Voegele, manager of the confectionary company Voegele & Dinning. In the May 2, 1903 issue of Popular Mechanics, Voegele and Foster are the first two men listed under Officers and Directors. In fact, Charles Foster had served as the company’s president since its incorporation in 1900.23 His role as a former Secretary of the U.S. Treasury surely bolstered trust in the company for early investors. Although the company reportedly closed a deal in July 1905 for the erection of a sugar mill on the plantation property, things seemed to start falling apart following the death of Charles Foster in 1904.24

A lengthy and descriptive advertisement for the Voegele & Dinning Company from The Mansfield News, July 1, 1911.

We see, at least in Elwood where company reports were published far more frequently, classified ads for the sale of company stock. What these ads suggest is that at least one person in that city was trying to offload their stock and they were willing to take a 10% loss in their sale.25

Pan American Planters stock for sale, The Call-Leader, May 9, 1905.

News of the company dries up after that and in 1907, George H. Gilpatrick, one of the company’s eight directors, abandoned the company entirely in favor of running a drug store. The Elwood Daily Record cited Gilpatrick as saying “the Nomad life” of traveling to sell stock in the Santa Isabel plantation “was not to his liking and he cut out.”26 A 1904 advertisement in The Wayne County Democrat in Wooster, Ohio, indicates the company had a contract for “the development and equipment of the property for seven years, ending October 1, 1909,”27 but whether that 1909 date remained firm in the years after this advertisement was published is debatable since no other mentions of it in the press have been found. It is further debatable that the company held firm to this 1909 date if they offered Loiselle a ten-year contract in 1908.

Another Ohioan enticed by the promises of the Pan American Planters Company was Professor John C. Boyd of Wooster. In June 1904, he announced his resignation from the University of Wooster to “take up business” with the company and had even traveled to Mexico earlier that year to visit another Ohio man (J. E. Carnahan) who was president of the Tuxtepec Plantation company in Mexico City.28 Boyd’s direct involvement with the company in 1905-1906 shows the same pattern as Gilpatrick and others. According to the 1911 yearbook for the University of Wooster, Boyd returned to Ohio and took up work as a high school principal in Doylestown and school superintendent in Seville before returning to the University of Wooster in 1909.29 The Wayne County Democrat further clarifies that Boyd never permanently left Ohio and worked as a special agent in the state for Pan American Planters selling shares in the plantation.30 What prompted Boyd to abandon his sales job in that time remains a mystery.

John C. Boyd in The Wooster Voice XIX, no. 2 (September 29, 1909): 2.

As news of the company dwindled in the U.S., American companies in Mexico like the Pan American Planters Company were enjoying a robust relationship with the Mexican government. Mexican president, Porfirio Diaz, had made it a priority (building off the goals of his predecessor, Benito Juarez) to court foreign investment from the United States and Europe. According to John A. Crow, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were “the golden age of Mexican economics” for the elite classes where one peso was worth 3.2 dollars.31 This led to rapid but highly unequal economic growth in Mexico and by the early 1900s, there was growing unrest within the working classes. Diaz had systematically worked to suppress worker’s unions through force of the police and army but workers still began to organize and orchestrate labor strikes. In 1906, a strike at the U.S.-owned Cananea Consolidated Copper Company resulted in 23 deaths at the hands of U.S. marshals who had crossed the border from Arizona. This strike and the violence that followed were evidence of the growing labor unrest in Mexico and the fact that Diaz’s regime did nothing in response to the U.S.’s outright violation of Mexican sovereignty only heightened tensions.32 Although we have no direct evidence, it is possible that Gilpatrick and others with the Pan American Planters Company saw this as a warning of what was to come and chose to get out of the Mexican enterprise before it was too late. That is, everyone it would seem except Louis Loiselle.

A crowd of Mexican workers during the 1906 miners’ strike in Cananea, Mexico.  Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-88749 (b&w film copy neg.)//www.loc.gov/resource/cph.3b35165/.

In April 1908, The Weekly News in Mansfield reported that Loiselle and his wife had recently returned from a trip to Mexico and were “contemplating removing to that country” early in the fall.33 The particulars of what Loiselle observed on this trip to Mexico were not disclosed in the press at that time but any uneasiness he may have had did not deter him from “dispos[ing] of all his interests and holdings in the Loiselle Bread & Milk Co.” and resigning as the company’s treasurer and general manager in August 1908.34 He was apparently all in on the Santa Isabel plantation and the Loiselles sailed for Vera Cruz in early October.35 The pair were visited at Christmastime the following year by Loiselle’s old friend Roy Antibus who, according to The Mansfield News, viewed the Loiselle “pineapple plantation” as “quite an enterprise and liable to develop into a big thing.” The paper additionally reported that Antibus saw “the Mansfield people’s rubber plantation” while in the country.36 Loiselle’s 1917 account indicates that he was funding the plantation’s daily operations at this point out of his own pocket, allowing him to keep up appearances for visitors like Antibus, but in 1911, Loiselle “started court proceedings to recover the money due me.”37 He “obtained a judgment against myself as agent in 1914” and began almost desperately trying to sell the property.38 As he wrote to friend B. J. Balliett in May 1914, he and his wife fled the plantation “at the first sign of outbreak” but they had no intention of returning to the United States “unless compelled to do so” because they still had business interests in the country.39 According to Loiselle’s letter, the Mexican authorities “wished us to leave as they could not give us protection from the hoodlums they feared, in reality, bandits who have become quite numerous through our section.”40 Ironically, when Loiselle was still fighting for the money owed to him and the fighting was still raging in Mexico, The Mansfield News reported that the “big plantation” Loiselle was managing “has not suffered to any extent during the revolution in that country.”41 We know that Loiselle and his wife had lost property when the plantation was looted in 1916 which The Mansfield News had reported a year before they declared everything was fine, but, then again, they admitted in a 1914 article that they were slightly basing their judgment of the crisis in Mexico on the fact Loiselle, a steady subscriber of the newspaper, “has never sent any notice to have [his address in Mexico] changed.”42

At the time of Loiselle’s move down to Mexico in 1908, Porfirio Diaz, who had been in power for close to thirty years, indicated to an American journalist that he was planning to retire. In Diaz’s words, Mexico was ready for democracy and a true presidential election to determine his successor.43 The promise of Diaz’s retirement was shortlived as was a peaceful transition of power but Diaz wanted to secure U.S. support for his seventh run as Mexican president. In October 1909, he invited U.S. President Willaim Howard Taft to an unprecedented meeting in El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. Taft agreed to the meeting, according to historians Charles H. Harris and Louis R. Sadler, specifically to protect the billions of dollars in American capital invested in Mexican industry.44 At the time, U.S. businesses controlled close to “90 percent of Mexico’s mineral resources, its national railroad, its oil industry, and, increasingly, its land.”45 As the Mexican election of 1910 approached, Diaz was challenged by Francisco I. Madero.

William Howard Taft and Porfirio Diaz in the Ciudad Juarez Customs House, October 10, 1909. Available through the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/91789772.    

Historian Friedrich Katz claims that although Diaz’s regime was growing increasingly unpopular with Mexican civilians, “there was no foreboding in 1910 that a revolution was about to break out.”46 That is until Diaz ordered Madero to be jailed and Madero called for an armed uprising against him. Diaz was forced to resign in May 1911 and fled to Spain. Despite Diaz’s ousting as president, not everyone supported the newly elected Madero and he faced armed opposition from Emiliano Zapata, leader of the Liberation Army of the South whose forces had defeated the Federal Army in May 1911 leading to Diaz’s resignation. Madero and his vice president, Pino Suarez, were forced to resign in early 1913 following a coup d’etat staged by military leaders from the former Diaz regime and a new president, Victoriano Huerta, assumed control of the country. Huerta swiftly orchestrated the assassination of Madero and Suarez, which ingnited a new fight led by Venustiana Carranza. Huerta was ousted in July 1914, but the bloody fighting continued with Carranza on one side and Francisco “Pancho” Villa on the other.47 In his 1916 letter to Roy Antibus, Loiselle called Carranza “a worse bandit than Villa.”48 According to Loiselle, “Carranza took all the silver money from the people and compelled them to accept paper money which he thinks will always be worthless. . . . After Carranza had taken the money from the people, Villa took the land from them.”49 In Loiselle’s view, the situation in Mexico was lose-lose for the Mexican people. He, on the other hand, had secured a good job as a street commissioner during the American occupation of Vera Cruz but the money to pay Americans soon dried up.50 Carranza became president of Mexico in 1917 and served until the end of the revolution in 1920.

Loiselle and his wife remained in Mexico until 1925.51 According to Sara Loiselle’s 1919 passport application, she and her husband had lived in Vera Cruz until 1918 and then moved to Tampico where he had secured work with the Standard Oil Company.52 Much like G.H. Gilpatrick, Loiselle went into the drug store business upon his return to the United States. By 1932, he was operating the Loiselle drug store at 16 North Diamond Street,53 but they sold the business in early 1937 as Loiselle was approaching 78 years old and it became Kerr’s Medicine Store.54

An advertisement for Kerr’s Medicine Store, formerly, Loiselle’s, The Mansfield News-Journal, May 15, 1937, 2.

Loiselle passed away on June 24, 1939, at the age of 80. His obituary in the Mansfield News Journal states he “operated the Loiselle Bread and Milk company until his retirement some years ago.”55 No mention is made of the seventeen years he and his wife spent in Mexico during the Revolution.

The story of Mansfield and the Pan American Planters Company leaves several open questions: What happened to James Brydon that left an opening at the plantation for Loiselle? How and why was Loiselle chosen to manage the plantation? Why did the company largely disappear from the press and public record after 1907? I’m sure there are plenty of other mysteries to be found in the Sherman Room collections. Stay tuned to our blog for future posts and updates!

  1. “Intervention Would Please,” The Mansfield News, August 1, 1916, 4. ↩︎
  2. Ibid. ↩︎
  3. Ibid. ↩︎
  4. Ibid. ↩︎
  5. “U.S., Consular Registration Applications, 1916-1925 for Louis N. Loiselle, Boxes 1-40, 20, 7350-7749,” accessed through Ancestry.com. ↩︎
  6. A.J. Baughman, ed., A Centennial Biographical History of Richland County, Ohio (Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Co. 1901): 194. ↩︎
  7. “Twenty Years Ago Today,” The Mansfield News, January 23, 1913, 6. ↩︎
  8. Mansfield City Directory, 1894 (Akron: The Burch Directory Co. 1893). ↩︎
  9. “News Family at Home,” The Mansfield News, January 5, 1900, 4. ↩︎
  10. “Lyceum Entertained,” The Mansfield News, January 25, 1900, 4 and “C.E. Notes,” The Mansfield News, May 12, 1900, 4. ↩︎
  11. A.J. Baughman, ed., A Centennial Biographical History of Richland County, Ohio (Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Co. 1901): 194. ↩︎
  12. “Bicycle Club,” Richland Shield and Banner, May 2, 1896, 2. ↩︎
  13. A. J. Baughman, “Gatton’s Rocks,” Bellville Messenger, May 30, 1902, 1. According to the Butler Enterprise, Loiselle was the primary investor at Gatton’s Rocks, writing, “L. N. Loiselle of Mansfield has leased some ground at ‘Gatton’s Rocks’ south east of Bellville, and has erected three summer cottages. Next season he expects to erect several more cottages, for other prominent Mansfield people to occupy.” (Butler Enterprise, September 21, 1900, 7). ↩︎
  14. Both Antibus and Jennings’ wives were involved with the First Congregational Church and were elected to the group’s floral committee in 1903. See “Annual Business Meeting,” The Mansfield News, December 12, 1903, 7. ↩︎
  15. “Sara Elizabeth Loiselle Department Passport Application #67853 with Affidavit to Explain Protracted Foreign Residence,” accessed through Ancestry.com. ↩︎
  16. “Pan American Planters Company,” The Mansfield News, September 21, 1904, 3. ↩︎
  17. “A Fortune in Rubber,” Albuquerque Morning Journal, June 24, 1903, 4. ↩︎
  18. Ibid. ↩︎
  19. “Rubber Planting and Exploitation,” The India Rubber World, April 1, 1903, 225. The Mexican Herald further notes that a number of large tracts of land in the “immediate neighborhood” of the Santa Isabel plantation had recently been purchased by Americans. See The Mexican Herald, January 1, 1903, 9. ↩︎
  20. “Meeting of Plantation Shareholders,” The Indianapolis Journal, October 3, 1903, 2. ↩︎
  21. “American Rubber Planting Companies,” The India Rubber World, March 1, 1903, 193; The Mexican Herald, January 1, 1903, 9. ↩︎
  22. “A Demonstrated Success,” The Mansfield News, October 6, 1904, 5. ↩︎
  23. See The Elwood Daily Record, November 7, 1901, 4. ↩︎
  24. “Sugar Mill,” The Call-Leader (Elwood, IN), July 25, 1905, 1; The India Rubber World, February 1, 1904, 177. Following Foster’s death, Charles Voegele became the company’s president. See Audit Company of New York, Directory of Directors in the City of Chicago 1906 (Chicago: Audit Company of New York, 1906): 697. ↩︎
  25. The Call-Leader (Elwood, IN), May 9, 1905, 8. ↩︎
  26. “Purchased a Drug Store,” The Elwood Daily Record, August 12, 1907, 5. He was still listed as a director of the company by the Odon Journal in 1908 in a small mention about a company meeting in Indianapolis. See Odon Journal (Odon, IN), August 3, 1908, 2. ↩︎
  27. Wayne County Democrat (Wooster, OH), September 14, 1904, 2. ↩︎
  28. “Ohio Condensations,” The Mansfield News, June 3, 1904, 10; “Tuxtepec Plantation,” The Mexican Herald, March 3, 1904, 8. ↩︎
  29. Index Editors, “Index 1911” (University of Wooster), page 22, https://openworks.wooster.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=index1870-1920. ↩︎
  30. Wayne County Democrat, June 22, 1904, 3. ↩︎
  31. John A. Crow, The Epic of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). ↩︎
  32. Paul J. Vanderwood, Disorder and Progress: Bandits, Police, and Mexican Development (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1992): 144. ↩︎
  33. “Going to Mexico,” The Weekly News (Mansfield. OH), April 16, 1908, 12. ↩︎
  34. “Loiselle,” Richland Shield and Banner, August 6, 1908, 3. ↩︎
  35. The Mansfield News, October 5, 1908, 3. ↩︎
  36. “A Mansfield Man in the Tropics,” The Mansfield News, April 16, 1910, 5. ↩︎
  37. “U.S., Consular Registration Applications, 1916-1925 for Louis N. Loiselle, Boxes 1-40, 20, 7350-7749,” accessed through Ancestry.com. ↩︎
  38. Ibid. ↩︎
  39. “Mansfield People Safe in Vera Cruz,” The Mansfield News, May 14, 1914, 17. ↩︎
  40. Ibid. ↩︎
  41. “Where They Are Now,” The Mansfield News, March 6, 1917, 14. ↩︎
  42. “Patriotism Runs High in Mansfield,” The Mansfield News, April 24, 1914, 9. ↩︎
  43. James Creelman, “Interview with President Porfirio Diaz,” Pearson’s Magazine XIX, No. 3 (1908), https://library.brown.edu/create/modernlatinamerica/chapters/chapter-3-mexico/primary-documents-with-accompanying-discussion-questions/document-4-president-diaz-hero-of-the-americas-by-james-creelman-1908-interview-with-president-porfirio-diaz/. ↩︎
  44. Charles H. Harris, III and Louis R. Sadler, The Secret War in El Paso: Mexican Revolutionary Intrigue, 1906-1920 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009), 2. ↩︎
  45. Joshua Zeitz, “The Last Time the U.S. Invaded Mexico,” Politico Magazine, February 4, 2017, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/02/the-last-time-the-us-invaded-mexico-214738/. ↩︎
  46. Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981): 3. ↩︎
  47. “Mexican Revolution,” Wikipedia, last updated February 22, 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Revolution. ↩︎
  48. “Intervention Would Please,” The Mansfield News, August 1, 1916, 4. ↩︎
  49. Ibid. ↩︎
  50. Ibid. ↩︎
  51. “Returned to City from Tampico, Mex.,” The Mansfield News, October 9, 1925, 20. ↩︎
  52. “Sara Elizabeth Loiselle Department Passport Application #67853 with Affidavit to Explain Protracted Foreign Residence,” accessed through Ancestry.com. ↩︎
  53. “Loot Weighing Machine,” The Mansfield News, July 11, 1932, 14. ↩︎
  54. The Mansfield News-Journal, May 15, 1937, 2. ↩︎
  55. “Louis Loiselle Dies at Age 80,” Mansfield News-Journal, June 26, 1939, 9. ↩︎