Wapak celebrates new pool 71 years after first pool opened

WAPAKONETA - There was a time when the Auglaize River and a few local swimming pools were the places to beat the summer heat. A little more than a century after Wapakoneta was founded that all changed with the opening of the city's first community pool.

Now, as the city celebrates its 175th anniversary, the city is inaugurating the rebirth of the community institution. A new, redesigned and reinvented waterpark now stands at the site of the city's first pool along Hamilton Street at Harmon Park.

It wasn't always that way. The area has once been open farmland. That's when a little outside assistance helped get things moving.

"We are a Harmon Park," said Rachel Barber, administrator of the Auglaize County Historical Society, explaining that William Harmon did much around Wapakoneta. Harmon was a philanthropist from New York who supported African-American artists and also funded playgrounds.

"Our school board applied to get a Harmon park. That's why Wapakoneta football field is called Harmon Field and the park is called Harmon Park. That appears to be the reason that the pool was built there," Barber said.

Efforts to build a community park and playground began in the 1920s. Newspaper accounts from the era herald Wapakoneta as one of 50 Harmon parks under development nationwide.

The chamber of commerce President Chas W. Fisher told the Wapakoneta Daily News in April 1925 that the development of the new park and playground was a positive step for the community.

"Through the efforts of our board of education, the Harmon Foundation of New York City has brought the site for a public playground, and now it is up to every man, woman and child in Wapakoneta to take an interest in Harmon Field," Fisher told the newspaper. "Go out to the site along the beautiful Auglaize river and you will be convinced that the board of education and the Harmon Playground committee selected an ideal location and you will also see that the topography is just right for a playground."

There was talk in 1926 that the park would include a baseball diamond, tennis court, a community bandstand and a wading pool. The movement to get a swimming pool took another decade.

Fisher also told the local newspaper that the new facility would promote healthy children.

"We all know that exercises in the great outdoors is one of the most important requisites for child health and for this reason alone we should have a playground," Fisher said. "Isn't it true that a city is just a collection of many families living together as neighbors and for this reason the city as a whole should have the same aspirations."

The school district, which initiated the original effort, maintained ownership of the pool until just two years ago when talk of a new pool began to gain momentum.

"It was always confusing, I think, to people about why did the school board ended up with an outdoor community pool," Barber said. "I think it was because there really would have been no parks per se of a size in Wapakoneta that would have been appropriate to put a pool on.

Work on construction of the pool began in March 1936 with labor through the Works Progress Administration. The spark that ignited the project came in September the previous year when $4 million was allotted to the WPA for projects in Ohio, including the project in Wapakoneta, Barber said.

There was a chill in the air that day 71 years ago when the first community pool opened in Wapakoneta. A news account from June 7, 1937, said several hundred people were on hand to watch those who "braved the ‘shivers' to try out the new tank." The official count the first day: 248 people.

It permanently changed the landscape of outdoor recreation in the city, Barber said.

"Suddenly it was a facility. When you talk to older people who had grown up before the pool, anything happening in the water was happening in the river," Barber said. "They were all swimming in the river and there were some swimming holes around like in old gravel pits and stuff."

An advertisement that ran in May 1937, shortly before the pool opened, trumpeted that residents could "swim with safety." The price for a family season pass that first year was $10.

The opening of a new pool also posed another interesting situation for the community.

"It was really interesting because they talked about they were going to have a free day because it was in the height of the Depression," Barber said. "It was hard for them to sell some of their passes. They realized these kids showed up and didn't have swimming suits. There had never been a swimming pool in Wapakoneta before."

The new facility meant a new learning curve and also brought out a quick solution.

"They didn't know they needed swimming suits. They were going to swim in their underwear, in their clothes," Barber said. "They had to have a little drive to get people to give them old swimming suits to lend to kids who didn't have stuff of their own."