Tag: Reminisce

A half century ago, aiming to bring some stability to the county’s occasionally chaotic public transportation system, the Allen County Commissioners approved the creation of a regional transit authority.

From the mid-1940s until the mid-1950s the most popular worker at the Erie passenger station in Lima had a tail.

Smoke billowed from the Minster Milling Company in the early morning hours of Sunday, August 4, 1912. In two hours the mill would be known not only for its flour, but also for being the victim of one of the largest fires in Minster’s history.

When Malcolm McCoy, educator, activist and bringer of smiles, died August 29, 2013, his wife of 55 years told the Lima News she wouldn’t remember him through a veil of tears.

The Invisible Empire could be seen all over Ohio in the 1920s, rallying in their robed and hooded thousands at Indian Lake on the Fourth of July or gathering in their hundreds for initiation ceremonies beneath fiery crosses in Perry Township farm fields and on the Pioneer Picnic Grounds in Elida.

When he left his job at the Lima Locomotive Works on Friday, he was, the Lima Republican-Gazette wrote on Sunday, May 18, 1924, “plain old James H. Smith.” By Sunday, according to the Gazette, he was “Sir James Henry Smith,” the main character in a real-life fairy tale.

Fire bells rang out over New Bremen streets as people lined up their cars decorated in vegetable and grain products. The New Bremen parade immediately dispersed as participants and onlookers rushed to the accommodation barn of St. Paul’s church. After they put out the flames, the parade commenced. Not even a fire diminished the crowd’s enthusiasm for the New Bremen Farmers Picnic in 1920.

Since the early days of Lima when John P. Mitchell welcomed weary travelers to his log inn on the Public Square, hotels had always been “the open door of the community,” William Rusler wrote in his 1921 history of Allen County.

Much had changed in the three decades since the day in 1885 when Abner LaFevre stepped off the train in Lima.

Music from cornets filled the air on Auglaize Street in Wapakoneta on the morning of July 15, 1871, announcing the arrival of Joel E. Warner’s Great Pacific Combination Museum, Menagerie, Circus and Caravan. Onlookers lined the street several people deep as the group traveled through Wapakoneta from the west to east of town, where they set up their three tents at Jones’ woods. The Pacific Combination performed in St. Marys the previous day.