Tag: Reminisce

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.

The Fourth of July, in the tongue-in-cheek estimation of Lima newspaperman Albert C. Truitt, just wasn’t what it once was.

The back page of the Allen County Democrat was stuffed with snippets of advertising, advice, observations, news and reports on who was arriving and who was leaving.

Edgar B. Cunningham’s trip down memory lane led him back more than a half century to Lima’s Public Square when he was a boy in the years after the Civil War.

George Newson arrived in Lima in 1891 with a head full of dreams and nearly empty pockets.

In a time when women fought for the right to vote and to own property regardless of their marital status, Martha Allen made her way first as a teacher in Auglaize and Allen Counties and then as one of the largest landowners in Auglaize County. Overcoming tragedy caused by the invisible scars of the Civil War, she became so prominent within the community that she was one of five women and 995 men to have a biography in the 1923 Auglaize County History compiled by William McMurray.

He was Lima’s first Black physician – unless he wasn’t. He was run out of Lima by the city’s Black citizens in 1909 – or he was fleeing a white lynch mob.

Streetcar strikes, the Lima News observed from a safe distance during a 1913 strike in Cincinnati, “mean disorder, disaffection, inconvenience, financial loss and sometimes loss of life.”

As a volunteer with the Cold War-era Ground Observer Corps (GOC), Maynard Macke was trained to identify anything that passed overhead. Macke could not identify what he saw in the sky over Putnam County on a spring evening 66 years ago.