Tag: Reminisce

It was a week before Thanksgiving and a day before the world changed forever.

On a cloudy, chilly Monday in November 1945, Lima wrapped up its first peace-time observance of Armistice Day since 1941 with a parade featuring the bands of Central and South high schools, the American Legion drum and bugle corps, and veterans of the armed forces.

On a Saturday evening in mid-October 1959 Nickel Plate Railroad passenger train number 9 departed the station at Bluffton bound for Coldwater, the end point of its journey from Cleveland. With its departure rail passenger service came to an end in Bluffton.

The Spring of 1934 arrived in a winter coat. Outside the Allen County Courthouse on March 23 flurries fluttered in a biting wind that belied the fact it was the first Saturday of spring. Inside, on the third floor of the courthouse, Judge Emmit E. Everett delivered the final lines in a gripping drama that began on an October evening six months earlier with the slaying of Allen County Sheriff Jess Sarber and the freeing of notorious gangster John Dillinger from the county jail.

William French was born in 1782, served with the Ohio Militia in the War of 1812, settled in Allen County in 1834, made one of the first wills in the county in 1835, died in 1836, and was buried in Lima’s Tanner Street Cemetery.

The final years of the 19th century had been good to Lima and, thanks to the discovery of oil in May 1885, business was good as well, a fact reflected in the new buildings going up along busy downtown streets.

The Sawyer sisters shared a birthplace, a love of music and, seemingly, little else.

For nearly a century, for as long as there had been a Spencerville, the mill stood at the heart of the village, grinding grain into flour and, being the tallest building in town, serving as a handy point of reference.

Elmer McClain was born in 1883 at the family farm and died there nearly eight decades later in 1963.

In July 1965, the Lima News, which had just completed a two-story addition to its plant in the 100 block of East High Street, devoted three pages in a Sunday edition to explain the newspaper’s operation for the benefit of subscribers, and to do a little bragging with statistics about its dominance in the region for the benefit of advertisers.