History majors at Bluffton University Garrett Rice and Macey Thomas were among the most recent students to complete the neighborhood reconstruction project.
Jacob Espinosa | The Lima News
LIMA —Students at Bluffton University are discovering new history about the city of Lima.
While previous Theory and Application classes of Dr. Perry Bush have focused on analyzing neighborhoods where primarily white residents lived, Bush had students in this year’s class focus on a neighborhood in the city’s Far West End where they uncovered what might be Lima’s first Black neighborhood near St. Paul AME Church on W. Spring St.
“What they do is I select a Lima neighborhood and I give the students six houses in the neighborhood to find out everything they can about the people who lived in those houses from 1900 to 1940,” Bush said. “And they picked about 35 people each, about 100 in total, and they researched their census information. And they had to find comparative data.”
That comparative data, gathered to measure next to what previous years’ classes had found in other neighborhoods, included information about race, sex and age, as well as education, literacy, household, homeownership status, occupation, employment, birthplace and immigration.
“And it’s been the same variables that these students have been tracing every time they do this class,” continued Bush. “It’s not everybody, just a representative sample of people who lived in this neighborhood. And the students’ job is to tease me these numbers with a spreadsheet that they put together.”
From that, the students, including Garrett Rice and Macey Thomas, put together the individual stories of people, all in an attempt to answer the question of what the research says about the American Dream in a 10 to 12-page paper.
“I think the biggest thing we found, compared to the other neighborhoods that had been done (in previous classes) was the difference in race,” Rice, a junior history major, said. “In 1910, the percentage of African-Americans was 57% and of white residents 42%. But then when we got to 1940, it was 87% African-American and 12% white. So this was the first neighborhood that was majority African-American.”
Compared to data on other neighborhoods in previous classes, that was surprising to the students.
Bush said that he knew there was a historically Black neighborhood in the city of Lima, but he had been looking for it for years.
“They didn’t realize that that was what they found,” Bush said. “Modern Black southside was born in the late ’30s when John Galvin of Ohio Steel needed laborers and sent job recruiters to Mississippi and Alabama. That was during the Great Migration.”
But the highest percentage of Black residents that any class had found previously had been just seven percent.
“In other words, what does it illustrate, class?” he said. “It illustrates Jim Crow. That was the only neighborhood that people of color were probably allowed to live in.”
Among the issues that pointed to were white flight, redlining and barriers to success.
But the students also found evidence for rare social mobility in the area and the time period, as well as an example of an interracial couple.
“In my paper, I said there was little to no achievement of the American Dream,” Rice said. “But there was one interracial couple that I found in the whole set. And I think it shows that Lima is a working-class town and still is today.”
Thomas said that she found examples of contributors to the local Green Book, used by Black motorists to identify safe and welcoming areas.
“We found that we had people in our neighborhood who were a part of that movement and that story, which was really interesting,” she said. “Other parts of history that have already been studied and connected to these people outside of the industrial boom, too. I think that really showed the generosity of the neighborhood too and how even as we see their struggles in that time, they were still generous to other people during that time.”
Another student found an example of a teamster with a third-grade education who became a funeral director and one of the wealthiest people in the neighborhood.
“Lima is an industrial city with locomotive and oil production and steel,” Bush said. “So, in any other project, other than one that focused on the Golden Block, I can tell you what you’re going to find. If you come to Lima with blue-collar skills, you can make it. There are remarkably high levels of homeownership and even these students found that and evidence of some people rising up the social ladder.”
The overarching project, in which the students had to uncover the data as a group and then come to their conclusions on their own, was all part of Bush’s effort to teach them how to use genealogical tools and get meaning from numbers.
“I want them to do real history,” he said. “You go to take a chemistry class and you do chemistry. You have to produce evidence and come up with interpretations of the past.”
To do that, students used a combination of the website ancestry.com, census data on microfilm at the Allen County Museum and up-close observation of the area in question.
“I don’t think we would have been able to do it if we didn’t have ancestry.com,” Rice, who wants to be a history teacher, said. “It was all worth it in the end. It really felt like we accomplished something when we put this all together and wrote our papers and got our grades. This actually matters and we did this.”
Rice said that it was probably the hardest history class he has ever taken.
Thomas, who also wants to become a teacher, added that they would be taking the lessons and skills she learned from the project to use in the future.
But she had some advice for students trying to complete the project in classes to come: not to put it off.
“We had to go back and double-check things sometimes and it was time-consuming,” she said.
“With history, you discover that it’s complex and doesn’t always make sense,” said Bush. “You run into dead ends and brick walls because you deal with real people and real data. There are inconsistencies because it’s real history and the more characters you’re looking at, the more complex it appears.”
And to Bush and the students, that is how they are going from being students to real historians.
“It’s a great way to learn. And they’re real historians and it’s real data and real people. And they know more about this than anybody in the world.”
Reach Jacob Espinosa at 567-242-0399.
