Elizabeth M. MacDonell poses next to the Milburn electric car, which she drove from 1923 until her death in 1942. Mrs. MacDonell drove the car, which had a range of about 50 miles, on trips to collect artifacts for the Allen County Museum. Today, the car is on display in the basement of the museum.
Courtesy of Allen County Historical Society
Elizabeth MacDonell, who was born into a horse-and-buggy world and lived until the eve of the Atomic Age, possessed what a biographer described as “a strong sense of the historic.”
That sense, the biographer wrote, “made her visualize articles of everyday living and source materials in print as valuable interpreters of our times…” It also compelled her to collect those articles for a county museum, which didn’t yet exist. In the early years, items collected were displayed in Memorial Hall.
“She and Mrs. Ella Pillars, wife of the founder and first curator (James Pillars), week after week journeyed in Mrs. MacDonell’s electric car to auction sales, antique stores, nearby country houses to locate some bit of Allen County history,” the Lima Citizen wrote in a December 1958 story on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Allen County Historical Society.
With a range of 50 miles, the car at times did not last as long as Mrs. MacDonell’s zeal. Her son James MacDonell “remembers receiving frantic calls from his mother to come pick her up,” the Citizen noted. Like many of the articles she collected, that Milburn electric car is on display at the Allen County Museum.
Mrs. MacDonell’s own journey began Feb. 27, 1865, when she was born to James Ross and Harriet Elizabeth (Chaney) Dalzell in the family home on the northeast corner of Elizabeth and North streets. Dalzell was a longtime blacksmith for the Lake Erie & Western railroad.
“As a child, Elizabeth Dalzell attended school in Lima and Fort Wayne, Indiana, and, while in the latter place, learned to play piano sufficiently well to be billed as a child wonder, at the age of seven, in a performance in Chicago,” according to a historical society biography. “She graduated from Lima High School and taught in the old West building for several years.”
In May 1885, oil was discovered along the banks of the Ottawa River in Lima. The discovery brought an influx of industry and oil men, among them Ontario native Alexander Thomas MacDonell. According to the historical society biography, MacDonell thought Elizabeth Dalzell “was the most beautiful thing he ever saw.”
The couple were married August 27, 1890, in a “quiet ceremony” at the Dalzell home, the Lima Daily Times reported, adding that the groom “is a highly esteemed and successful oil producer” while the bride “is one of Lima’s most estimable and charming young ladies.” Four sons were born to the couple: Duncan Ross, George Edmond, Alexander Dalzell, and James Alfred.
Mrs. MacDonell settled into life as the matriarch of a prominent family, traveling with her husband and sons, entertaining in the couple’s West Market Street home, attending club meetings and participating in services at First Baptist Church, where she taught Sunday school and played piano.
Tragedy would visit Mrs. MacDonell three times between 1918 and 1923.
In October 1918, the MacDonells’ eldest son, Duncan, a 27-year-old Army captain serving at Fort Stevens, Oregon, died, a victim of the Spanish flu pandemic. Funeral services were held in the family home at 631 W. Market St.
On November 13, 1919, the Republican-Gazette announced that Alexander T. MacDonell, “pioneer among the oil producers of the Lima field and for more than 30 years a resident of the city, died at 9:30 o’clock last night.” MacDonell, the newspaper wrote, “was among the foremost of those men who were first on the ground in development work in the early days of the Lima oil field.”
Then, in August 1923, the MacDonells’ second son, George, who was born in 1893 and worked as a financier in Lima, was killed in an automobile accident 14 miles north of Findlay.
After the death of her husband, Mrs. MacDonell had purchased the Henry Deisel residence at 312 S. Cole St. In June 1932, she moved from that spacious home to a Victorian mansion at 632 W. Market St., which, like her electric car, today is part of the Allen County Museum.
“To her all of life and living was one piece of cloth and today but a continuation of yesterday and tomorrow the natural projection of today. And so, it was completely natural for her to associate herself with the Society in its nestling days,” Frank G. Love wrote in the 1976 history of Allen County. “She had three great dominating interests in her life: her family, her church, and the Historical Society, and these were to be the major receptacles of her time and energies and money.”
Mrs. MacDonell, the Citizen wrote in 1958, “is credited with providing the ‘zeal and inspiration’ for making the present Allen County Museum possible.”
Through the efforts of Mrs. MacDonell, the museum site at 620 W. Market St. was donated by the heirs of William Wemmer and a campaign headed by James MacDonell was begun in 1941 to raise building funds. “But before construction could begin, the U.S. entered World War II,” the Citizen wrote. “Further delays after the war were necessitated by shortage of building materials and rising construction costs.” The museum was completed at the end of 1955 and opened in 1956.
Mrs. MacDonell did not live to see the museum she envisioned come to brick-and-mortar reality. “Mrs. Elizabeth Meason MacDonell, 77, widow of A.T. MacDonell, one of Lima’s most prominent and active citizens, died at 6:45 a.m. Monday at her home, 632 W. Market St.,” the News reported December 14, 1942. The research library at the museum was named in her honor.
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SOURCE
This feature is a cooperative effort between the newspaper and the Allen County Museum and Historical Society.
LEARN MORE
See past Reminisce stories at limaohio.com/tag/reminisce
Reach Greg Hoersten at [email protected].
