IA Online Session 14: Jerry Miller

I'm Jerry Miller, president of the North Central Ohio Industrial Museum located at the historic Mansfield Reformatory, home of Shawshank. We opened our industrial museum in July, and this talk I'm going to give is about a guy named Harry Smith, who was an inventor with several over 100 patents with his friend Charles Kettering and college roommate. So that's the story.

I'm going to talk about our museum that just opened in July. It took 30 years to get to this point. My son and I made the sign that's on the entryway. We're in the famous Shawshank prison in Mansfield. So my talk is going to be about our museum in general and then specifically about an amazing inventor whose name is Harry Ford Smith from Lexington, Ohio.

I like to start off by creating wealth, and there's only three ways. In honor of Peter Schramm, who was the director at the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University, he says, you know, the schools, churches, hospitals, library, theaters did not come first. It was from mining, farming, and manufacturing that you create wealth. So we have a great collection of items in our museum. Mansfield is only a town of about 60,000, county a couple hundred thousand, but we've got some amazing industry that were here and still today manufacturing is number one employment sector in the county.

Maybe you can't see all of this, but we are in partnership with the Historic Mansfield Reformatory, and granted the 501(c)(3) in 2015. The nice thing about being here at the prison is they get upwards of 60 to 80,000 people, so we get a percentage of that ticket sales to help our funding. Just a couple weeks ago they had a tattoo festival and had 80,000 people in one weekend. So we're in this section of what's left of the prison that was built in 1886. We're in the shaded area there called the upper east diagonal. The rest of the prison is all torn down, so you have the east and west cell blocks and the beautiful main part of the prison, and that's our room. Long and skinny, but you'll see it's pretty beautiful inside and perfect for an industrial museum. It was a kitchen originally back when it first started.

The collection started, I said, in the 1990s by a guy named Bob Blasner. When the factories were closing, he picked up these items. This was from Westinghouse, 1990, all the employees signed it. And there's what the room looked like when I started seven years ago in 2014. Like the rest of the prison, a lot of leaded paint and a lot of clutter and mess. So that was our first project, just clear all that stuff out.

We'll get into some of our first industrialists. This guy Daniel McFarland Cook invented the sugar evaporator, which was great during the Civil War. Then he invented the flying machine that we found. It was built in 1860, and he was going to fly from Mansfield to California, have lunch, and come back. After that, they called him Crazy Cook. And that's another interesting fellow we had was Frank Black. His family actually made that sugar evaporator, the Blind Meyer Company. Then in 1893, they hired a guy named Charles Kelly King, and King left his estate to our town and his Kingwood Center. But Ohio Brass started off with the buckles for horse collars, and then once they hired King, they got—we were the first town in Ohio with the streetcars. Then they got into high voltage. This is a lab that he bought in 1903 up in Wadsworth, Ohio. That's a picture of Frank Black himself there. But the research lab is still there, owned by Harvey Hubbell, and pretty amazing if you go to Wadsworth sometime.

So today my talk is going to be about, like I said, Harry Ford Smith. I've got the information mostly from this gentleman that wrote these two books, Robert Carter. Electrician by trade, but these two books are pretty interesting if you're into mills. We had a lot of mills here in Richland County. And then he also wrote about the riots, and I'll show you the link to that later on here. But pretty interesting guy, Robert Carter is. And so these are pictures out of the mill. This is downtown Lexington where Harry Smith would grow up as a kid. The river you see runs along that old mill on the left there. That mill was torn down, a smaller one with the dam there. And then you see in the background is the Cockley Mill. The Cockleys are pretty famous here in our area for this, and also the Tube Mill in Shelby was started by David Cockley. So I just wanted to give you a little idea of Bob's read. Bob was kind enough to give us this grist mill that he had found in Caddis, Ohio. It's the only item in our museum that's not made in the Richland County, North Central Ohio area. But I thought it was so unique, and Bob's wife wanted to get it out of his house, so we were glad to take it over. In our first booth there on the left, you know, every village had a mill.

So this is a guy I want to really kind of nail down here today. Harry Smith. It's kind of interesting that most of the guys back in the 50s and 60s all kind of look like Harry. If I showed you J.C. Gorman or Herb Rupp, any of the founders here that had businesses, they all look like Harry. But he had a good life. I want to tell you a little bit of history again. Lexington, this is where he grew up. His dad was a doctor in that house back in the back, the oldest building in Lexington still. And this is Harry's house that he built in 1903. So you see he was pretty successful at a young age, of course he was in his 30s then. And you probably can't see this, but I want to read it because it gives you a real quick glimpse at Harry Smith. The end on Smith Hills is now a bed and breakfast, and it was a 1903 renowned home of electrical engineer Harry Ford Smith. Smith held over 200 patents and was associated with a guy you might know, Charles Kettering, that was his college roommate and the inventor of the electric starter and many other things. Guests at Harry Smith's home included Kettering, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, the Wright Brothers, and Louis Bromfield, who was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author from Mansfield and the owner of Malabar Farm. At the age of 19, Smith built and owned and managed an electric power plant in the city of Lexington while a student at Ohio State, and is responsible for the first outdoor lighting system powered by steam in 1894. He sold that to Ohio Edison in 1917. The rumor is that he would ride a bicycle from Lexington to Ohio State back in those days. At age 22, he created and operated the Gas Cold Generator Factory, which I'm going to get into more detail here in just a minute. That manufactured and installed gas coal gasification plants to businesses and municipalities all over the world, which was Lexington's largest factory. Gas producers were units, some very large, oven-like units where coal was heated to give off coal gas. He was very successful, but the coming age of natural gas lines ended his business in 1918. He sold the business to Delco Frigidaire division of General Motors, and Harry worked for his old college buddy Charles Kettering until his retirement in 1937. So Harry closed the gas producing plant in 1927, and his foundry went on to become an operation of a farm tool and pump company. He and his wife Carrie purchased the 35 Short Street property after they sold it when they came back to live in Lexington from his retirement in Dayton, Ohio. After he retired, he designed valves, and I'll show you some of those from Mansfield Sanitary Products, which is now called Mansell Plumbing in Perrysville, and one of the largest producers of toilets and sinks still around. He designed and oversaw the creation of the Clear Fork Reservoir, the water supply for Mansfield, Lexington, and other numerous cities in our county. He got his help from a lawyer William Cockley, whose father had the steam-powered mill, and Cockley was a founding partner of Jones Day in Cleveland, which is still in existence, one of the largest law firms in the country. Harry became known as the father of the Clear Fork Reservoir. I still sail down there today. Since the 1960s, I think they first started the first regattas down there. So Harry had a salary of one dollar a year to satisfy the bonding company. Harry and his wife Terry were local philanthropists and were extremely generous during World War II. Any Lexington soldier that was wounded, Harry paid off their mortgage. He founded the Industrial Board in our area and Men's Service Club. So that's a little bit about Harry Smith. Quite a guy.

Here's his gas producers patent. What we're also doing at our museum is we're taking some of these old patents. I have some original drawings from several other great-great-grandchildren, and we're going to have an art and industry display. But this gives you an idea of his gas producer that he patented in 1970. The overall kind of tough blueprint to read, but you'll see later on in pictures of how he took coal and produced gas. So we're really lucky to find this brochure again from Bob Carter. Great, you know, when people collect and save things like this. There's not a date on it, but it's got to be from the early 1900s. So Harry basically ran the power plant from 1894 to 1916, and the gas producer company from 1899 to 1927. Then he worked at Delco Frigidaire GM from 1919 to 1937, and then Mansfield Sanitary, Mansell Plumbing from 1934, 43 to 59, and he worked 11 years on the Clear Fork Reservoir. So quite a history. This plant in this brochure was his plant. Not any sign of it today where it was. But here I put these in. Kind of interesting, I'd never met David before, and we started talking. He's up in Albany, I think. So I found these examples of where Harry put some of his gas producers: in Elmira, New York, GE plant there in North Tonawanda, and the Buffalo Bolt Company. The instrument on the right is pretty neat. It could keep track on a 24-hour basis of the heat and the BTUs produced and all the stuff, all recorded in that little box back in the early 1900s. There's another plant in Syracuse. That gives you an idea how big that one was. And this tar extractor, I'm not quite sure what the tar extractor did, but something to do with the whole gas production part of it.

Then when he left the gas producing, he got to Delco Frigidaire. Here you see a stove he made, was making a range with the on-off and broil and bake buttons. Then down at the bottom is a refrigeration unit. And on the bottom right is the water closet for Mansfield Plumbing Products. This is the only building that's left. This was the Smith office for the gas producing company. Now it is the Moose Club in Lexington, Ohio.

I want to get into some other things that are in our area just because of what I think are important. The tractors: we had the Altman Taylor Company, one of the biggest. Plymouth Silver King is an interesting story. Plymouth had the first car too, and then Chrysler came down and said, 'Hey, you're using our name,' and I go, 'Oh no, we've been making units way before you.' And the Centaur tractor is pretty neat. That was owned by Westinghouse Air Brake Company. And the Leroy Company that made the engines ended up buying Bantam and made this tractor called a Track Air that had a compressor on it too. We have the seamless tube business started, like I said, from the other Cockley, David Cockley. Bicycles were big in the late 1800s, and so tubing came from England. David Cockley either stole the idea or brought the idea to America, and we are the home of the first seamless tube company. We had over 10 cigar factories in our town and three breweries. These are some of the collections. You'll see when you come to our museum, we had small appliances: Dominion and Westinghouse, all their small appliances and ranges. New Method didn't last through the Depression, but they were one of the first range companies in town. And then we had Herb Rupp. I'm actually sitting in Herb's house. Actually, this is his son Mickey, and Mickey still lives here in Mansfield. Mickey started this business with the go-karts in '55. The last unit you see there is a Centaur, which I think he might have grabbed from the Greenwich Centaur Tractor Company, and that was '73. Lasted about 20 years until the Japanese came in with Honda, Kawasaki. Even Elvis had a Centaur. Mickey's also known for racing in Indianapolis 565, racing P-51s in air races, and he loves to go fast. The Aqua Dart for hydroplanes, he had offshore racing, and then the dragster they had, and still I think is up in Minnesota right now trying to get it back here to Mansfield. Mickey's brother-in-law was the brother of A.J. Watson, who designed Indy cars. And his brother Don Watson designed these trailers which were called the Watson Dollies with that dual wheel in the front. So it's kind of interesting we have that claim to fame. A.J. Watson is the only designer of Indy cars to win five races in a row. And then we, of course, had appliance capital of the world with Westinghouse and Tappan. Westinghouse employed almost 8,200 people at its peak after the war. Tappan started here in the 1880s. The microwave—they didn't invent the microwave, that was during the war by Raytheon, but Tappan commercialized it. I have those two stones in our museum. Of course, Tappan was involved in World War I field kitchens, and then they were involved in the galleys of the dirigibles and FDR's plane. And my company now, Mapco, got started in '44 when Tappan didn't want to do the galleys, but a company called Mapco did, and we're still making products today. Again, just items that Tappan and Westinghouse had that we have in our museum. We have a great collection of roasters. You see on the bottom left there, we have about 18. Westinghouse made a million roasters by 1939, the World's Fair when the robot was introduced. This is next for our museum. We just had a Hall of Fame dinner September 1st, had 200 people. So we'll have a local Hall of Fame. I already have 22 individuals in that, and a local company, Lloyd, is going to help us with the building that. And then outside, someday down the road, we hope to have that so we can get our Altman Taylor tractor. We have our Silver King already, have the flying machine, and someday we'll be outside with that. And again, we're the home of Electro, which was debuted at the 1939 World's Fair. And that's how you can get a hold of me: my phone number, my email. And I think, yep, I'm done.