The Fat of the Land – Dream or Reality?            By Alan Borer

            Agriculture has a long and (mostly) noble tradition in the written word.  I suspect that I am not the only reader of this magazine who developed an interest in agriculture through reading, regardless of whether farming is a profession, a hobby, or just a fantasy.  One sub-genre of this farming books is the “back to the land” story.  Although plots and details differ widely, the story is basically this:  urban- or suburbanite is downtrodden or bereft of the country life.  The urbanite devours books, draws plans, saves hard-earned money, and begins to scout for real estate that might meet the needs/wants/dreams of a pastoral and profitable lifestyle.  Finally the right piece of ground is selected, or one that will do, and he or she makes the leap from urban to rural and becomes a full participant in the pastoral life.

            The farmer may not be successful.  Some of these stories are tragedies.  Sometimes the would-be agrarian finds out that the farmer’s life is not for them after all.  A fine example of this is Richard Gilbert’s 2014 book Shepherd, in which the author tries raising sheep outside of Athens, Ohio, only to meet with enough drawbacks to withdraw from the sheepfold.  Many other memoirs recount success stories, although they set the parameters of success on their own.  RFD, by Charles Allen Smart and published in 1937, is a well told story of a successful quest for the rural near Chillicothe, about fifty miles (and fifty years) from Athens.

            This is a longwinded way of saying that I enjoy the literature of farming.  Recently I had occasion to look at a syllabus from a class in “agricultural science” in the summer of 1915 at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio. The then-president of the college, Walter G. Clippinger, had a long standing dream of offering a degree in agriculture, and the summer program may have been a way of testing the waters.  In any event, the list represented an attempt to cover what was up-to-the moment in sheep manuals, grain economics, marketing and the like.  The only author I recognized was Liberty Hyde Bailey, the author of so many books on agriculture and horticulture.

            The last book on the list, in the category “Other,” was a volume written by John Williams Streeter and titled The Fat of the Land: The Story of an American Farm.  The book, which was first published in 1903, was written by the son of an early Otterbein professor.  Streeter himself attended Otterbein until 1858, when he left due to financial hardship.  He served in the Civil War, and then became a homeopathic physician in Chicago.  Around 1895, Streeter became infected during a surgical procedure and was forced to retire.  He died in 1905, having spent the years of his retirement as an author.  He lived in the prosperous Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, where he built a country home called “Uppercross,” and maintained thirty acres, most of which was wooded or planted in fruit trees.

            The Fat of the Land tells the story of “Tom,” a doctor who was forced into retirement after a surgical accident (sound familiar?).  No longer able to do a physician’s work, Tom is able to spend his retirement nest egg on buying land.  After much searching and advertising, he purchased 320 acres of land near “Exeter” (which may or may not be in New England).  He carefully chose a staff of workers, planted an orchard, built chicken houses and barns, and built a farmhouse for “Polly,” his wife.  Hoping at the start to set up the farm for $60,000, Tom managed to go through $100,000 dollars in three years.  Fortuitous that he had a doctor’s savings on which to rely!

Tom wanted to run a “factory farm.”  Before the reader cringes, he did not mean factory farm in the modern sense, farming done with chemicals and advanced machinery, a farm of antibiotics, crushingly tight-packed livestock never seeing the light of day, and oceans of manure.  Tom, perhaps in his innocence, used an older sense of the word “factory:”

I wished to experiment in intensive farming . . . . I believed that if I fed the land, it would feed me.  My plan was to sell nothing from the farm except finished products, such as butter, fruit, eggs, chickens and hogs.  I believed that best results would be attained by keeping only the best stock, and, after feeding it liberally, selling it in the most favorable market.  To live on the fat of the land is what I proposed to do. . . .   [p. 9]

            The ways in which Tom built his farm, “Four Oaks,” illustrated his tenacity in keeping to this model.  Planting 3400 apple trees was not too many, because his farmhands carefully tended them, and sold the apples at a higher than average price.  Same standards applied to his chickens; buying 4000 white Wyandotte chicken eggs would lead to a massive flock even if only half would lay eggs.  Tom’s flock enjoyed clean, well-lit, heated buildings, fresh water, and grain grown in his own fields.  When time came to sell, he could get top price for eggs and fryers, because the customer knew what and where Tom’s chickens came from, and did not mind paying more for a clean, safe product:

To lack confidence in the egg is a serious matter at the breakfast table, and a person who can insure perfect trust will not lack patronage. [p. 108]

            Tom and Polly approached their farm not merely as an economic enterprise, but also as a chosen life – and an interesting life:

            We were both keenly interested in the experiment.  Nothing that happened on the farm went unchallenged.  The milk product of the day was a thing of interest; the egg count could not go unnoted; a hatch of chickens must be seen before they left the incubator; a litter of pigs must be admired. . . . flowers were blooming, trees were leafing, a robin had built in the black oak, a gopher was tunneling the rose bed – a thousand things, full of interest, were happening every day.  As a place where things the most expected do happen, recommend me to a quiet farm. [p. 172]

            And,

            For sharp contrasts give me a dull country.  The unexpected is the usual in small and in great things alike as they happen on a farm, and I make no apology to the reader for entering them in my narrative.   [p. 209]

            The book has no exact ending.  Tom and Polly reckoned that, despite their considerable expenses, they created what they wanted – a self sustaining farm making a small profit, and farmed in a rational yet humane fashion.  As a book, Streeter’s work is thoughtful and pleasant reading when it kept to its overall subject.  At times it reads like an accounting textbook.  Chapters on labor strikes and an overseas voyage seem out-of-place.  But as a whole, the book was well-received.

            The surprising success of the book was coupled with an audience that did not always understand that The Fat of the Land was, and was meant to be read as, a novel.  Yet from the outset, readers saw it as a real, “how I did it” account of an actual experiment.  Then as now, the book review in The New York Times, set the pace:

            Here, combined with hints of a story and several episodes quite foreign to the matter in hand, is what purports to be a detailed account of an ambitious and successful experiment in factory-farming by a man who spent the greater part of his fifty odd years in the practice of medicine. [New York Times, March 5, 1904]

            Note that the Times used the words “purports to be.”  Yet in the review that followed, there was no further mention of the fact that the details of farming expenses, labor, animals, and other facts were presumably, all figments of the author’s imagination.

            The book became a bestseller, and went through four printings.  It was not his intention, but Streeter became known as a source of quotations for the agricultural press.  Of the many periodicals that quoted him, few or none pointed out that readers were taking farming advice from a physician-turned-novelist.  For example, the Farmer’s Review in their March 31, 1904 article on “Location of the Farm House” quoted at length from Fat of the Land.  The same journal quoted the book again on April 15, 1905 in the article, “Grow More Clover.”  The February 20, 1904 issue of American Gardening described the book as a factual account:

            The author’s farming experiment did not begin until he was fifty-three; but his book shows what an orchard property cared for will come to in seven years.  The author points out to young people how an income will grow from an orchard of a few acres, and that the fun of doing it will be more worth while than the income.  [p. 123]

            Although Otterbein University, as Streeter’s alma mater, could not be blamed for using the book in its curriculum, it was not the only school to think highly enough of it to use it in the classroom.  The superintendant of the Hendricks County, Indiana, school system used Fat of the Land as a textbook secondary only to Liberty Hyde Bailey’s Principles of Agriculture in 1907. And in a report to the nation’s librarians, the American Library Association ended a list of agricultural books for public libraries:

. . . .  Streeter’s Fat of the land have [sic] come to be almost as popular as novels. 

Despite the wide use of a novel as a textbook and a provider of instruction for farmers, there does not appear to be any dishonesty or “cover-up” in the story of The Fat of the Land.  Dr. Streeter died on June 4, 1905, not too long after his book came out.  In a letter to a fan, Streeter claimed to have spent but sixty days writing the novel, and that at least part of that time was spent in a Chicago hospital.   Posthumously, some of the reviewing sources pointed out that Streeter’s book was in fact a novel.  The August, 1905 issue of Book World stated:

Dr. John Williams Streeter, whose “Fat of the Land” has interested so many people, numbers of whom believe the book to be actual fact instead of fiction, which last it is, died in Lake Forest, Illinois. . . . where he also owned and worked a farm.  From this last, much of his inspiration for “The Fat of the Land” must have been derived.

            The Fat of the Land made an impression on many contemporary farming people.  A bestseller of its time, it is rarely mentioned today, except as an early example of a “back to the land” book, and a fictitious example as well.  Many of the book’s lessons on farming still apply to the right kind of farm.  And while “Four Oaks” may have been no more than a dream of the author, all of us who dabble in agriculture know that dreams are important stimulators.  They may never get beyond the dream phase, but, like Streeter’s dream, they are the beginning of every farm – fiction or not!

[originally published in Farming Magazine, Spring 2020]

Boarding House in Green Springs

Boarding House in Green Springs              by Alan Borer

Boarding houses were a part of life in big cities.  Toledo in 1900 had more than sixty boarding houses, ranging from widows renting a couple of spare bedrooms to small hotels.  The Rathburn Hotel at 1221 Superior, for example, listed itself as both a hotel and a boarding house in the city directory.  Many Toledo boarding houses were connected with saloons and liveries, a sensible arrangement for serving a transient clientele.   Before the auto age, most villages had one hotel.  Travelers could not count on a quick trip to the nearest city.  If darkness was approaching one had to take whatever lodgings were close at hand, and there was usually one place, one choice.  But if the village happened to have a tourist attraction, one might have more choices.   

My mother’s home town fit that description.  A rural hamlet, Green Springs sits astraddle the Seneca/Sandusky county line.  The town was and is tiny, but at one time, the village had abundant visitors.  A sulphur spring, for which the town is named, gushed three million gallons of odoriferous water into a pond.  The spring, still flowing today, drew thousands of guests to its lodge, sanitarium, and reputed curative properties.  In the heyday of the railroads, Green Springs needed more hotels, and more guestrooms.  A guest register and accounting book has been preserved from the Finch Boarding House in Green Springs for the years 1902 to 1910.  The register offers a look into travel at the opening of the twentieth century, and confirms the needs and uses of tourism in a time long gone.[i]

            In 1850, there was living in Green Spring (the “s” was added later) a shoemaker named Elias Finch.  Elias, or E. B. as he was known, was a “York Stater,” and married to Laura.  Fast forward to 1880, and Mr. Finch had given up shoemaking and was now proprietor of the Green Spring Hotel.  Besides his wife and three younger daughters, he also had four lodgers.  Whether E. B. was running the hotel in retirement, or because of another reason, he had made a life-altering change. 

The hotel was originally on ground across the road from the Oak Ridge Sanitarium.  Visitors from all over Ohio visited the mineral spring baths.  E. B. Finch tried to cash in on some of the tourism dollars.  Likely there were people who wished to “try the cure,” yet could not afford the elegant “official” hotel.    The gap was filled by E. B. Finch.

The Finches acquired a large building across the road from the Spring.  Hotels had occupied the site since 1838, and sometime in the 1870s, the Finch Hotel took its turn, and welcomed guests for at least twenty years.  This first Finch hotel had three floors, “with a large ballroom on the third floor where many grand parties during the [18] 70s and 80s. . . .” 

After several years, the Finch Hotel moved to a more centrally located site in the middle of the village, perhaps to be closer to the railroad.  In 1887, E. B. Finch died and left the running of the boarding house to his wife and younger daughters.  Nancy Finch died in 1900, but the boarding house kept on at least until the 1930s, The last Finch daughter, Belle Finch Graydon, still had two roomers in 1930, but made no reference to it being a boarding house, hotel, or anything else.  Belle died in 1942.

Names in the register are difficult to trace.  Who was Otto Harzell, who sold something to the Finches, often several times a month, until he died in 1907 at the age of 26?  What nameless person sold them “milk and onions” frequently?  A fifty dollar charge to J. B. Kanney? Kanney was a “bartender” in the village; did the Finches sell liquor at their boarding house?  Why did business pick up in 1903?  What did 13 year old Macy Ludwig sell or do for $2.00?

When I was young I often visited my grandparents in Green Springs.  While there, I played on the site of the original Finch Hotel.  Bits and pieces of ruined arbors and paths made it a great place to play in the 1960s.  A hotel was still on the site, built after the Finch family left, but long since turned into a retirement home.  Hotel, boarding house, rooms for rent; in a town as small as Green Springs, the term was flexible.  As a “home away from home,” the Finch Boarding House was home for many over the years.  I hope guests had fond memories of the village, as I do.

               

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[i] Paul Groth. Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States (Berkeley, 1994), p. 92.

Marion County Blacksmith: Not Just Horseshoes

Marion County Blacksmith: Not Just Horseshoes            

by Alan Bensley Borer

Each morning sees some task begin,
Each evening sees it close (H. W. Longfellow, The Village Blacksmith, 1840)

            At first, I had no idea what I was looking at.  The papers contained a list of tasks performed by one David Mouser, of Marion County, Ohio.  The work performed, from 1859 to 1861, was carefully dated and priced.  But at first the work was obscure.  “3 single trees honed;” “Mending crank;” “Sharpen plow irons,” “Making repair to sheller;” and many entries regarding “new shoes” or “shoes sett [sic].”  But after ruling out cobbler and wagon maker, David Mouser’s occupation must have been no more or less than that of a blacksmith.

The list of jobs performed by Mouser was recorded in paperwork related to the estate of Thomas Harvey, also of Marion County.  Mr. Harvey died November 30, 1861, meaning all the work done by David Mouser was done before Thomas Harvey died.  Harvey was only 51 when he died of typhoid fever, and was a County Commissioner, a father of eight, and owner of 320 acres of land.  He “made most of the improvements,” but whether that meant he literally went out and built or fixed machinery, or hired someone else, is unknown.[i]

Even the pioneering/first generation farmers of central Ohio could not do every kind of chore imaginable.  Although Ohio farms and farmers lived and worked in the relative simplicity of a preindustrial world, they still needed repairs made when something broke.  Workers of the period were probably more likely to fix a machine than buy new, at least if someone in the area could do the work.  Fortunately for Mr. Harvey and his large acreage, David Mouser lived just west of Marion village, and was a competent blacksmith.

            Mouser, born in 1810, the same year as Thomas Harvey, was a native of Pickaway County.  His father, James Mouser, was also a blacksmith, and began teaching his son the trade when the younger Mouser was 13.  Mouser “followed this business for fifty years or more acquiring a good property and a comfortable home in Marion.  He is the oldest blacksmith in the county [1883], having devoted his life to this occupation.”  Mouser also farmed, and speculated in land, owning many lots in the village of Marion.  He had nine children by five wives, and still managed to die a widower in 1896.[ii]

            Mouser kept a running account of his work for Thomas Harvey.  As mentioned above, his most frequent chore was making horseshoes, followed by the manufacture or repair of farm hardware.  Sharpening, honing, making hooks, cranks, and washers accounted for much of Mouser’s time.  The “sheller” he repaired on July 2, 1860 was a more involved task.  Mechanical corn shellers were only just beginning to appear on the market; the earliest hand sheller patent was granted in 1856, with the majority of patents coming after the Civil War.

         Seemingly, Mouser’s bread-and-butter came from shoeing horses.  But did it?

Blacksmiths on the frontier who did shoe horses only spent about a fourth of their time on such work. Fifty to sixty percent of their business consisted of repairing farm implements. The rest of their time was devoted to producing new items such as tools and hardware.[iii]

Although Mouser’s list of jobs completed included many horseshoes, many other little jobs were completed.  And while horseshoes were the numerically most frequent, a quick glance at the list would agree that they probably accounted for about half his workload.

            I want to close this superficial look at a Marion County blacksmith by pointing out many of the things we do not know about Mouser or his client, Thomas Harvey.  Did Mouser have a shop in town, or did he use a forge at the job site?  Did Mouser and Harvey get along, or was it an antagonistic relationship?  It has been stated that the blacksmith’s “forge was a center of social as well as industrial activity.”[iv]  Would they have agreed?

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[i] The history of M[i]arion County, Ohio (Chicago, 1883), pp. 587-88; https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/38810189/thomas-jefferson-harvey

[ii] Marion County, Ohio,  p. 614., Find-a-Grave, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/32931158

[iii] https://www.shirleendavies.com/history-of-blacksmiths-farriers-in-the-19th-century-frontier/

[iv] R. Carlton Buley, The Old Northwest: Pioneer Period 1815-1840 (Indianapolis, 1950), p. I-227.

Homesteader Robbed in Toledo on Way to Kansas,1877

Homesteader Robbed in Toledo on Way to Kansas,  1877                        by Alan Borer

            In 1877, a young man named Howard Ruede [above] left his hometown of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and resettled in Osborne, Kansas.  Ruede, who was a printer by trade, built a sod house, or “soddy” as they were sometimes called, and established a farm on free land from the federal government.  Under the Homestead Act of 1862, settlers could stake legal claim to unsettled land.  Provided they lived on the land, built a dwelling, and planted trees, a homesteader would in ten years receive clear title to the property.

            Millions of settlers from the East tried their luck at homesteading, but results were mixed.  One of the reasons Ruede and a multitude of others had to dig down into the soil for their habitation was that, owing to the nature of the Great Plains, trees were scarce.  Territories and later states like Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma were areas of low annual rainfall, too low for forests and the building material they provided.  No wonder that Ruede, when the time came to write his memoirs, titled the book Sod-House Days.

            Ruede, like many others, were not born farmers.  The eastern states were rapidly filling up, and Ruede, like many of his comrades, wanted title to land, more than any specific agrarian vision.  By the post Civil War era, railroads provided easy, if not always inexpensive, transportation west to the settlement line.  Sometimes, the nascent homesteader had as much trouble or bad luck getting through the east to settle the West.

            Ruede welcomed his father, Gottlieb Herman Ruede, to Kansas the summer after he arrived there.  On the way, “Pa” Ruede had an encounter in Toledo, Ohio:

…..I am glad you did not send that money with Pa.  He had $30 snatched from his hand at Toledo.  A man asked him for change, and he got it out, and just then the man grabbed it and jumped from the car.  So that was gone.  Now anybody who travels and has money ought to keep it in his pocket, and not allow a stranger to make him get it out. Either.  He has only 50 cents left.[i]

            Americans moving west were an idealistic lot.  They believed in progress.  Some of them also believed that the settle East was morally degenerate, and that the movement from the wicked, settled cities to a pristine, virgin West was a cleansing act for the settler.[ii]  We have no idea if Gottlieb Ruede’s thoughts on being robbed in Toledo followed this line of reasoning.  It might be that his experience of Toledo, however transitory, left a bad taste in his mouth.

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[i] Howard Ruede, Sod-House Days: Letters from a Kansas Homesteader 1877-78 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1983), p. 98.

[ii] Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1950), passim.

Buckeye Traction Ditcher

Buckeye Traction Ditcher                                       by Alan Borer

Most northwest Ohioans know that our home was once an impenetrable, dangerous swamp.  The Black Swamp stretched from Sandusky toward the Indiana line, with its deepest parts running parallel to the Maumee River and stretching south toward Findlay.  Settlement of the swamp lands lagged to least 20 years behind the rest of Ohio.  Two hundred years later, with the exception of a couple of nature preserves west of Toledo, the swamp is gone without a trace.

           That is the story of why the area, especially Wood County, is flat and crisscrossed by mile upon mile of ditch.  To drain the Black Swamp, and create usable land for farms and, later, industry, the state of Ohio had to lower the water table.  In a swamp, the water table is at the surface.  It was necessary to lower the water table by ten feet or more to avoid surface water and in effect fix the water table several miles below the surface.

            Like any modern construction project, the state bid out the gargantuan effort of digging ditches surrounding every square mile of swampland.  Like every state-financed construction project, the money gushing out of Columbus was an impetus for economic development.  Ditch diggers, mostly foreign born, had to be hired.  Workers had to be fed, clothed, and sheltered, however poorly.  Ditchers died at high rates from malaria; money was needed to purchase quinine, doctors’ fees, and hospitals, however primitive.  And a steady stream of tools and machines were needed, growing larger and more complex as the project became more sophisticated.

            The Buckeye Traction Ditcher Company was one of the companies that profited by the desire to drain the swamp.  Located in Findlay near the southern edge of the swamplands, Buckeye Traction provided huge machines that replaced the Irish and German hand-diggers after the Civil War.  By using steam power to dig ditches and finally break the Black Swamp’s stranglehold on the area, the company thrived by applying local industry to a local problem.  But an industry built on solving a finite problem has a finite life, unless it could change with the times.  Buckeye Traction faced this hurdle when the swamp was gone.

            Buckeye Traction and its ditching machines were the brainchild of a Bowling Green mechanic named James B. Hill.  Hill, a machinist, patented his first ditcher in 1894.  Moving to Deshler, Carey, and finally Findlay by 1902, Hill built ditchers in all three locations.  The Findlay foundry of Van Buren, Heck and Marvin produced the machines, changing its name to Buckeye Steam Traction in 1906.  Keeping abreast of changes, steam was replaced by gasoline in 1908, and diesel in the 1920s, as the motive power.

            Instead of a shovel or vertical digger, the Buckeye ditchers utilized a huge digging wheel:

The revolutionary design of the ditcher digging wheel had neither an axle nor spokes, enabling the machine to dig a deeper trench that was uniform in size and grade.. . .. Buckeye Traction Ditcher Company grew into the largest tile ditching and construction trenching company in the world and remained so for over fifty years.. . . .  The steam-driven ditcher cut in a single motion along a consistent gradient and was operated by two laborers. These machines replaced slow and costly hand labor. 

One of the machines, number 88, can still be seen at the Hancock Historical Museum in Findlay.[i]  The machines sold in Ontario, as well as Africa. To train foreign users, Buckeye sent skilled engineers to teach the machine’s use. 

About 700 Buckeye Ditchers were sold before 1910.  In the years after, a total of 2000 were built by the firm.  Sales declined as the swamp was drained, but this is not to suggest that the company is gone.  Just as the Black Swamp temporarily reappears in the puddles left by a sudden, heavy rainfall, Buckeye Traction Ditcher survives in smaller forms.  

The firm has since switched ownership several times, including Garwood and Sergeant Industries. The company discontinued production in Findlay in 1973, although Ohio Locomotive Crane Company of Bucyrus is manufacturing a version of the machine. Buckeye's product line is still being marketed today by H & S Company, an agricultural drainage equipment dealer in Celina, Ohio.

            And what happened to inventor James B. Hill?  

In 1908 Hill moved to Raceland, Louisiana, where as a farmer he developed seed corn, known as Hill's White Cob and Yellow Dent, which was sold in many parts of the United States and South America. He also continued development work on components of the modern tank and on equipment used in draining swamplands in Louisiana.

While living the remainder of his life in Louisiana, on his death in 1945 he was buried in Maple Grove Cemetery in Findlay.[ii]

            So the next time you drive through Wood and Hancock counties, remember that this is a totally man-made landscape.  For better or worse, the change was made by men using Buckeye Steam Traction Ditchers.

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[i] https://www.asme.org/about-asme/engineering-history/landmarks/133-buckeye-steam-traction-ditcher; https://www.asme.org/wwwasmeorg/media/resourcefiles/aboutasme/who%20we%20are/engineering%20history/landmarks/133-buckeye-steam-traction-ditcher.pdf

 [ii] https://www.farmcollector.com/steam-traction/buckeye-steam-traction-ditcher

Peck's Flower Store

Peck’s Flower Store, Toledo, Ohio by Alan Borer

Nothing has a more wonderful scent than that of a flower shop, especially in the off season.  Those of us who live in the North get a little stir crazy during the long weeks of winter, even a tame winter.  One cure for the winter blues is to poke your head into a flower shop.  A few deep breaths of the concentrated perfume of many flowers from many places may convince you that life is worth living after all.

One Toledo purveyor of flowers and their scent was Selah N. Peck (1845-1922), who owned and operated Peck’s Flower Shop.  Neither the largest nor most notorious, Mr. Peck ran his florist’s business for many years from downtown Toledo at several different locations.  Long forgotten by most, Peck’s career was typical of urban floriculture at the turn of the last century.

Selah N. Peck (he was usually called “S. N.”) was born in 1845, at or near Dresden, Ohio, in Muskingum County.  We do not know the details, but he married a girl from Van Buren, Ohio named Alice Larkins, the marriage taking place in Hardin County.  They moved to Toledo about 1895, and lived on Broadway Avenue with their two daughters, one son, and a female servant.  The two oldest, Bertha and Frank, helped out in the shop.  

And what a shop!  A contemporary description (1897) had this to say:

His hot- house covers about 8,000 square feet, and is equipped with every modern service service known to the art of floriculture.  Mr. Peck grows all kinds of rare flowers, shrubs and plants and keeps the finest display of blooms in the city.  He makes a specialty of all kinds of floral decorative work for balls, parties, weddings, etc., and also supplies the choicest of all cut flowers for any use. . .  He has long been interested in floriculture and knows every detail of the growing and propagating of flowers. 

[Toledo-Lucas County Public Library]

Actually, Peck moved the business, specialized as it was, to several different locations Downtown.  The greenhouses were located at 1707 Broadway, but he had retail outlets at 507 Madison (1900-02), 442 Summit (1908-11), and 424 Superior (1912-19).  He also spent “part of the time in Air Line Junction,” that conglomeration of railroad shops and facilities in south Toledo, which may account for some of the gaps in his addresses. 

In addition to his work arranging and selling flowers, Peck was an inventor, and the holder of a patent. “Mr. Peck is also the inventor and patentee of a novel ventilating device whereby ventilation can be secured at one.” United States Patent 575892, issued to Peck on January 26, 1897, secured his right to a “transom lifter.”  The invention automatically lifted the windows of greenhouses, which are sensitive to changes in heat and light. 

Peck was well-regarded and well-liked in Toledo business and social circles.  At times, the Toledo Florists Club met at his store.  When he retired to Folkston, Georgia, in 1919, he was looking forward to a well-earned retirement in a warmer climate.  But on the night of December 7, 1922, tragedy struck:  

Mr. Peck and wife [sic] were on their way to visit a neighbor, walking on the edge of the road. . . . [he] was knocked down and drug over a hundred feet. . . . by a wildly driven, dimly lighted Ford by parties unknown.   

Peck lingered for 26 hours, then died of his injuries.  In March, his remains were brought home to Toledo, where he was buried at Maplewood Cemetery. 

As a florist, Selah Peck provided floral arrangements for many a Toledo funeral.  It is one of the ironies of the florist’s calling.  The beautiful flowers and plants that symbolize life when there is no life in season are also symbolic of funerals and the end of life.  However used, flowers cheer the heart.  Mr. Peck brought happiness to many a Toledo home.