Sheep in Franklin Mills, 1847

 Sheep in Franklin Mills, 1847 by Alan Borer

I spent a year living in Kent, Ohio (Portage County) in the mid 1980s.  The town is host to Kent State University, and that was in fact what took me to Kent.  It was a part of Ohio I did not know, so I took advantage of my limited free time to see the local sites: Blossom Music festival, Cuyahoga National Park, the Jonathan Hale homestead, etc.  But I was there as a student, and most of my time was given to the labor that studying in pre-Internet days required.

I don’t remember how, but my short time in Kent led me to know that the town had a different name in the past, Franklin Mills.  The cover in Figure 1 thus was a link to my memory, and a link to my own past.  Town names, and their postal markings, are changeable, but I was surprised at the changes Kent/Franklin Mills has endured.

Franklin Mills was founded in 1805.  A village on the upper Cuyahoga River, it was famous/infamous as the site of Captain Samuel Brady’s leap across the river to avoid Native capture.  Brady’s twenty-two foot leap lives on in folklore, although later development widened the gorge.  There were actually two villages, Franklin Mills, or the “lower village,” and Carthage, or the “upper village.”  

[George] DePeyster was at this time appointed Postmaster of Franklin Mills, that being the official name of the office, although the twin settlements were known respectively as Upper Village and Lower Village. The name Carthage was afterward applied to the Upper Village. Postmaster DePeyster kept his mail matter in a cigar box, and 25 cents was the usual moderate fee of Uncle Sam for carrying a letter a reasonable distance.

The rural character of the neighborhood is emphasized in the contents of the letter the cover contained:

Franklin Mills April 13, 1847  

…My sheep look well   have 78 now   . . . I have 3 other [old?]]....with 16 Pigs [?]  1 Cow & two two years old heifers which will have Calves Soon….I would send you 100 Bushels Corn if you will pay the Express from here  at 35 cents   I think it will be a little higher here but all the funds that can be raised is invested in Wheat and flour …. corn plants keeping on from Next [?] year and plowing to sow [sew?] Spring Wheat. . . .

Your Brother

Charles Button

This somewhat garbled excerpt reinforces the pastoral setting of the area.  While the mills of “Franklin Mills” gave the protovillage an industrial cast, the town was in a rural area and a rural setting.  Keeping to our postal theme, was the “Express” mentioned in the letter a private express company? 

Franklin Mills kept its early name until 1864, when the village was renamed after railroad magnate Marvin Kent.  Mr. Kent was responsible for bringing the Atlantic and Great Western railway to Franklin Mills, and the new influx of business led to the change.  Kent’s last mill, the “Star of the West,” was destroyed in a major fire in 2022.  The mills of Franklin Mills have retreated further into the past, and is only the occasional reminder, like this postal cover, that survives.

A Swarm of Dogs, or, Clash of the Titans, Westerville, 1915

A Swarm of Dogs, or, Clash of the Titans, 1915       by Alan Borer

In a small town, residents can clash over the smallest things.  Of course, two feuding neighbors may not see things as “small.”  Petty nuisances, noise complaints, and minor spats can escalate into conflicts at the highest level.  One such spat occurred in the early spring of 1915, when two of Westerville’s most noteworthy names squared off over a dog running loose.

Let’s review the combatants:

In one corner, we have Mayor James H. Larimore.  J. H. Larimore was mayor of Westerville for two years, 1914 to 1915, and by coincidence, the last mayor before city-manager-style governance began.  Active politically throughout his life, Larimore was a member of the powerful Anti-Saloon League, and a dedicated journalist who worked on several newspapers including the Ohio State Journal, one of Columbus’s leading news sources.  Born in Pennsylvania, he moved to Sunbury as a small child.  He and his wife Phebe relocated to Westerville in 1897, where he also pursued a lifelong hobby of writing for fun.  He even created a literary alter ego, one “Hank Timmons,” who loved repeating cornball witticisms, such as, “Never look a gift auto  in the carburetor.”  These appeared here and there in the Public Opinion and several magazines for which Hank/J. H. wrote.

And in the other corner, we have Otterbein University president Walter G. Clippinger.  Familiar to most readers of this rag, Clippinger had been president for six years by the time of the “dog fight.”  He lived fairly comfortably in a house on Home Street, north of Saum Hall, where he could keep watch on his fiefdom.  North and west of campus was more or less open country at that time, and a great tease for a curious dog.  We know nothing of the dog’s breed or origin, but if it was like most dogs, it liked to follow its nose.

The opening salvo of this fight came in a letter Mayor Larimore sent to President Clippinger with a complaint:

. . . . It has been reported to me that your dog is causing some annoyances to folks down that way.  I know, of course, that you do not want to have this occur.  There is an ordinance which forbids the running of dogs at large in Westerville, and I am sure that you will be pleased to know that such an ordinance exists.

Cool and sedate, the president fired back:

. . . . I have your note of the 1st. concerning our wayward dog.  We are all too conscious that the dog has been running at large too much, but he is being well cared for now, and the public need have no fear of molestation from him.

Clippinger then parried, as he went on:

You speak about an ordinance forbidding the running at large of dogs.  I know of no such ordinance.  Judging from the swarm of dogs that are at large in our village it would seem that there never was an ordinance to that effect.

Touche.

An interesting exchange of words, but we do not have much background or depth.  Only two days later, the Mayor sent a cordial letter to the President, praising Otterbein students for their civic-mindedness, and promising to “work together” to make Westerville “not only great but beautiful and attractive..  Larimore served on Clippinger’s committee to raise $400,000 for Otterbein in 1917.  No mention of discord between the two was reported by the Public Opinion.  It may have been a joke, with tongues firmly in cheek.

We will probably never know.  I am a cat person, so I won’t take sides!