When its first covered bridge was constructed on the Ashtabula-Trumbull Turnpike in 1832, Ashtabula County was closer to frontier than a "new Connecticut." Its rutted roads promised adventure and suggested prosperity but also great hardship. Covered bridges, made mostly of local timber, would eventually soften the brutality of travel, isolation and a well-watered landscape. Their proliferation and preservation gave Ashtabula County the nickname "Covered Bridge Capital of the Western Reserve." Admire both famous and forgotten crossings with Carl E. Feather, who has spent over a quarter century mired in muddy creek beds, camera in hand, waiting for the perfect light."
Post-World War II Ashtabula was a major Great Lakes port with a thriving downtown. Local photographer Richard E. Stoner began taking photographs of the growing city in 1938, and for the next 58 years, his lens captured Ashtabula's businesses, industries, and citizens. His commercial accounts ranged from the harbor's Pinney Dock and Transport Company, to Main Avenue's locally-owned Carlisle-Allen Company department store, to Ashtabula's major war industries. Dick Stoner's earlier photographs capture the Ashtabula that once was, including the week-long Sesquicentennial Celebration of 1953. His later photos record the beginnings of fundamental change in our way of life. Also included in this volume are some pre-1930s photographs by Vinton N. Herron, whose work Stoner purchased when Herron retired. For Ashtabulans, this is a family album. For others, it is a look at a bygone time in Midwest America.
Ashtabula Harbor was a sleepy Lake Erie port until 1873, when competing railroads finally connected it to the steel mills of Pittsburgh and Youngstown, Ohio. Within two decades, it had become the greatest iron ore receiving port on the Great Lakes. Much of the greatness was due to immigrant labor - Finns, Italians, Irish and many others found work, home and a better life in Ashtabula. The Harbor had a reputation for being the toughest port on the Great Lakes, thanks to dozens of saloons, brothels, fights, murders and bums. This is a story of innovation, hard work, transformations and revival, the story of the world's greatest iron ore receiving port.
In the early 1940s, $10 bought a bus ticket from Appalachia to a better job and promise of prosperity in the flatlands of northeast Ohio. A mountaineer with a strong back and will to work could find a job within twenty-four hours of arrival. But the cost of a bus ticket was more than a week's wages in a lumber camp, and the mountaineer paid dearly in loss of kin, culture, homeplace, and freedom. Numerous scholarly works have addressed this migration that brought more than one million mountaineers to Ohio alone. But Mountain People in a Flat Land is the first popular history of Appalachian migration to one community -- Ashtabula County, an industrial center in the fabled "best location in the nation." These migrants share their stories of life in Appalachia before coming north. There are tales of making moonshine, colorful family members, home remedies harvested from the wild, and life in coal company towns and lumber camps. The mountaineers explain why, despite the beauty of the mountains and the deep kinship roots, they had to leave Appalachia. Stories of their hardships, cultural clashes, assimilation, and ultimate successes in the flatland provide a moving look at an often stereotyped people.
" ... provides updated county and town listings within the same overall state-by-state organization ... information on records and holdings for every county in the United States, as well as excellent maps from renowned mapmaker William Dollarhide ... The availability of census records such as federal, state, and territorial census reports is covered in detail ... Vital records are also discussed, including when and where they were kept and how"--Publisher decription.
Life is perfect for fifteen-year-old Elinora Wolton?for the most part. Anxious by nature and resistant to the often painful metamorphosis of growing up, she is most content when she is able to avoid uncomfortable feelings and experiences. This proves easy enough to do living a secure, sheltered life at Kellandale, a quiet country estate that has been isolated from many of the world's problems. But in Kellandale Wood (Book One): The Way of the River, a tween fantasy/adventure set a hundred years ago in the country of Eldmoor, this estate also happens to sit on the edge of a vast forest. Known as Wyches Wood to some, it is a forest with a centuries-old reputation of being haunted. No one has dared to enter it for the last two hundred years, and Elinora and her precocious, easily bored younger sister Tillie have been strictly forbidden from going near it by their parents-a fact that drives Tillie mad.This all changes when they witness a man dropping a mysterious parcel into the river within their property. Despite Elinora's initial reluctance, Tillie-curious and relentlessly persistent-persuades Elinora to go searching for it with her, taking them deep into the woods. There they discover an abandoned puppy with an extraordinary ability, setting them off on a dangerous rescue mission.In order to help Henry find his canine family, Elinora is forced to confront her deepest fears as she, Tillie, and their allies are pitted against a greedy and unscrupulous showman. Over time, they unravel the circumstances surrounding his abandonment, discovering what links their family to the forest, and the forest to Henry's own traumatic past. Together, they set out to achieve what seems impossible, ultimately revealing the truth of the legendary enchanted woods and the mystic river that flows through it.
