Fayette County Fair

In the history pamphlet published in 1953 for Ohio's Sesqui-centennial, the Fayette County committee researched the beginning of the county's fair. 

They wrote that the original fairground was located on the east side of the city in 1859.   After the grounds were no longer used for fairs, shows and circuses were held there including 'Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show" with William F. Cody and Annie Oakley. 

In 1886 a new fair was begun on the present location and was held Tuesday through Saturday, October 5-9 that year.

This postcard shows the fairgrounds in 1909.  My grandmother, Maude Post Rankin, identifies herself and friend, Bertha Briggs, in the foreground towards the left under the black umbrella. 

The 1953 history identifies three main buildings on the grounds: the Grand Stand, the Art Hall, and the Fruit Hall and that only the Grand Stand remained by that year. 

The building in the left background is not known to me but perhaps to another reader.  Please leave your comment if you can identify this building.

And good luck to this year's exhibitors!!

http://www.fayettecoagsociety.com/

The 1976 Tour of Fayette County

In 1976 four members of the South Central Ohio Preservation Society* organized a tour of Fayette County homes and landmarks. They borrowed a bus from the Boy Scouts and headed out to show 40 locations to those who signed up to join them.

Those four people were  B.E. Kelley, Kenneth Craig, George Robinson and my mother, Jane Rankin. **

I knew them all, some better than others, and I can imagine them that day as the most entertaining tour guides, telling anecdotes and answering questions from their vast, collective knowledge. They handed out a listing of the tour sites and a hand-drawn map (shown above) with comments; in some cases detailed and in others just a short note about each stop along the route that they had worked together to create.

They started at the court house, of course. They ended up at the Fayette County Museum where guests were served cider and cookies. They looked at homes and cemeteries. Their notes say they stopped at the last remnants of an old toll house (sadly not marked on the map), an old barn (also not marked), a schoolhouse converted into a motel, and pointed to locations where structures were long gone such as the double covered bridge that was torn down in the 1930’s.

I plan on re-tracing their tour route to see if I can find all their landmarks and in future postings will list all 40 tour stops. Please add your comments about these or any sites you feel should be part of a tour of Fayette County landmarks.

If you have old photos that you would like to have posted on this blog, please e-mail your submission to fayettehistory@gmail.com.




*Founded in 1966, the mission of SCOPS is to preserve the natural and cultural history in the South Central Ohio area.


** At the time, Mr. Kelley, Mr. Craig and Mr. Robinson were Fayette County Historical Society board members and my mother would also later become a board member. However, for this tour, it appears they were organizing this tour as a SCOPS project.

Happy Independence Day 2010

This photo of my grandfather Rankin is from the June 1902 issue of the Washington High School literary publication, the Argus. 

That year Harry was a senior, editor-in-chief of the Argus, and member of the track and debate teams.

His contribution to the Argus was a long political and social essay on the rise and fall of various countries concluding with his fervently felt patriotism:

" ... Courage in war, and a love of personal freedom have always been a noticeable characteristic of the American people and this alone has been her dream.  It was germinated by oppression, cherished by the liberty-loving people, rocked in the Mayflower and firmly planted on the stern bosom of Plymouth Rock. 

We may search the pages of ancient history; we may study the motives of contemporaries, we may prophesy the future of any nation and we will fail to find any with higher ideals, with nobler efforts or with a brighter future than those of the United States, and her dream is Freedom!"

The Revolutionary Soldiers Buried in Fayette County (Part 2)

  

In Part 1 of this story (see post from May), I wrote about finding a script my grandmother, Maude Rankin, wrote for a segment of a weekly broadcast on radio station WCHO which was given by members of the Fayette County Ohio Sesquicentennial Committee, possibly in 1952.

In this script she laid out the case for wanting to commemorate the Revolutionary War Soldiers buried in Fayette County including the thought that had gone into potentially marking each soldiers' grave.  But given a number of obstacles, which I re-counted in that earlier post, it was concluded that a plaque should be placed in the court house with all of the men's names that could be identified.  

In the second half of her radio talk, she appealed to members of the community:

"Now we are anxious that NO name be left OFF this plaque that should be on it. Over a period of years Mrs. Max Dice has been compiling a list of the Soldiers of the Revolution who lived in Fayette County, and in recent years she has been able to add more names through our research.“

These are the names that the Committee was still researching at that time:

    

     William Whicker          Buch Pendleton          Caleb Taylor

     Thomas Crouch            Drury Ragsdale           Jacob Coons

     William Mahy              Jesse Britton                Thomas Jones            

     James Kious                  Joseph Vance               John Graham

     William Faulkner        Abraham Colaw

    

And I find this to be one of the most interesting comments my grandmother made:

“When Mr. George Gossard was Superintendent of the Washington Cemetery he gave us the names of Joseph Bloomer, Abraham Payne and “Boss” or Ross Bryant. The latter is buried on the lot of Joseph Bell, as Mr. Bell said he did not want a soldier of the Revolution to lie in Potter’s Field.”

She concluded that week’s radio address:

"… Any of my listeners who may have knowledge of one or more of these men will be doing us a favor by sending that information to Mrs. Dice, Miss Elizabeth Johnson at the library or myself. You will be helping to insure that no name is left off the plaque that should be on it.”

This joint effort by the D.A.R. and the Ohio Sesquicentennial Committee and others resulted in the plaque, pictured above, being located outside the present-day probate court office.

I would be very interested to gather more information from anyone who knows about these weekly radio addresses.

Please leave your questions or comments.

Preserving Family History

Although this post is not exclusively about Fayette County, I think it could be of interest to anyone thinking about how to preserve family history.


In the past four years I've had to make a lot of decisions.  From heirlooms to trinkets:  what do I do with all the family items I've inherited?

Some choices are easy and obvious.  I've donated many out-of-print research books to the genealogy department at the Carnegie Library.  Other more personal items have a natural new 'home' with another family member.  I still have hundreds of such decisions ahead of me.

In the fall of 2009 I decided to tour the newly renovated Thompson Library on the Ohio State University campus. I’d read about it in the Dispatch and decided to explore. It’s an amazing building.

I didn’t go there thinking I would find a place to donate some family history. But that’s exactly what happened.

One of the library’s features is an exhibit space on the 2nd floor where artifacts from the university’s various collections can be showcased. As I walked around I saw boots and a suit John Glenn wore on one of his space missions next to couture dresses; an elaborately decorated kimono and ancient manuscripts.

I also saw an item or two from the Starling Medical College. Next to the items was a note indicating that these were from the Medical Heritage Center collection at OSU. I’d never heard of it before but I was intrigued.

As I stood there, those items brought back to mind the tragic story of my great grandfather, William St. Patrick Kellough.

Starling Medical College* (which was located in downtown Columbus where Grant Medical Center is now) was the precursor to the Ohio State University Medical Center. William St. Patrick Kellough (Willie as his family and friends called him) was an almost-28-year-old junior at Starling Medical College in 1897 when he contracted typhoid fever. His wife, Bertha (Nancy Bertha Morain Kellough), had recently recovered from it, but his illness was more severe and progressed rapidly. He was treated at St. Francis Hospital by the doctors who were also his professors. He died there on March 12, 1897, the day before my maternal grandmother, Senath (his only child) turned one.

200 of the faculty and his fellow classmates at Starling/St. Francis accompanied his coffin to Union Depot in Columbus and some stayed with him to his home in Mount Sterling for the funeral and interment at Bethel Cemetery outside of Mount Sterling where his parents, Asenath and John Kellough, are also buried.

The exhibit had intrigued me so when I got home I checked out the Medical Heritage Center Web site:
http://mhc.med.ohio-state.edu

The Medical Heritage Center recognizes and celebrates historical health and medical personalities and events; collects, displays and archives artifacts; provides a venue for historical medical research; and supports medical history education.

Occupying the 5th floor of the Prior Health Sciences Library at The Ohio State University, the Center also serves as the repository of data, artifacts, and historical information relating to the health and medical education and the medical profession in central Ohio.

I e-mailed the curator. I wondered if my great grandfather’s artifacts would be something they would accept: a framed portrait of him (above), three of his medical texts (one a lab workbook which he was in the middle of when he died!), his obituary from the newspaper, and a funeral program.

Even though my grandmother Senath lovingly kept these items about the father she never knew, I can’t keep everything. That’s a hard reality.

The curator answered my inquiry and they are accepting these items into their collection.  It's a good feeling to know they will be properly maintained and that future generations will be able to learn about my great grandfather.  I hope my grandmother would approve.

Over the past four years I've been trying to think about the best places to preserve family history.  Maybe you are facing similar decisions. What do I do with all the things my family has kept over the years or even generations? Personal history is more fragile than you think and can easily be lost.

Maybe there's a new and unexpected way for you to preserve your family's history, too?

----------------------------------------------

* Starling Medical College/St. Francis Hospital was significant as it was the first institution in the United States, designed to combine patient care and clinical teaching in the same building.

Also, see this Web site for an historical marker: http://www.hmdb.org/marker.asp?marker=12926

I also located a photo of St. Francis Hospital/Starling Medical College at: http://www.hellocolumbus.com/Photos_Buildings.Cfm

1963 Flooding. Court Street and Circle Avenue

With some record-breaking flooding in Oklahoma and Arkansas this week and severe storms in Central Ohio, it is timely that I came across this photo today.

This is the intersection of Court Street looking toward Circle Avenue.  The home furthest away is 611 Circle Avenue where my grandmother, Maude Rankin, lived in the 60's and 70's. 

This photograph was taken by Richard Rankin in the spring of 1963.

Senior Class ... 1902 Style

Congrats to the graduates of Miami Trace and Washington High Schools!

In 1902 my grandfather, Harry Rankin, was a senior at Washington High School and Editor-in-Chief of the school’s monthly
publication, the Argus. In the June edition, the Argus’ Literary Editor, Besse Jenkins, wrote the class poem for the 26 graduating members of the class of ’02.

The language isn’t what today’s seniors might be familiar with in the world of instant messages (IM’s) or tweets (LOL) but the sentiment remains the same about leaving lifelong friends (BFF’s) and heading into the future.

And if any here in dreaming,
     Of the dear old days gone by,
May brush away in sadness
     A salt tear from their eye,
They will understand our feeling
     For the olden times and why
The love for our old school days
     Shall never, never die!

Yet where e’er our Fate shall lead us,
     In the unknown path of life,
Whether gay and strewn with roses,
     Or dark with pain and strife,
The roses will be sweeter,
     And the pain, less hard to bear
As we think of our old school days,
    When our hearts were free from care.

Excerpted from “Class Poem” by Besse Jenkins, Argus, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1902

In the same edition of the Argus, the Class Prophecy, written by Ethel Crozier, predicts that in 1920 Besse Jenkins “ … has risen to fame through her clever illustrated stories and poems. She is now an associate editor of one of the leading periodicals.”