Day 107, Monday July 1, 2024: Galion, Ohio to Cleveland, Ohio (Part 1)
- Mark Carl Rom
- 15 minutes ago
- 7 min read
Carnegie libraries visited: Bucyrus, Carey, Fostoria, Clyde, Sandusky, Milan, Amherst, and Lakewood, Ohio
Days sober: 375
The white van that had pulled in after dark had Oregon plates, so I need not have been concerned. Oregon is a peaceful place, and no one from there has ever hurt anyone, because as “10 Portland Stereotypes that are Completely Accurate” puts it, “Portlandians Are Way Too Upbeat And Nice, But They Don't See It,” and I’m pretty sure the van had a Portlandia vibe. After an early morning walk in the woods, I headed into Galion and the Three Bean coffee shop, with the van’s occupants still resting quietly, unless they were dead, which I doubt, when I left. At the Three Bean, I gave the barista a 200 percent tip as the fat mug of Three Bean Coffee was only a buck.
I visited eight Carnegie libraries today (in Bucyrus, Carey, Fostoria, Clyde, Sandusky, Milan, Amherst, and Lakewood) and each showed its individuality within the common theme. All of them had impressive renovations and large additions which enhanced their original structures. The most intriguing renovation was in Fostoria. It was difficult for me to discern the outlines of the library built in 1903. On two sides of the current library, the walls were sheathed with translucent marble. I recognized this style: I had learned about it (48 years ago!) in the architecture class I had taken as an undergraduate where I saw pictures of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.
Bucyrus, which holds “America’s Eatingest Festival” (its Bratwurst Festival, held every August), is “the perfect Midwest destination for anyone looking to experience authentic Americana,” or so says every town north of the Mason-Dixon line, west of Pennsylvania, and east of the Missouri River. Bucyrus – no one knows for sure where the name comes from – can claim that the old Lincoln Highway cuts through the center of town. And in 1906, the Bucyrus Forum reported, an apple tree, more than 100 years old, planted by Johnny Appleseed himself, was still producing more apples than seemed possible. The tree was flourishing on Finley Hill, where General E.B. Finley and his wife Charlotte Codding Finley had their home.
The Finleys had moved to Bucyrus around 1860, and they became prominent members of the community. Ebenezer built a distinguished career as a lawyer, politician, and judge (he carried the honorific General from his rather brief service in the civil war). General Finley’s career suggests that he was a devout extrovert. Charlotte, maybe not so much, or maybe just in a more self-effacing way.
Dolls were one of Charlotte’s special passions. In 1885, she organized a doll-making project at Bucyrus’s First Presbyterian Church as a fundraiser. These “Presbyterian Rag Dolls” were made of cloth and had hand-painted faces and were typically dressed in boot-style shoes, petticoats or bloomers, and a matching prairie-style bonnet. The Victorian Traditions website states that many generations of church women continued Charlotte’s work (she was the head of the project during the “First” and “Second” Periods) until the end of the Fourth Period in 1984, and “Grace Kelly was known to have once owned a Presbyterian Doll.” (If you want to read more about these “world famous” dolls, you can do so in Debra Hoover’s book "The Doll That Built a Church: Uncovering the Story of the Presbyterian Doll".) As of September 2025, a First Period doll was available on Rubylane (“The Dolls World’s Home”) for $2395.
While her husband was building his career, Charlotte was busy building Bucyrus’s social and intellectual life. She was a “beloved teacher” in the town’s school system, and was also recognized as “the mother of some of Bucyrus’s leading clubs,” including the Crocus Club (founded with Susan Kearsley), the Northside Reading Club, and the New Era Club, a women’s literary club. At New Era’s opening ceremony in 1899, club president Lucy Yeend Culler, in one of her six addresses to the club, proclaimed:
This is a new club, the New Era Club. Today we take the initial steps in a new program…New faces are among us. New hopes and aspirations take possession of us, and I trust we each may be called the new woman; not in the popular sense, as mannish in actions or apparel, or clamoring for positions which are outside her sphere, or unbecoming her sex, but the new woman of the nineteenth century, whose, increased educational advantages have created an earnest seeking after knowledge. This has opened up new avenues of thought and broader fields of usefulness, bringing her efforts into recognition, and thus adding dignity and force to her womanhood…
Given her social engagement, surely Charlotte was one of the fifteen women who banded together to form the Memorial Library Association, incorporated in 1894, for the purpose of establishing a library in memory of those lost in the Civil War. The library they created was tiny – the size of two pantries – and so in 1899 Mrs. Finley, by then president of the library association, reached out to Andrew Carnegie for assistance. Carnegie did not give her a library then, although he did send the association a $500 check to buy books. An 1899 letter to Carnegie from Bucyrus resident E.R. Kearsley noted that Mrs. Finley alone had been successful in soliciting the $500 donation from Carnegie, but at a meeting of the library’s trustees her “retiring disposition” had prevented a resolution in her honor from being presented.
In 1903, Mrs. Finley again reached out to Carnegie on behalf of the Library Association. Charlotte and her husband, a lawyer, politician, and judge, were prominent members of Bucyrus. Rather than writing to Carnegie (Bertram) directly, Finley sent her letters through a couple of other townsmen, leading Betram to advise her that “it would facilitate matters if you would correspond direct (sic) rather than circuitously.” Charlotte also seems to want to engage in an “I don’t want to ask Carnegie unless I know he will say yes” game. As Bertram puts it, “it appears you deprecate bringing the matter up officially before getting a promise from Carnegie.” A promise, it seems is what Mrs. Finley received, because subsequent letters from local officials make references to the “$15,000 for a city library which was promised through Mrs. E.B. Finley.”
The Bucyrus Carnegie opened for business in 1906. Augusta McCracken, who had been the librarian for the old Memorial Library, continued on as the librarian until 1914. In 1909, the library became the sole beneficiary of the will of Nellie R. Harris who, before she was either murdered or committed suicide at age 35 (the reports were inconclusive) had established a trust fund of $26,000 – roughly $800,000 in today’s currency – for purchasing books.
When Vera Price, McCracken’s assistant, became librarian she created a reading area devoted to children. In the century and change since then, Clara Angell, Grace Fuller (who served for 35 years), Julia Havron, Ruth Kerr, Wilma Rittenour, Sue Stuckman, Marilyn Roe, Dr. Jeffrey Herold, James Wilkins, Matthew Ross, Brenda Crider, and Stephanie Buchanan have all led this library, in a pretty typical ratio of ten women to three men. Charlotte Finley, Augusta McCracken, Nellie Harris, and Vera Price are all buried in the Oakwood Cemetery in Bucyrus, just a one mile stroll from the books they once shelved.
Thank God and Abstinence for establishing the library in Carey in the 1890s. The Women’s Temperance Union started a reading room, a lending library funded through private donations. Later, the Literary Society took over the library, which found homes in a millinery store, a photographer’s studio, and then a public school. Faith and sobriety only take you so far, though, and at some point it’s helpful to have cash on hand. The library didn’t, and so fell into disuse by the end of the decade due to the lack of funding.
Around 1900, things began turning around. The city council created the Board of LIbrary Trustees and slipped it a few dollars. Local man Edwin Brown donated $5000 to buy the land for the library and furnish it with books, then the town convinced Carnegie to pony up $8000. As a condition of his gift, Brown asked that the library be named after his mother-in-law, Dorcas Carey. Dorcas was the wife of John Carey, one of the town’s prominent early citizens. Dorcas and John had a sense of history or whimsy: they named one of their six children Napoleon; another, Cinderella. Their final child – the last of five straight girls – was their only junior: little Dorcas
The Dorcas Carey Public Library has been led by women since its beginning. Mable Newhard was the inaugural director, serving from 1906 to 1910. She was succeeded by Margie Sutphen (1910-19), Carolyn Newhard, who directed the library for thirty-nine years (1919-25, 1927-63), Ruth Cole (1925-27), Louise Klein (1963-78), Marilynn Lortz (1979-90), Linda Gatchell (1990-2014), Laura Toland (2014-24), and Amanda Reinhart (2024-present).
Carolyn Newhard, the long-serving and I hope not long-suffering librarian – seems to have lived her entire life in Carey. Although she has the same last name as the first Carey librarian, she was neither Mable’s daughter nor sister, although perhaps a cousin, as both were born and died in Carey. She never married and, according to the 1940 Census, she had completed two years of high school, lived with her parents (who were 75 and 71 years old at the time), and worked every week of the year for a salary of $890 ($17.50 per week). She was buried in the Spring Grove Cemetery in Carey, along with her parents and five of her siblings. Mable is also buried there.
Sometimes, the generosity of women manifests in small ways. In 2017, Mary Martha Class provided a gift to build a much needed outdoor storage building for the Carey library. It’s not as grand a gesture as endowing the Met. The shed does allow the library the ability to store stuff.
This travelogue entry is already getting a bit long, and I haven’t even gotten to one of the libraries that has the most complete set of archival records I’ve yet found. So I’m going to make it brief, knowing that I’ll have to come back to add some flavor.
The Kaubisch Memorial (Carnegie) Public Library in Fostoria was made possible through the gifts of Mrs. Louisa McLean and Andrew Carnegie in 1913.
The Sandusky (Carnegie) Public Library wouldn’t have been created without the efforts of a “group of unusual local women” who “were determined to succeed.”
End of Day 107, Part 1