Flood in Middletown, Ohio

1913 was not a good year for Middletown, Ohio. This picture doesn't show the half of it; it was really much worse than this. All of the water, sewer and gas mains were washed away to a depth of 8-10 feet. People and livestock perished, and buildings were destroyed.

There were people who actually traveled to Middletown to gawk at the destruction after the flood as a form of amusement. They got amusement all right; they were arrested and put to work at street cleaning. I think we couldn't do that today, which is a shame.

The Middletown Public Library has lots of pictures of this terrible flood, including gawkers being put to work (see picture #148), on their website.

American Rolling Mills was a steel company, founded in 1900 in Middletown.  Today it is known as Armco.  Tom T. Hall wrote a song entitled The Rolling Mills of Middletown. Click here to see the lyrics.

The Fadgl Auto Train

Fadgl is a catchy name, don't you agree? Well, it turns out that the contraption (aka the auto train) was manufactured by the Fageol brothers from California. Someone thought their name was hard to pronounce and that Fadgl would be easier. Really! Perhaps they should have just removed that last pesky vowel and left it as Fdgl.

Anyway, the auto train was not so much a train as a tractor pulling a bunch of open cars. The brothers owned the Flageol Motor Co. in Oakland, CA, where they manufactured tractors, trucks, and automobiles. They made this train for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, but when the exposition was over, the train was shipped to Chicago to be used in Lincoln Park.

I'm not sure how long the train lasted, but the Flageol Motor Co. ran into financial difficulties in 1930, went into receivership, and was eventually bought from the bank by T.A. Peterman, a logger and plywood manufacturer from Tacoma, WA, who needed logging trucks for his business. That was the beginning of Peterbilt trucks, but that's another story.

Streetcar Sunday - Celeron Park

Celeron Park was an amusement park in Jamestown, New York. Early on, streetcars were instrumental in creating viable communities outside of cities, because they ensured that residents could easily travel  from their homes in the suburbs to their jobs in the city. But that meant that on weekends the streetcars would sit idle - unless of course they could transport people to amusement parks such as Celeron Park. This arrangement was great for streetcar operators and for residents.

The card probably dates from about 1910, but the message was written much later, in 1966. It's amusing to see a communication like this sent by mail. Now, of course, it would be an email, a text message, or a phone call.  The sender has obviously advertised something for sale and received a card from a prospective buyer. Now he is writing back trying to determine what the prospective buyer wants. Then, the prospective buyer has to write back again...and finally he will get the goods. It's hard to imagine that long-distance telephone rates were once prohibitive enough that it really made more sense to communicate by mail.

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