Vermilion Acquires Houses for Demolition - Spring 1964

This photo of two homes on W. River Road in Vermilion, acquired by the city in the spring of 1964, caught my eye. It ran in the Journal on March 19, 1964.

The one on the right was slated for demolition but as the photo caption noted, the one on the left was under consideration as a possible temporary police station. The property containing both homes, however, were going to be used “as part of the city’s improved sanitary sewer system and also to eliminate the hazardous S-curve which fronts the property.”

This news item even made it into the Sandusky Register of March 23, 1964.

I wondered: is the house on the left still there? I hadn’t done a “Then & Now” in a while, so I thought it’d be neat if the house had survived all these years, repurposed as something else. But neither newspaper’s article included an address for either building. City directories and phone books did not include a listing for Vermilion Auto Body Shop either.

Looking at a map of West River Road, however, it was easy to figure out where they had been located: on the now gently curved section of the road near its intersection with South Street, where the Vermilion Wastewater Treatment plant is now located.

A 1960 aerial view of the area (courtesy of HistoricAerials.com) confirms this, showing the two houses along with a much more drastic curve of W. River Road. You can also see the South Shore Packing Company (the subject of yesterday’s blog post); it’s the large building complex opposite the two houses.

For a lark, I checked the microfilm archives of the weekly Vermilion News for some mention of the two homes being acquired, and maybe a better photo. But all I could find was a reference in the March 19, 1964 issue about the acquisition of land, and that “use of the newly acquired Ross property should be given for study by the planning commission to improve the curve at West River and South St."

Strangely enough, while looking at Vermilion Photojournal film for 1969 in preparation for an upcoming post about the Pit restaurant, I found this (below) entirely by accident: a photo of the house on the left in the 1964 photos being demolished.

It's nice that the caption provides a capsule summary of the history of the home, pointing out that the home had originally been located on Ohio Street before being moved. That explains why in the two photos at the top of this post, the house appeared to be jammed onto the property tightly next to the other house.