Historic House Demos – Fall 1969 - Part 1

The autumn of 1969 was a busy time in Lorain when it came to demolishing historic homes.

While doing my regular blog research on Journal microfilm at the Lorain Public Library, I came up with two demolition photos that I never thought I’d see. And both of them were on the same roll of microfilm: September 1969.

The first home was at the intersection of Baumhart Road and West Erie Avenue (U. S. Route 6). Here’s a photo of it circa 1956.

It was built in the 1820s by Colonel Henry Brown (later known as Judge Henry Brown), who was one of the founding fathers of his namesake Brownhelm settlement. By the late 1940s the house was known as the Baumhart house, since the descendants of Jacob Baumhardt (who was born in the house) were living in it.

(I did a seven-part series on the house back here in 2017.)

And here’s the sad demolition photo, from the September 10, 1969 Journal.

Unfortunately by the time of the demolition, the Journal no longer had anyone on staff (like it did in the 1950s) who knew the history of the house and its actual age (it was not 200 years old).

Tomorrow – The other house

Colonel Henry Brown’s Grave

After devoting more than a week on the blog to Colonel (or Judge, if you prefer) Henry Brown’s house, it seemed appropriate to pay a visit to Brownhelm Cemetery, and take some photographs of his grave to wrap up the series.

So on this past beautiful Sunday morning, I took a short drive out to Brownhelm Cemetery on North Ridge Road.

I was disappointed to find the row of his family's tombstones still in bad shape.

Several years ago – when I first began researching this story – I noticed that either a storm or vandals had created a mess of the Brown family’s stones. Broken monuments were lying on the ground, or unceremoniously stacked like TV dinners in the freezer.

They were pretty much in the same position on Sunday.

Henry Brown’s stone was still standing, but that’s more than we can say for his wife’s monument.

According to this article that ran in the Chronicle back in October 2016, care of the graves is left up to the families of the deceased.

In that case, it looks like the Judge is out of luck.

According to an article in the Elyria Independent Democrat of October 9, 1872 about the death of Mrs. Abby Long, "the deceased was daughter of Judge Brown, who first settled in, and gave name to the township of Brownhelm, and was the last surviving member of that honored family."

The History of Lorain County, Ohio published by Williams Brothers, Philadelphia (1879) includes a biography of Judge Brown and notes that "the family is now extinct in the township."

Nevertheless, it doesn’t seem right that the family plot of a man so important to the founding of Brownhelm should be so neglected, especially during the township's bicentennial year celebration.

Colonel Henry Brown’s House – Part 7

I’m sure you’re just as surprised as me to see yet another post in this series about Colonel Henry Brown’s house that I concluded yesterday. (Think of it as a curtain call.)

I forgot that I had a funny news story in my files about the house from one of the later years that the Emmerich family owned it. The short article is from the Lorain Journal of July 2, 1956, and provides a good example of the pitfalls of living in a highly visible house on a major highway.

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Emmerichs Find ‘Guest’ In House

Mrs. Harvey Emmerich, Stop 119, East Lake Rd., doesn’t mind an overnight guest now and then, but she does like to know about it.

Shortly after arising early Saturday morning, Mrs. Emmerich discovered a well-dressed man comfortably ensconced on her couch and sound asleep.

A FURTHER CHECK disclosed his late-model car parked neatly in the drive. A daughter later told Mrs. Emmerich that she had noticed the car there when she drove past the house about midnight.

Mrs. Emmerich called her husband in from the barn, notified an upstairs tenant and the three roused the stranger and demanded to know what he was doing there.

STARING ABOUT him in confusion, he mumbled that he “must have got in the wrong place.”

“Did I hurt anyone?” he asked. Thereupon he asked the directions to Sandusky and left.

Recovering from their amazement, the Emmerichs alerted the State Highway Patrol and Sheriff’s office, but efforts to locate the man were unavailing.

Describing her unexpected guest as tall, grey-haired, about 55 and nicely dressed, Mrs. Emmerich nevertheless declared, “I sure am going to keep my doors locked after this."

Colonel Henry Brown’s House – Part 6

The Emmerich family did not linger very long in their house after the Ford plant opened; they had moved out by the fall of 1958 (according to the Lorain phone book). The Baumhart relatives living next door (closer to Baumhart Road) hung in there a little longer, but they too were out of their house by 1960.

HistoricAerials.com reveals that the two houses managed to survive until at least 1969.

The disappearance of their addresses in the 1970 Lorain City Directory pretty much proves that no one was living there then. However, the 1972 Dickman Criss-Cross Directory contained one last listing of the 8360 West Erie Avenue address, with the letters “XXXX” next to it.

At some point in the 1970s, Ford acquired the properties north of the highway containing the two houses. Perhaps it was part of the Lorain plant’s much-publicized expansion in the early 1970s.

Anyway, a 1971 topographic map on HistoricAerials.com shows that the two houses are no longer depicted on the map.

An aerial photo of the plant from an undated Ford advertisement (found in the Lorain Public Library archives) shows the land containing the two houses cleared, with many tracks left by earth movers, but with the ramp and highway overpass across West Erie Avenue not yet constructed.

This undated photograph of the overpass (courtesy of the Lorain Historical Society) shows the land under the houses still showing signs of their demolition.

Here’s a more recent Bing Maps view (below).

Unfortunately, like famous celebrities who pass away in obscurity, decades after their greatest fame, the Colonel Henry Brown house was apparently demolished without fanfare. A house that had warranted several fascinating newspaper articles in the 1940s and 50s had simply outlasted the people who called it home, as well as the local newspaper reporters that knew its historic significance.

Today, there’s not much for motorists to see at the intersection of U. S. Route 6 and Baumhart Road. If they look towards the lake, they see only a weedy, fenced-in area with an unused overpass leading to a shuttered auto plant.

But 200 years ago, for a group of hardy settlers from Massachusetts, it was the perfect location for a fine home, and the birth of Brownhelm Township.

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UPDATE

I was wrong about there being no newspaper coverage of the demolition of the Col. Henry Brown House. Here is the link to my post about its Sept. 10, 1969 demolition as covered by the Journal.

Colonel Henry Brown’s House – Part 5

The historic house built by Colonel Henry Brown, and associated with the Baumhart family for generations, eventually passed into other hands in the years after the Ford plant was built.

By 1958, the Emmerich family was living on Foster Park Road. (Harvey G. Emmerich’s obituary from late January 1964 also revealed a move to Tampa, Florida two years earlier.)

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to know for sure who lived in the house (if anyone) after the Emmerich family.

The house’s location in Brownhelm Township meant that it was not included in the Lorain city directories until the end of the 1950s. It did not have a numerical street address in the books until the early 1960s, after the Emmerich family had moved out. (Prior to that, “Stop 119” was the only address indicated.)

But using city directories and phone books, it’s possible to come up with some theories.

The 1954 Lorain County Farm & Rural Directory confirms that the house was the second house east of Baumhart on the north side of U. S. Route 6. Here is that directory's listing (below). Note that the listings at the top of the column (including the Holiday Inn Motel) are closer to Vermilion and that the listings run from west to east towards Lorain.

This 1952 aerial (courtesy of Dennis Thompson) shows the Emmerich house (circled) and farm where the Ford plant would later be located. As you can see, there are only the two houses on the north side of Lake Road near Baumhart Road.

The 1964 Lorain City Directory listing below – with the addresses starting at Beaver Park and progressing west towards Vermilion (including Allen's Shell Service) – reveals numerical addresses for what I believe are those two houses.

It appears that the address of our historic house was 8360 West Erie Avenue, assuming that the 8360 and 8366 addresses are for two different houses with two different phone numbers.

But as usual, city directories and phone books create a confusing jumble of information.

Sometimes the residents for the two addresses are swapped in one directory, but not the corresponding phone book; then, the following year, the residents are swapped again, as if they were moving back and forth between two houses. Sometimes the phone book eliminated the 8366 address and had both sets of residents living at the 8360 address, making me wonder if the historic house had been converted to a duplex of sorts.

Anyway, I reviewed the available Lorain phone books and city directories, as well as the Dickman Criss-Cross Directories for Lorain County for the years 1957 to 1973. A gentleman named Harry Griffith (who worked as a welder for Ford) and his wife seemed to live at both addresses the longest, beginning at 8360 West Erie in 1962 and ending at the same address in 1970, with the same phone number all those years. In between those years, he is sometimes listed at 8366, such as in the 1964 entry reproduced above.

Next: The Rest of the Story

Colonel Henry Brown’s House – Part 4

The house's sheer scale is startling when seen in this shot looking north 
across the Ford plant's roof toward the lake.

I never imagined that I would see actual photos of Colonel Henry Brown’s historic house other than the images that accompanied the 1947 and 1956 articles that ran in the Lorain Journal.

Thus it was a pleasant surprise when I discovered that the house had made it into several aerial photos of the Ford Motor Company plant that are in the photo archives of the Lorain Historical Society. Above you see one of them.

The photos – some of which are identified as a 'Bill Long' photo – reveal a huge, lonely farm house completely out of place with the modern factory nearby.

Here are a few more shots from the Lorain Historical Society's archives.

Next: Looking up an Address

Colonel Henry Brown’s House – Part 3

Mrs. Harvey Emmerich – interviewed in the two Journal articles posted earlier this week – found herself talking about her historic house again to a local newspaper in mid-July 1956.

This time, however, the circumstances were quite different.

The Ford Motor Company’s new assembly plant was coming, and many Brownhelm Township residents – including the Emmerichs – had already sold their farms to Ford. All that remained was the annexation of the land to Lorain.

Many township residents had mixed feelings about losing their farms, which is the subject of the article below, which ran in the Chronicle-Telegram on July 13, 1956.

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Brownhelm Residents Voice Views On New Ford Plant
Reluctance To Vacate Homesites Is Blended With Joy At Progress

Mixed feelings – joy at seeing their area grow and reluctance to give up their homesites – were voiced yesterday by residents and neighbors of the Brownhelm Township tract where the Ford Motor Co. will erect a huge truck and car assembly plant.

Sale of the land to Ford will mean, in some cases, families moving from properties that have been in their families for nearly 100 years. In others, it will mean that residents newly moved from cities to “the country” will soon find themselves neighbors to a bustling new industry center.

Members of the Baumhart family, owners of most of the 375-acre site, are selling property that’s been in the family since 1865.

Young couples who will not be selling their newly-constructed Baumhart Rd. homes have no financial salve for having an industry move in across the street from the “country homes” they built to get away from the traffic and factories in the city.

Officials Jubilant
Township officials are jubilant over the activity and new importance coming to their area. No one seems to dispute one point: The industrial development will be good for the area.

“You can’t stop progress,” said Mrs. Harvey Emmerich, granddaughter of the Baumharts who settled the area when there was grass growing in the middle of Lake Rd. and Baumhart Rd. was just the “path to the church.”

Some residents previously have had sections of their farms lopped off for the widening of Lake Rd. Then Ohio Edison bought the section just to the east of the Ford site. The Lake Rd. widening took many of their front yards, but the Ford plant will take most of their entire farms.

Will Retain Home
“We’re selling the 167 acres of farm land, but we get to keep the house because it’s on the north side of Lake Rd.,” Mrs. Emmerich said. “My father, my daughter and I were all born in that bedroom.

“Naturally, I’m glad to get the money – in fact they came around and raised the price four times.”

Mrs. Emmerich said she doesn’t think the industrial development will hurt the neighborhood. “The zoning is rigid,” she said. “I wondered what they could have when I heard all the restrictions. But I understand it will be a light industry and the building will be glazed brick.”

Selling 105 acres
One of the few plant site residents not related to the Baumharts is the Howard Burke family, who live on Rt. 2 and 6. Mrs. Burke said the family’s 105 acres all is on the plant site, but she doesn’t particularly mind moving. “It’s all right if we can find what we want in some other farm… Everybody else is satisfied. I guess we’ll have to be too,” she commented as she walked back into the field to continue cultivating.

“We don’t like it,” said Mrs. James Bell, one of the young people who are building new homes on Baumhart Rd. “We moved away from 21st Street in Lorain to get the children out in the country away from traffic and factories. Then they go and start building a plant right across the street… We’ve got this big picture window and now we’ll be looking right at a factory. But I guess it depends on where they put it and what it looks like…”

Two Farms West of Road
Two farms on the west side of Baumhart Rd., owned by the Kenneth Baumhart family also are being sold for the industrial site. “When you’ve had anything such a long time it’ll seem kind of odd to be without it,” Mrs. Baumhart said. She said the owners of other farms being sold for the side, Adam and John Claus and Charles Baumhart, all are relatives.

Her daughter, Mrs. Richard (Ruth) Reed is building another new home on Baumhart Rd. “We’ve been working three years at building our own home, now it’ll be right across the street from a plant. But you can’t stop progress,” she commented.

‘Good For Area’
“I really don’t give a darn – I’m a farmer and that’s what this land has been,” said Robert Leimbach, township trustee chairman. “But the plant will be good for the area. As long as we know what it is now, it’s OK. But I was opposed to rezoning the land when we didn’t know who wanted to come in here.

“The plant taxes probably won’t help the Firelands school district much because most of the site is in the Vermilion school district. Actually I think it will help Brownhelm Township more than anything else,” Leimbach said.

Ben Taylor, another trustee, said he had “very much faith that the plant would arrive here finally.” He said “We’ve been obscured here too long.” He compared the new plant to a new child: “It will bring a lot of activity… life. I’m glad we got it – the rezoning was a crisis, but it’s all set now."

Next: Anachronism

Colonel Henry Brown’s House – Part 2

Here’s another terrific article about the historic house that stood where Baumhart Road meets West Erie Avenue (Route 6). This one, written by Ruby Totten, is from the April 19, 1956 Lorain Journal. It also provides a nice history of the Baumhart family, who acquired the house in the 1860s.

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Could Stop Trains
But Don’t Bother
By RUBY TOTTEN

VERMILION-ON-THE-LAKE – It probably wouldn’t appeal to the Nickel Plate Railroad’s sense of humor, but someday a member of the Harvey Emmerich household might flag down one of its streamliners and clamber aboard.

While it’s doubtful that this will ever come to pass, an old agreement made sometime around 1880 provides for just that.

Resourceful perpetrator of this agreement was Adam Baumhart, Mrs. Harvey Emmerich’s grandfather. Adam gifted the land back of his home on Lake Road just east of Vermilion-on-the-Lake, to the railroad on condition that the train would stop and give passenger service to the family whenever needed.

IT IS JUST one of the many fascinating aspects of this old home which has stood for 130 years and has been in Mrs. Emmerich’s family for 90 years.

When the fine old frame structure, which stands close to the highway on the north side was built, John Quincy Adams was president and Abe Lincoln was only a strapping lad of 17. The first U. S. passenger railroad was yet to be built and Victoria, Queen of England, was still a child of nine. The telegraph was unheard of, and the Civil War wasn’t to be fought for 35 more years.

LITTLE WONDER that Mrs. Emmerich, a tiny curly-headed woman nearing 60, has resisted all efforts to buy the property. However, over the years she has lost 46 feet of an original 60 foot front yard  to the state for highway projects. In the current road widening the state chopped down several magnificent trees, one of which was a huge elm which was believed to part of Ohio’s virgin forest.

“It was like losing a member of the family,” she said.

The house was built in 1826 by Judge Henry Brown who founded Brownhelm Township and became its first judge. Apparently he was the township’s first postmaster too, for in her basement, Mrs. Emmerich had the tall old cupboard which sat in the living room and through which, by the way of a latched door in the center, the mail was handed out. The mail arrived via stagecoach. The cupboard is still functioning though perhaps not quite so illustriously – its innards now hold canned fruit.

ALSO IN THE basement you can see the hand hewn beams with wooden pins that form the home’s structural framework, and also that of the big old barn across the highway. The barn is one of the last few out buildings on the property that has withstood the press of time and weather. The house itself, while weathered, did not require new siding until about 10 years ago.

Foot-thick walls and indestructible woods have made very little change necessary in the interior. Only that for the comfort of the occupants including modernizing and some diminishing of the giant rooms, has been done. Eight great fireplaces have been filled in to conserve heat.

The family has retained a beautiful hand carved cherry mantlepiece which graced the living room fireplace. The woodwork throughout the living room is of this cherry wood and an arch between livingroom and dining room is carved to match the mantel.

MRS. EMMERICH has estimated that there are about 300 Baumhart descendants living in the area, including her brothers, Kenneth and Edward who live nearby. A third brother, Louis, is now dead.

A tragic tale accounts for the fact that there are not so many descendants on the Herwig side of the family, maiden name of Grandmother Baumhart. The sole male Herwig, Grandmother Baumhart’s brother, was drowned in Beaver Creek along with his expectant wife and five children as they were on their way to church one Sunday. No one ever knew exactly what happened, but their bodies as well as those of the horses drawing the buggy were found in the creek. It was assumed that the frightened horses crashed through the bridge rail and into the stream during a storm.

Grandfather Adam and his wife died in the old home in 1893 and 1904 respectively, as did father Jacob in 1944 and mother, Mary Krapp Baumhart, in 1935. Mrs. Emmerich, her father, and her daughter were all born in the same bedroom, and the daughter, now Mrs. John Morrison, was born on the same date and day of the week as Jacob, August 19, on a Monday.

THE BAUMHART BLOOD line extends through five generations who have lived in the house. Bringing up the tail end of this lineal sequence is 12-year old Robert Morrison, youngest of four Morrison children who with their father and mother live with the Emmerichs.

Mrs. Emmerich doesn’t think the Nickel Plate Railway has to lose any sleep about any members of her family flagging down the train.

“I don’t know what on earth we’d want to do it for,” she said, and added she didn’t even know if she could find her copy of the old agreement.

Next: The Coming of the Ford Plant

Colonel Henry Brown’s House – Part 1

Brownhelm Township is celebrating its bicentennial this year, so it’s a good time for me to do this series. It’s all about a historic house owned by Col. Henry Brown, one of the original pioneer settlers of Brownhelm Township. The township is in fact named after him.

The house was later owned by the Baumhart family. You can see its location in the 1874 map above, where today’s Baumhart Road meets U. S. Route 6.

The house is long-gone now – ironically lost to the now-shuttered Ford Plant. But as you will see in this blog series, the house had a rich history and was a Lorain County landmark for many years.

This first article, written by Rhea Soper Eddy (Mary Lee Tucker herself) ran in the Lorain Journal on May 27, 1947.

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House Built by Judge 
Gave Brownhelm Name

Indian Lookout Post, Hand-Carved Woodwork, Huge
Fireplaces Distinguish Ancient Home

By RHEA SOPER EDDY

You’ve probably passed the house time and time again during the last year.

Possibly you never noticed as you whizzed by on State Route No. 6 that it’s a different sort of a structure than the usual type of home usually seen these days.

Perhaps you didn’t know that the big square house on the lake shore west of Lorain, with its large square windows uniformly set into the wood on all sides, is the oldest frame house in Brownhelm-twp – built around 125 years ago.

Mysterious Trap Door
If someone had called your attention to the house and you had examined it at close range, you no doubt would have asked about the mysterious trap door that sticks up from the high roof, and the lovely hand carved doorways on the front and side.

The house, somewhat weather-beaten and much in need of repair, was one of the best known residences in northern Ohio once upon a time. It still is impressive with its two large front rooms with high ceilings, glass fanlights over its doors and delicate, carved woodwork.

Col. Henry Brown, later known as Judge Henry Brown, arrived in 1816 from New England and settled on the site of the present house which, in late years, has been known as the Baumhardt house, named for the late Jacob Baumhardt, who was born there.

He first built a log cabin and later the present frame building, thereby establishing a new settlement closely associated with the early development of Lorain-co.

It was in this big home, with its immense hand-carved log fireplaces in every room, that the township people gathered to organize the first church. It was there that the pioneers congregated to decide on a name for the town, and in later years, it was the township postoffice.

Little is known about Brown, other that that he named the place for himself – Brownhelm. Why he picked “helm” is not known. Possibly it appeared to him as more euphonious than the usual suffix, “ham” or “ton.”

Judge Brown, like so many of those early New Englanders, was devoted to the idea of higher education. He had spent two years at Harvard university and had often discussed plans for a college for settlers’ sons.

But, in spite of his determination to get a college established in these parts, he didn’t succeed.

Oberlin Offer Better
After many conferences, the sites he selected were turned down and folks who owned the clearing where Oberlin now stands offered their land for less. It was mostly mud and clay, wet much of the time, but cheaper.

Judge Brown, however, was rewarded for his efforts. Before Oberlin got underway, people down in Hudson, O., some 70 miles distant, asked him to help them obtain a charter for a college they were going to call Western Reserve. He saddled his horse, took himself down before the legislature, and got the charter passed. In return, he was made a trustee of Western Reserve, a position he held the rest of his life.

The present owner, Mrs. Harvey Emmerich, who, like her father, Jacob Baumhardt, was born in the house, declares that Brown built a trap door in his roof as an Indian lookout because there had been much talk about Indian uprisings. Leading up to it is a winding, steep stairway from the high ceilinged second floor. The spot provides a splendid view of the lake beyond the Nickel Plate tracks.

It is believed that Judge Brown used the platform only a few times. Little is known of his personal life, but there are indications it was anything but happy. Death came again and again to members of the family when they still occupied the log house and after they moved into the big one.

Rows of Graves
Besides the graves of Judge Brown and his wife, Harriet, in the little old Browhelm cemetery on North Ridge at the head of the Vermilion river valley, are a row of children’s tombstones. Inscriptions on them indicate that four children of the couple died between the years 1822-27.

First to die was Henrietta, in 1822 at the age of 11. Next was Sidney, aged six and a half, whose death occurred two years later. Then Harriet, 10 and Henry Jr., 3, both died in 1827.

The judge died in 1843, at the age of 70, and no one in these parts can tell of a single survivor today of the man who had struggled against many handicaps to rise to wealth and power. His wife, Harriet Seymour Brown, died 24 years later at the age of 86, in Auburn, N. Y.

Mrs. Emmerich knows little about the circumstances whereby her grandfather, James Baumhardt, acquired the property, other than that he came in possession of it in 1842, the year preceding the death of Brown.

Ninety-five of the 224 acres of land which comprise the present Baumhardt property are tillable and are worked by Mrs. Emmerich’s husband.

If the large maple trees in the front yard, which have been there since before Judge Brown first picked that site for his home, could talk they would have many fantastic stories to relate to the couple’s three grandchildren who play under them.