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Toledo, 1897

In 1888, when Edward Drummond Libbey moved his glass works to Toledo, he rightly predicted that more glass manufacturers would follow. A number of Toledo's most important industries, including the glass companies, located in Toledo in the following decades. In addition, Edward Libbey, in partnership with other glass makers, created new companies to produce glass and machines that made glass.

Michael J. Owens
1859 - 1923

Michael J. Owens joined the Libbey Glass Company soon after its move to Toledo. He developed the semiautomatic bulb machine while supervising Libbey's first venture into light bulb manufacturing in 1891. He next invented a similar machine to blow bottles and fruit jars, introducing mass production to the glass bottle industry. The machine could very quickly produce a standardized product with fewer defects than the old method of blowing and straightening cylinders. About 1899 Edward Libbey invested in Owens's business, which was incorporated in 1907 as the Owens Bottle Company.

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Edward Ford
1843 - 1920

When he came to Toledo in 1898, Edward Ford had already organized several glass companies, including the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company. Ford's father, John Ford, was called the "father of the plate glass industry" in the United States. Edward Ford purchased 160 acres of land just outside the Toledo city limits in Wood County, where he built an entirely mechanized factory. It featured an electric overhead trolley system to move the grinding and polishing tables to the glass, a first in the glass industry, as well as a new, continuous system of heating and cooling which produced a less brittle glass. The Edward Ford Plate Glass Company began operations in the spring of 1899. To house his workers, Ford created the new community of Rossford, completing the first thirty-seven homes in 1899.

The Owens Bottle Machine

Inventions of the DeVilbiss family developed into two of Toledo's largest industries. Dr. Allen DeVilbiss, a Toledo nose and throat specialist, formed the DeVilbiss Company in 1888 to manufacture atomizers. His son, Thomas A. DeVilbiss joined him in 1900, and in 1905 the firm incorporated as the DeVilbiss Manufacturing Company. In 1909 the company, by then making paint sprayers as well as atomizers, vaporizers, and surgical equipment, located on Dorr Street. The DeVilbiss Company purchased the Lenk Wine Company buildings at Detroit and Phillips Avenues in 1919.

A Toledo Scale Advertisement

In 1898 another son of Dr. DeVilbiss, Allen DeVilbiss, Jr., invented a springless automatic computing scale. DeVilbiss produced the scales, which used the gravity-pendulum principle to show weight and an automatic indicator to show the value of the item weighed, in his small shop at the corner of Jackson and Thirteenth Streets. In 1901 he sold his patents to the Toledo Scale and Cash Register Company, which later became the Toledo Scale Company. By 1910 it had sold more than 75,000 scales and had opened branch sales offices in fifty cities in the United States.

The Haughton Elevator and Machine Company, incorporated in 1897 by Nathaniel Haughton, began as a foundry in 1866. Haughton invested in the business about 1867, but the firm built elevators only after Haughton became sole owner in 1890.

Shipbuilding, one of Toledo's earliest industries, developed into one of the largest after the arrival of Captain John Craig about 1888. In 1905 the busy Craig Ship Building Company yards, at Front and Craig Streets in East Toledo, passed into the hands of the Toledo Ship Building Company, which built some of the largest steamers on the Great Lakes.

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The Acme Sucker Rod Company, 1902

After the discovery of oil in northwest Ohio in 1885, several refineries and drilling supply companies located in Toledo, among them the National Supply Company, one of the largest in the United States, and the Acme Sucker Rod Company, owned by Samuel M. "Golden Rule" Jones. The Paragon Refining Company built the first refinery in Toledo in 1888. Both the Craig Oil Company and the Sun Oil Company began refining operations here in 1890.

A number of foundries established plants in Toledo in the 1880s and 1890s, including the Smead Furnace and Foundry Company, at Bancroft Street and Smead Avenue, the Toledo Foundry and Machine Company, and the Toledo Machine and Tool Company.

A Gendron Bicycle Advertisement

The bicycle industry came to Toledo about 1890. Peter Gendron, one of the earliest of the bicycle makers came to Toledo in 1865, and established his first company for the manufacture of wire wheels in 1877.


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A Gendron Pedal Car from the 1920s

His first company failed, but in 1880 he incorporated his Gendron Iron Wheel Company for the manufacture of baby carriages and children's velocipedes, or tricycles. Already nationally known for his children's vehicles, Gendron expanded into bicycle making in 1890. The Toledo Metal Wheel Company, incorporated in 1887, also produced children's wheeled toys. The Lozier and Yost bicycle factory started in 1889, but the two men formed separate companies in 1892. The Union Manufacturing Company organized in 1895. In addition, the Dauntless Bicycle Company, the Colton Cycle Company, and the Tally Ho Tandem Company, along with as many as ten other Toledo companies produced bicycles, and a number of companies made bicycle accessories. For two decades bicycling was the country's favorite sport, and Toledo dominated the bicycle industry.

A Yale Bicycle Advertisement

The factories brought more people to Toledo, pushing the population from 50,137 in 1880, to 81,434 in 1890, and to 131,822 by 1900. Immigrants from foreign countries made up a substantial proportion of the city's population in 1890. In the census of that year 22,189 people, or over 27 percent of the residents listed another country as their place of birth. Another 44,101 native-born Americans gave a foreign birthplace for one or both parents, making the total foreign element almost 82 percent. By 1900, the foreign population had increased by nearly 5,000 people. However, since the total population had grown at a much greater rate, the total foreign-born represented only about 21 percent.

The number of German-born nearly doubled between 1880 and 1890, but increased by less than 1000 people between 1890 and 1900. The number of Irish-born dropped slightly during each of those decades, though St. Patrick's parish completed its new Gothic church with shamrocks inlaid in the terrazzo floor in 1901. The Russian-born showed a dramatic increase between 1890 and 1900. However, in those twenty years, the Poles and the Hungarians accounted for the largest proportion of Toledo's immigrant population. In 1880, 603 Polish-born lived in the city. By 1890 this number had more than tripled, to 1,971, and it more than doubled to 3,824 by 1900.

Though fewer in numbers, the Hungarians showed equally large percentages of growth, from 55 Hungarian-born in 1880 to 285 in 1890, and 647 by 1900. Many of the Hungarians came to Toledo to work in the National Malleable Castings Company plant, established on Front Street in 1892. They settled nearby in a community known as Birmingham. St. Stephen's Hungarian Catholic Church organized in 1898. Protestant services, which began that same year, evolved into the Magyar Reformed Church in 1901.

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Toledo's black population grew more slowly during those early decades. From 928 in 1880, the number of blacks rose to 1,077 in 1890, and to 1,710 by 1900.

A Real Estate Advertisement, 1901

Toledo grew to house the new residents. The Toledo City Directory listed 75 realtors in 1888, 86 in 1890, and 149 in 1898. The number of new subdivisions platted and recorded grew even more quickly. The realtors developed land along streetcar lines and close to factories, and they featured these advantages in their advertising. In 1890 one realtor promoted Cycledale, a "New and Handsome Addition surrounding the Bicycle Factory" on West Central Avenue. Besides having natural drainage, graded streets, and shade trees, Cycledale lay within easy walking distance of the Wagon Works, the Bicycle Factory, and the Collingwood Avenue Streetcar line. The plat included streets named Lozier, Yost, and Cycle. Some realtors gave their new neighborhoods such fanciful names as Englewood and Cherry Grove in 1890, Marina Meadows and Utopian in 1892, Ivanhoe in 1896, and Lagrange Manor in 1899. Westlake, in the Lawrence Avenue and Islington Street area, was platted in 1897. Others took their names from more logical sources, such as the Broadway Addition in 1891, the Fair Grounds in 1890, Ironville in 1892, and the Drop Forge Addition in 1898.

Toledo's downtown district also expanded, both geographically and upward. The city's first "skyscraper," the nine-story Nasby Building, went up in 1892. The six-story Gardner Building, Toledo's first "fire-proof" structure, followed in 1893. The ten- story Spitzer Building topped them all in 1895. The Valentine Office and Theater Building, completed in 1892, housed municipal offices on its second and third floors.

Lucas County laid the cornerstone for a new courthouse on September 3, 1893. Approximately 40,000 people toured the $500,000 building, designed by Toledo architect, David L. Stine, during its informal dedication on January 1, 1897. At the Adams Street entrance a frog design inlaid in the terrazzo floor reminded visitors that the site had once been a swamp.

The Toledo Public Library opened in its new building at Madison Avenue and Ontario Street on June 23, 1890. In 1898 the Toledo High School finished rebuilding the old Central High School which had been destroyed by a fire in 1895. Toledo gained another bridge across the Maumee River in 1896. Built at a cost of $214,000, the Fassett Street Bridge had to be tested by a heavy fire engine pulled at top speed by three large horses before Toledoans would venture onto the high, narrow structure. The city bought the 90-acre Guoin Park, later named Bay View Park, and the 53-acre Navarre Park in 1893.

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	The Frog In The Courthouse Floor
The Nasby Building, 1895	The Old Lucas County Courthouse with the New Courthouse in the Background, 1897

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The Toledo Public Library, 1890

The Fassett Street Bridge Construction

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A Toledo Beach Streetcar,  1911

Between 1894 and 1895 the Toledo Business College, in operation since 1858, became the Davis Business College. The Tiedtke Brothers started their grocery business in 1893, the W.L. Milner Company opened a dry goods store in 1894, and the Lasalle and Koch Company incorporated in 1898.

A Pope Moter Car Company Advertisement,  1904

A new form of rail transportation developed during the 1890s, with electric motor powered cars known as interurbans, which carried passengers quickly and cheaply to nearby towns and cities. The oldest and best known, the Lake Shore Electric, started in 1893. The Toledo and Maumee Valley made its first trip to Perrysburg on August 9, 1894. The Ohio Electric Railway, a consolidation of a number of smaller lines, three of them in northwest Ohio, was the second largest electric railroad system in the United States. During 1907 and 1908 the Ohio Electric built the largest reinforced concrete bridge in the world across the Maumee River near Waterville, with the center pier of the twelve-arch bridge resting on the historic Roche de Boeuf.

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A Toledo Steamer Advertisement

On January 17, 1907, the Toledo Railway and Light Company announced that it had leased the Toledo, Ottawa Beach and Northern Railway, and changed the name of Ottawa Beach to Toledo Beach. On the Fourth of July that first year, 15,000 people rode the interurban cars to Toledo Beach. By August 1908, forty cars operated on the line, with a car leaving the interurban station every two minutes. The same company had opened Lake Erie Park, near Bay View Park, in 1895. Known as the Casino after 1901, the popular resort could be reached only by interurban. The interurbans prospered until trucks, buses, and private automobiles began to replace them in the 1920s.

Peter Gendron purchased the first gasoline powered passenger car seen in Toledo in September 1899. However, Lamson's had used a battery powered delivery truck, Toledo's first horseless vehicle, since June 1899. The Lozier Manufacturing Company, originally a bicycle maker, may have produced a steam powered truck in Toledo as early as 1899. In 1900 the firm, by then part of A.A. Pope's American Bicycle Company, made a steam driven passenger car called the "Toledo." Pope dropped the steamer in 1902 in favor of a luxury model gasoline powered car called the "Pope-Toledo." The company became the Pope Motor Car Company in 1903. Pope employed about 1600 workers when the 250 machinists struck the plant in August 1906. An injunction in November permitted the company to continue its operations, but it never recovered. In August 1907 the Pope Motor Car Company went into receivership.

The Overland Automobile Company of Indianapolis, Indiana, also fell into financial difficulties in 1907. In order to get delivery of Overland cars that he had sold in his dealership in Elmira, New York, John N. Willys took over the company. The Willys-Overland Company purchased the Pope Motor Car Company plant in 1909, and moved its operations to Toledo in 1911. When Charles Knight invented the sleeve-valve motor in

John N. Willys
1873 - 1935

1913, Willys acquired the patents and began production of Willys-Knight automobiles. By 1915 Willys-Overland was the second largest automobile manufacturer in the United States. Only the Ford Motor Company produced more cars.

The Ohio Electric Company made its "Ohio Electric" in Toledo from 1909 until 1918. In 1914 the Milburn Wagon Company turned out its first electric automobile. With a maximum speed of 20 miles per hour, it sold for $1,485. Production of the popular "Milburn Electric" continued into the 1920s.

John N. Willys brought other companies to Toledo to supply the parts needed for Willys-Overland cars. The Kinsey Manufacturing Company was organized in 1911 to make sheet metal parts for Willys. Willys brought the Warner Gear

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Company to Toledo in 1912 to make gears and other parts for his cars. Willys organized the Tillotson Carburetor Company in 1914, and acquired the Electric Auto-Lite Company to make starters and generators. The Champion Spark Plug Company moved to Toledo in 1910, and the Mather Spring Company incorporated in 1911.

New residents continued to arrive in Toledo. By 1910 the city population had grown to 168,497. This included 32,144 foreign-born, or approximately 19 percent. The German, Russian, and Italian-born populations increased and the Irish-born continued to decline. The most significant growth in the first decade of the new century was again in the Polish and Hungarian communities. The number of Polish-born nearly doubled, increasing from 3,824 to 7,063. In 1901 St. Hedwig's Polish Catholic Church completed a new Gothic building. In 1907 St. Adalbert's parish was created in the expanding Lagrange Street neighborhood.

The Hungarian population grew from 647 in 1900 to 2,927 in 1910. St. Stephen's Hungarian Catholic Church completed its new church in 1914, and the Magyar Reformed Church built a new building in 1903. St. Michael's Greek Catholic Church organized in Birmingham in 1910 and built a new church in 1915. In 1906 a Slovak Catholic Church called Our Lady of the Rosary organized on Front Street. The black population increased only slightly between 1900 and 1910, from 1,710 to 1,877.

The rush to plat subdivisions intensified after 1900. By 1914 the Toledo City Directory listed 273 real estate concerns. The realtors no longer stressed nearby factories in their advertising. In describing Homewood Park in 1910, E.H. Close declared that, "The day of the cramped, crowded city lot is passing and the movement toward the suburbs is more pronounced now...." Even the names of the new developments sounded more rural than urban. Fairlawn Heights was platted in 1906, Friendship Park and Glendale by the River in 1907, Pleasant Place in 1910, Sanguishine in 1912, and in 1914, Lotus View, Urbanrest, Case Farm Beach, and Silver Creek Hills and Dales. In addition, there were endless variations on home: Home Acres, Homedale, Homestead, Homeville, Homewood, and Homewood Park.

While the real estate industry built suburbs, the density of the downtown increased. The eight-story Majestic Apartments on Cherry Street, built in 1907, had what was probably the first electric elevator in the area. The six-story Scottwood Apartments, later named the Plaza Hotel, opened in 1903, the ten-story Secor Hotel in 1908, and the seven-story Betts Flats, at 135 Fourteenth Street, in 1904.

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The twelve-story Ohio Building and the seventeen-story Nicholas Building opened in 1907. The Toledo Trust Building with its twenty-two stories, opened in 1912.

In the first decades of the new century, Toledo's institutions kept pace with the economic advance. A city zoo started in 1900, when the superintendent of parks provided a cage at Walbridge Park for a large woodchuck, which some people thought was a small bear. The animal attracted so much attention, that two badgers, a golden eagle, and three black bears soon joined him. In 1905 citizens contributed funds to purchase an elephant named Josie from the Ringling Brothers Circus. When Josie died in 1912, Babe, who cost $2,000, replaced her. In the fall of 1909 the zoo purchased two lion cubs named King and Queen at a cost of $400. The Toledo Zoological Society organized in 1910 to manage what was then called the Walbridge Park Zoo.

The Toledo Museum of Art, incorporated on April 18, 1901, by Edward Drummond Libbey and several of his friends, opened that fall in a store room on Madison Avenue. Libbey and his wife, Florence Scott Libbey, contributed money, paintings and statues, and land on Monroe Street at Scottwood Avenue, where a new $244,000 museum opened to the public in October 1912.

By 1908 Toledo High School had become crowded. Toledo voters approved a $500,000 bond issue that year for two new high school buildings. Jesup W. Scott High School opened in 1913 on Collingwood Avenue, and Morrison R. Waite High School opened in East Toledo, in 1914. When the last class graduated from Toledo High School in 1914, the old school building became a technical school.

A steamer knocked down the west half of the Cherry Street Bridge during the spring floods in 1908, and a temporary bridge replaced it while the city argued about the location of a new bridge. Finally, in 1913 city council appropriated $525,000 for a new steel and concrete bridge. The present Cherry Street Bridge opened to traffic in 1914, at a final cost of $1.2 million In 1915 the remains of the old Cherry Street Bridge were towed down the river and rebuilt as the Ash-Consaul Bridge.

Roy Knabenshue's Airship

Ohio required automobile license plates for the first time in 1908. On June 30, 1905, Toledoan Roy Knabenshue flew his dirigible from the fairgrounds on Dorr Street, landed on the roof of the Spitzer Building on Madison Avenue, then flew back to the fairgrounds. In 1910 curious Toledoans went to look at an airplane that had landed at Bay View Park. A large lighted sign on the roof of the Valentine Building in 1913 promised, "You Will Do Better in Toledo."

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Though by 1900 only a few Toledo homes had electric lighting, electricity had for more than ten years supplied power for street lights, the telephone and telegraph, stores and factories, and public transportation. On July 19, 1889, hundreds of awestruck Toledoans watched the first electric streetcar make its test runs on Michigan Street from the downtown to the new Libbey glass factory on Buckeye Street. By 1892 all the streetcar lines had retired their horses.

In order to operate on city streets, the streetcar companies had to secure franchises, giving the city council the power to regulate not only where the tracks could go, but what fare the operators could charge. In 1901 the Toledo Railway and Light Company consolidated all the streetcar lines into one company, which inherited the old franchises. One of the old franchises required that the company charge a 3-cent fare between six and seven o'clock both morning and evening, to enable people to ride to and from work. The fare had been an issue throughout the 1890s, with the citizens demanding it, while the company claimed financial losses because of it.

In the spring of 1913 Henry L. Doherty and Company, of New York, who had acquired control of the Toledo Railway and Light Company, began negotiating for new franchises. The last of the old franchises were to expire in March 1914. In November 1913, just before a newly-elected city administration came into office, the council passed an ordinance setting the streetcar fare at 3 cents. The company refused to lower its 5-cent fare, but to avoid trouble, no one who refused to pay 5 cents was denied a ride. Toledoans took advantage of the situation and refused to pay any fare at all. As many as nine million passengers rode free, before a court injunction in September restrained the city from enforcing the 3-cent fare.

Samuel M. Jones
1846 - 1904

Toledo, like most other rapidly growing cities, feared the social effects of the urbanization civic leaders promoted. During the progressive era of the 1890s and early 1900s, demands for political, social, and economic reform swept the country. Several cities, including Toledo, elected reform mayors. When accusations of corruption in the city government split Toledo's Republican party in 1897, they turned for their candidate to Samuel M. Jones, a well-known Toledo businessman with no experience in politics. With 21,430 ballots cast, Jones won by 534 votes. Known as "Golden Rule" Jones, he brought his Christian principles to his job as mayor of Toledo. He insisted that prostitution, crime, and drunkenness were caused by the social system and argued that only a more humane society without poverty, ignorance, and privilege could solve these problems. He had city council repeal the Sunday closing laws and gave the policemen walking sticks in place of their clubs.

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He advocated municipal ownership of public utilities and a nonpartisan city government.

Because Jones would not obey their orders, the Republican party bosses refused to renominate him in 1899. Jones ran for mayor as an independent candidate, and won with 70 percent of the vote, carrying every ward in the city and every precinct but one. Though some Toledoans believed he was dangerous, and many thought him eccentric, Jones was beloved by the working classes.

Brand Whitlock
1869 - 1934

Samuel M. Jones died on July 12, 1904, during his fourth term as mayor. Robert M. Finch, the president of city council succeeded him. Jones had believed so strongly in the evils of political parties that he refused to allow his followers to organize, but immediately after his death an Independent party formed. In 1905 its candidate for mayor was Brand Whitlock, an attorney and friend of Jones who had long been active in the Independent movement. Whitlock won by an easy margin and was reelected in 1907, 1909, and 1911. In 1913 he declined to run again. President Woodrow Wilson appointed Whitlock minister to Belgium in December 1913. The 1913 Independent candidate, Judge Charles E. Chittenden, lost badly to the Republican candidate, Carl Keller, marking the end of the Independent movement.

Through the efforts of conservative Toledoans, who were frightened by Jones's relaxed attitude toward crime, and Jones's political enemies, a special state law in 1902 took control of the police out of the hands of the city government. Knowing the law was meant for him, Jones refused to give up control of the police and the matter went to the State Supreme Court. When the act was declared unconstitutional, the Ohio legislature passed a new municipal code requiring the same governmental organization for all Ohio cities. This led to a demand for home rule for cities. The 1912 Ohio Constitutional Convention drafted a number of new amendments, including one for municipal home rule, which the voters approved.

On November 4, 1913, Toledoans elected a fifteen-member charter commission to draft a home rule charter for Toledo. A year later, on November 3, 1914, the voters ratified the new charter, which would go into effect on January 1, 1916. The new charter required that all municipal franchises be submitted to the voters and provided for nonpartisan municipal elections. Though Toledo's Independent party died with the election of 1913, they succeeded in legislating their nonpartisan ideals into the basic law of the city of Toledo.

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