NINETEEN HUNDRED ONE – 1901 was the year that Carry Nation, the anti-saloon agitator, was smashing bar mirrors, bottles, and glasses with her hatchet…President McKinley was shot at the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo and Teddy, the first of the Roosevelts became president…
This writer carried a dime to school and got his name with other kids on a paper to be sealed in the McKinley tomb at Canton, Ohio…I remember standing in line with school children on Center street as the band marched that hot September afternoon when the funeral was being held…I think a lot of senior citizens, including Emerson Marting, Miss Lillian Humphrey, Howard Unrue, and others in my class remember that sad day at school.
The civic leadership that year had great confidence in a growing Ironton…Cement which was taking the place of brick as a street paving material was being adopted as a building material for tall buildings…
A group of businessmen headed by S.B. Steece, H.A. Marting, F.C. Tomlinson, Leo Ebert, S.G. Gilfillan, John H. Lucas, W.P. Lewis, J.W. Slater, F.L. McCauley, and others built what is now the Alpha Portland Cement plant, where the greatest limestone mines in the nation now operate, 578 feet under the water level of Ice Creek.
Harry W. Mountain, the mayor, appointed a young redhead policeman John H. Brice, chief of police…The redhead known as “String” later became the most widely known circus detective in the nation and was with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey 40 years before retiring in 1950…
The first automobile was seen on the streets here in 1901…The first motion picture theatre, the Nickelodeon opened on Center street…The name indicated the admission price.
The talk of the town was big dividends paid by old Big Etna Furnace which had just been renamed the Marting Iron & Steel Co. with H.A. Marting, president, W.W. Marting secretary, and E.O. Marting, treasurer…C.B. Fowler came to town as superintendent and E.J. Bird left the furnace to rebuild old Lawrence Furnace on the D.T. & I. as the Bird Iron Co.
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show with more than one thousand Indians, cowboys, and soldiers visited the city…The tent was on Oak street between Fifth and Sixth streets now Central School location…I got to shake hands with Wm. Cody and talk with Annie Oakley after the matinee performance…In 1953 I visited Wm. Cody’s grave was high on top of a Wyoming mountain and spent an hour in the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming en route home from a convention in San Francisco.
Written by Charles Collettt
Huntington Newspaper – August 11, 1966
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