BIG STONE HOUSE – Norman Walton has a birthday today…The retired banker whom I have known since he was a boy living on Washington St., now occupies the beautiful stone home at Fifth and Adams Sts. with his wife Edith…Only last week, when I met Norm, he asked if I remembered when the house was built and who lived there over the years.
I have many memories of the big stone house…When it was under construction I was a fifth-grade student at Kingsbury school…Many prominent families lived in that neighborhood and their children attended the same school.
The Mittendorf and Keiser families at Fifth and Washington had enough boys to play games under the street light and when all the boys from the neighborhood gathered after supper there was often a dozen…The Brumberg boys lived near Second and Washington.
My parents lived at Fifth and Park, just two blocks away…I could name a dozen other boys and so could Earl Mittendorf of the Russell Times, who was the youngest of seven boys in that family and had to go to bed at seven…The older boys had a tennis court on a vacant lot at Fifth and Adams just across the street from the big stone house…While the house was under construction and not finished and the windows were boarded up, our favorite game about dusk many nights was hide-and-seek and other wild games to annoy the neighborhood and the interior of the big unfinished stone house was a great place to hide, jump out a window and run.
We played a game divided into two gangs, marking arrows with white chalk on the sidewalk to point the direction the gang went to hide…Our territory, unless the police chased us, covered about four city blocks…Now about the house.
E. J. Bird was superintendent at Big Etna Furnace at the time of the Spanish-American War…He started to build the large home shortly after the war, but did not finish it because of the panic causing the price of pig iron to drop after the war…The big house stood half-finished until about 1910 when E. W. Bixby, cashier of the First National Bank, bought it and finished building.
Strange as it happened three bank presidents, all First National, have owned and occupied the home, Mr. Bixby (1914), Brook Capper, and now the Walton’s…Others include Mr. Bird, who never occupied it, and Mrs. Nannie Kelly Wright, a “Lady Iron Master” like Mr. Bird who lived there during the “Roarin’ 20s.”
The Bird family, before he started to build the home, resided at Third and Washington, now the Goodyear corner…The two sons, Ed and Bill, both later attended Harvard and Yale but at age 16 owned goats and wagons and often had goat races on Third St. from Vernon to Adams St…That’s the story of the big stone house as I remember it.
BLOOMER DAYS – If there is one man in town who remembers the once popular song hit “Hannah, Go Hide Them Bloomers” it is perhaps Henry Horn, 605 Lawrence St., who was the last of the Gay 90 bicycle riders to give up his wheel…He rode his bicycle to work at the Ironton Engine plant during WWII and a dozen years that followed…The question today is can you ride?
A surprising number of bicycles, 1966 models, are on the streets today, and more surprising is the number of big girls who would look better in bloomers than in the one-piece shorts they wear…When Hannah wore her bloomers and seldom appeared on the streets until after sundown, the police were more strict than they are today…Youth now ride the wrong way on one-way streets and speeding motorbikes, side by side, keep ahead of motorists with no signal light for a slowdown.
We observed a parade of motorcycles on the Fourth of July three blocks long in mid-town that recalled the bicycle parades of our youth…The big difference was that those of years ago were decorated bikes with prizes being awarded, so we looked up a couple of newspaper stories of the parades sponsored by the Ironton merchants during the gay 90s when there wasn’t an auto on the streets and the streetcars had the right of way over the horse-drawn vehicles.
The decorated bicycle parade on the Fourth of July, 1897 was two miles long…Paul Haley of Coal Grove dressed as Uncle Same and won first place…Some may remember him as the first city letter carrier to serve in Coal Grove 60 years ago.
There were costumes and decorations of all descriptions according to the newspaper story…Miss Florence Clarke was awarded the prize for the most graceful rider…She was a member of the C. C. Clarke family living at Sixth and Washington streets…Her father operated the Ironton Cross tie plant on the river bank near Kemp Ave. and he was president of the Second National Bank.
Misses Sadie Murdock and Jessie Hutsinpillar won the tandem prize…Miss “H” was the aunt of Richard Hutsinpillar, a teller at First National Bank, and Miss “M”, a sister of Albert and Earl Murdock, well-known citizens today.
Walter Jones and Flora Newman won prizes for children under age 14…Miss Newman’s parents, who were co-owners of the big Newman & Spanner lumber mill at Front and Adams streets and lived in the big brick house now at Second and Washington streets…Walter Jones was the son of E. H. Jones who had the big livery stable, now the Gillen Motor Sales.
Written by Charles Collett
Huntington Newspaper – July 8, 1966
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