Author: Tyler

The Sutler Secret of Erhard Steinbacher

By: Robert C. Reszler

Oatmeal is a staple on tables across America, and Quaker Oats is one of the most recognized brand names in the world. These, however, are relatively recent phenomena. One hundred forty-five years ago, most Americans were unfamiliar with oatmeal as a foodstuff, yet in a matter of only fifteen years it had become integral part of the American cuisine. How this dish went from relatively unknown to standard fare in just a few years is a legitimate, yet perplexing question. Historians have traced the oatmeal industry (and its most famous brand) to Akron, Ohio in the 1860s, but the particulars of its origins and phenomenal growth have never been explained satisfactorily. Local Akron, Ohio, legend states that Ferdinand Schumacher, “Oatmeal King” and founder of Quaker Oats, started his business empire with the help of close friend Erhard Steinbacher. Steinbacher had supposedly managed to get Schumacher a one hundred barrel trial order to supply Union Army troops during the Civil War.[1. Karl M. Grismer, Akron & Summit County (Akron: Summit County Historical Society, 1952), In this historiography, Grismer provided a standard, traditional account of Ferdinand Schumacher’s start in the oatmeal business which has been widely accepted in Akron, Ohio lore. “(Ferdinand Schumacher) was one of the first persons in Akron to prosper because of the Civil War…. in 1861 the thrifty Schumacher got a tremendous break. He got it through one of his best friends, a fellow German who had also fled from oppression in his fatherland. He was Erhard Steinbacher, grocer and druggist. Becoming an ardent Republican, Steinbacher had many influential friends in the party and when the Civil War started was authorized by the quartermaster general to purchase supplies for the army in this territory. He placed huge orders for flour with local mills and before the war was many months old, all were running at peak capacity. In making his purchases, Steinbacher did not forget his good friend Schumacher. He insisted that the army buy oatmeal to serve the soldiers for breakfast – it was much tastier and more nourishing than any other cereal which could be obtained, infinitely better than cornmeal. That stuff, he declared, might be good enough for Southern rebels but certainly not good enough for fighting Yankees. After weeks of arguing, Steinbacher’s German persistence won and the quartermaster’s office reluctantly agreed to take a sample order of a hundred barrels. Just a hundred barrels – from an army standpoint, hardly an order worth mentioning. But for Schumacher, the order was stupendous…. After the oatmeal was shipped, Schumacher anxiously waited to learn how it would be received in the army camps. He knew that few soldiers had ever eaten the cereal and was afraid many would refuse to taste it, just because it was something new. But his fears were unjustified. The soldiers liked it. Army orders for oatmeal began pouring in.”] Until recently, this legend has been accepted as fact, yet research into official government and army records provides no evidence that the Army or the Sanitary Commission ever directly supplied Schumacher’s products to the troops. If Schumacher started the American oatmeal industry through supplying great quantities to Union troops, it had to have been via unofficial channels. The issue of Schumacher’s success is not in dispute: by the mid-1860s he was running several mills and was the wealthiest man in Akron. The issue of where and how the oatmeal was sold, however, is not as clear. This paper will illustrate that the secret to the success of the oatmeal industry in America may lie in a much deeper role for Erhard Steinbacher as a Civil War “sutler,” providing hungry Union soldiers with an introduction and pipeline to Schumacher’s new dish, and thus whetting their appetite for more when the war was over. Continue reading The Sutler Secret of Erhard Steinbacher

To Work and Live: Brickyard Laborers, Immigration and Assimilation in an Ohio Town, 1890-1925

By: Martha I. Pallante

Historians generally agree that at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries immigration to the United States, particularly that from Southern and Eastern Europe, played an important role in reshaping the fabric of America life. These waves of humanity flooded American cities joining the laboring masses, and in the process forever changed the character and the composition of American cities. For the most part, historians and the others who have studied this phenomenon have concentrated on the largest masses of that movement–those who went to large urban areas or to the major industrial complexes that acted as magnets for the many immigrant groups.

This study approaches the problem differently. It focuses on a relatively small group of Italian immigrants from the Italian province of Avelino, who arrived in Niles, Ohio between 1890 and the mid 1920s when changes in immigrations laws stemmed their flow. Their origins did little to distinguish them from more mainstream immigration experiences either to east coast or mid-western metropolitan areas. Continue reading To Work and Live: Brickyard Laborers, Immigration and Assimilation in an Ohio Town, 1890-1925

In This Issue: Fall 2003

In The Current Issue:

From how Italian immigrants came to Ohio to how oatmeal came to your table, this edition of the Northeast Ohio Journal of History answers some questions you may never have considered.  In addition, a new “discussion” feature we are adding will allow you to ask your own questions and answer those of others.

In this issue, we feature a group of pieces that challenge us to rethink conventional wisdom.  For example, Margaret Pallante’s feature article on Italian workers in theNiles, Ohio brick works demonstrates that oft-repeated historical generalizations about Italian immigrants to America do not fit the experiences these brick makers. Pallante, Chair of the Department of History at Youngstown State University, argues that Italian workers at Niles Fire Brick were more likely to assimilate, rapidly acquire property, and pursue educational opportunities than their counterparts in large Eastern cities.

Similarly, Robert Reszler’s piece on Erhard Steinbacher overturns a century-old myth regarding the origins of the oatmeal industry in America.  Local legend (supported by Quaker Oats’ own history and publicity) has long held that America’s embrace of oatmeal began with a one hundred barrel order the Union Army placed with Ferdinand Schumacher during the Civil War.  Reszler’s research not only reveals that this legendary order almost certainly never happened, but offers an alternative, more interesting, and more likely explanation of how oatmeal got to Union troops (and thus to America’s breakfast tables).

Gregory Wilson’s item in “Notes and Comments” also challenges us to rethink what is meant by the term “region.” The Northeast Ohio Journal of History is by definition a regional history publication, but how should that region be defined?  Politically? Geographically? Culturally? Environmentally?  Wilson, NOJH‘s Publication Director and Assistant Professor of History at the University of Akron, means to provoke discussion and debate with this piece.

To add your part to this debate, please feel free to visit our new “discussion board” feature.  Taking advantage of the technology available to us as an electronic journal, we are endeavoring to make the NOJH an interactive publication in which our readers can comment on and discuss issues pertaining to our content and Ohio history.

In lieu of our usual virtual museum exhibit, we are featuring a link to the Ohio Memory Project.  This outstanding website–a cooperative venture of the Ohio Historical Society, the Ohio Historical Records Advisory Board, the State Library of Ohio, the Ohio Public Library Information Network, and the Ohio Library council–recently won the prestigious “Award of Merit” from the American Association for State and Local History.  It is a tremendous achievement in public history and a “must-see” for anyone interested in Ohio History.

In addition to the usual book reviews, we also encourage the reader to explore the other features of our site. For those who missed earlier issues, please visit our “Archives” link, which contains the entire contents of our first volume. We have expanded our “Research Links”  feature, adding not only more primary sources but also more links to local historical agencies. We strongly encourage the reader to suggest or send new links for this page. The same is true for items in “Current History,” which is a clearinghouse for information on events of a historical nature inNortheast Ohio. Because we update this section constantly, please feel free to send announcements for it at any time.

We would also like to remind our readers that printer-friendly versions accompany each item. These PDF files are not only easier on the eyes when printed, but also contain basic issue data and page numbers for convenience in citation.

As always, please address any inquiries about this project (or about any other aspect of the journal) to the editor at kkern @ uakron. edu. We welcome all comments and suggestions.

Kevin Kern

Continue reading In This Issue: Fall 2003

Notes & Comments: The Akron Fair Housing Case

By: Thomas Powell, State University of New York, Emeritus

Editor’s Note:
In January of 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court heard a case in which the Buckeye Community Hope Foundation, a builder of low-income housing, sued the city of Cuyahoga Falls for delaying construction of a housing project-an action they claimed was motivated in part by issues of discrimination. Although three months later the court overturned a lower court ruling and found in favor of the city,[1.  City of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio et al. v. Buckeye Community Hope Foundation et al. No. 01-1269. A copy of the decision can be found through the FindLaw website at http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=01-1269. Briefs for the case are at http://supreme.lp.findlaw.com/supreme_court/docket/2002/january.html#01-1269.] the case illustrates the continuation of long-standing divisions concerning race and residence in this Northeast Ohio Community.

Nearly forty years before the recent Supreme Court decision, Cuyahoga Falls was the focus of another lawsuit over discrimination and housing: Mercer Brancher et al. v. The Akron Area Board of Realtors et al., also known as “The Akron Fair Housing Case.” Thomas Powell, a former University of Akron professor and resident of Cuyahoga Falls at the time, here presents a first-hand account of his family’s role in the development of this case. Powell has chosen to write his account in the first person, present tense in order to impart the sense of “bite” and immediacy he felt as an eyewitness to these events. Given recent events, his stylistic choice seems particularly appropriate-even after forty years, some of the basic issues he discusses still have currency today.

Kevin Kern

Continue reading Notes & Comments: The Akron Fair Housing Case

Book Review: The Once and Future Union

The Once and Future Union: The Rise and Fall of the United Rubber Workers, 1935-1995. By Bruce M. Meyer. (Akron: University of Akron Press, 2002. xviii, 457 pp., photographs, index. Paper $27.95, ISBN 1-88483-685-2.)

Bruce M. Meyer’s account of the “rise and fall” of the United Rubber Workers is a welcome addition to the region’s historical literature. It provides a useful overview of an institution that was once thought to play a critical role in the region’s economy and unquestionably did play a central role in the lives of many individuals. It rises above that level in portraying the last third of the union’s history, the years from the mid-1970s to 1995, when the URW became a symbol of industrial decline in Ohio and the Midwest. Yet because Meyer devotes approximately two thirds of the book to those years, he inadvertently creates the impression that the URW’s “fall” was more important than either its “rise,” in the 1930s, or the long period, ranging from l940 to the 1970s, when it represented virtually all U.S. and Canadian tire workers and bargained aggressively to improve their wages and working conditions. Continue reading Book Review: The Once and Future Union

Book Review: Helping Others, Helping Ourselves

Helping Others, Helping Ourselves: Power, Giving and Community Identity in Cleveland, Ohio, 1880-1930. By Laura Tuennerman-Kaplan. (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2001. 222 pp. Paper, $29.00, ISBN 0-87338-711-2.)

Until the New Deal era, much social support in the U.S. came through private philanthropy. In considering the means and ends of such private philanthropy, historians have explored “top-down” philanthropy whereby wealthy Americans gave funds and endowed non-profit organizations to shape society in particular ways. When Andrew Carnegie, for example, chose to finance public libraries he was not merely expressing a benign belief in the power of reading. He gave his money to support his idea that the less fortunate should not be provided direct aid, but rather given the indirect means by which they could choose to help themselves. For Carnegie and other wealthy philanthropists, thus, giving was a way to control other groups in the U.S.

In Helping Others, Helping Ourselves, Laura Tuennerman-Kaplan has written a social analysis of philanthropy that moves beyond this top-down approach by shifting from philanthropy of the wealthy to that of more “ordinary” people in Cleveland and asking how and why they chose to give to others within their community. She admits that such philanthropy too was an exercise in power, but insists that the “giving” of more ordinary people was rooted in their sense of belonging to Cleveland and that patterns of giving reveal “a social relation, one that both reflected and shaped society” (150). Continue reading Book Review: Helping Others, Helping Ourselves

Book Review: European Capital, British Iron, and an American Dream

European Capital, British Iron, and an American Dream: The Story of the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad. By William Reynolds, Edited by Peter K. Gifford and Robert D. Ilisevich. (Akron: University of Akron Press, 2002. 288 pp. Hardcover, $44.95, ISBN 1-88483-691-7.)

First, a fair warning to readers, European Capital, British Iron, and an American Dream: The Story of the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad, is not, as the title would imply, a secondary history of the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad. Instead, this is the story of one of the railroad’s earliest leaders, William Reynolds, and how he viewed the organization and construction of the railroad from 1851 until his resignation from the road in 1864. Reynolds’ recollections, written some forty years after his departure from the railroad, provide an interesting glimpse into the problems with ’empire’ building in 19th century America. Continue reading Book Review: European Capital, British Iron, and an American Dream

Academic Regalia at Oberlin: the Establishment and Dissolution of a Tradition

By: S.E. Plank, Oberlin College[1. I am grateful to my colleagues Robert Haslun, Secretary of Oberlin College, and Roland M. Baumann, College Archivist, for their kind assistance and encouragement. I dedicate this essay to the memory of Geoffrey Blodgett, Danforth Professor of History Emeritus at Oberlin and devoted chronicler of Oberlin history.]

[I]f any season is worthy of symbolical expression and emphasis, it is the Commencement season, the initiation of new members into the international fraternity of educated men. . . .Viewed in this light all the formalism of college life assumes significance; it becomes an awe-full thing to wear a cap and gown.
The Oberlin Review (June 21, 1906)

Styles of clothing carry feelings and trusts, investments, faiths and formalized fears. Styles exert a social force, they enroll us in armies–moral armies, political armies, gendered armies, social armies.
John Harvey, Men in Black (1995)

Introduction

With the adoption of the Intercollegiate Code in 1895, American universities and colleges embraced a uniformity of design in academic costume that has held sway until the relatively recent proliferation of university-specific gowns.[2. For a summary of the Intercollegiate Code, see Hugh Smith, Academic Dress and Insignia of the World (Cape Town, 1970), II, 1527-75. Smith observes that “by far the most interesting feature . . . of United States academic costume in the period from 1960 to date (1970), has been the deliberate attempt of certain of the best-known and most influential Universities to break away from the uniformity of the Intercollegiate Code. The result of this has been the creation of distinctive academic costume for some or all of the Graduates of at least the following Universities: California, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Fairleigh-Dickinson, Fordham, New York, Pennsylvania, Princeton, Tufts, Union Theological Seminary and Yale.” To Smith’s now outdated list may be added Adelphi, Arizona State, Boston College, Brown, DePaul, Illinois, Johns Hopkins, Loyola, Michigan, MIT, New Mexico, Rochester, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Rutgers, Stanford, Temple, Washington, and Wayne State Universitites. A significant number retain the basic design of the Intercollegiate Code, though they alter the color scheme of the gown to create a robe of distinction.] Accordingly, studies of American academic costume may find questions of usage a richer inquiry than questions of design and development, questions of social history more compelling than a study of regalia as autonomous objects unto themselves. A particularly interesting example is the usage and social history of regalia at Oberlin College (Ohio), a usage established around the beginning of the twentieth century as the college experienced a burgeoning interest in “collegiateness,” and a usage dramatically altered in the late twentieth century with the politicizing of the campus and its ceremonial events. Continue reading Academic Regalia at Oberlin: the Establishment and Dissolution of a Tradition

Current History: Spring 2003

Award-Winning Historical Collection Now Available Online

The Oral History Digital Collection at Youngstown State University was named a finalist for a 2002 Award of Achievement by Northern Ohio Live! magazine in the IT/Internet Resource category. The Oral History Program at YSU began in 1974 by Professor Hugh G. Earnhart. In its 28 year existence, the program has collected over 2000 interviews with northeastern Ohioans on topics ranging from education to the steel industry to politics. In 2001, the staff of YSU’s Maag Library digitized the transcripts and placed them on-line, making them available on the internet.

Anyone wishing to examine these materials can access the collection at http://www.maag.ysu.edu/oralhistory/oral_hist.html.

Upcoming Events

Continue reading Current History: Spring 2003

In This Issue: Spring 2003

In The Current Issue:

Welcome to the final issue of this first volume of the Northeast Ohio Journal of History. We have been extremely pleased with the response to our publication so far, and look forward to continuing to serve as a forum for high-quality research on Northeast Ohio themes.

In this issue, we feature a group of pieces that reflect nearly twelve thousand years of Ohio history. Brian Redmond’s virtual museum exhibit provides a brief overview of human habitation in the Western Reserve from the earliest Native-American settlements to the founding of Cleveland. Redmond, who is curator of Archaeology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, also outlines recent projects sponsored by the museum to discover more about Northeast Ohio’s prehistory.

Steven Plank’s feature article on the history of academic regalia at Oberlin College is something of a time-capsule piece, steeped in the language and sentiments of two disparate generations of Oberlin students and faculty. Plank, head of the Department of Musicology at Oberlin, illustrates that something as seemingly innocuous as the use of academic regalia has had profound social, religious, ethnic, and political correlates in this academic community over a one hundred year period.

Thomas Powell’s document on the 1965 Akron Fair Housing Case is a unique eyewitness account on the patterns of prejudice in Cuyahoga Falls. Although essentially a diary of events leading up to the seminal court case, this piece also attempts to put these events into a larger context. Powell’s epilogue in particular challenges Gunnar Myrdal’s famous conclusion to An American Dilemma. Given the March 2003 Supreme Court Case concerning housing in Cuyahoga Falls, this article has a sense of immediacy unusual for historical articles.

In addition to the usual book reviews, we also encourage the reader to explore the other features of our site. For those who missed the first issue, please visit our “Archives” link, which contains the entire contents of our inaugural number. We have expanded our “Research Links” feature since last fall, adding not only more primary sources but also links to local historical agencies. We strongly encourage the reader to suggest or send new links for this page. The same is true for items in “Current History,” which is a clearinghouse for information on events of a historical nature in Northeast Ohio. Because we update this section constantly, please feel free to send announcements for it at any time.

We would also like to remind our readers that printer-friendly versions accompany each item. These PDF files are not only easier on the eyes when printed, but also contain basic issue data and page numbers for convenience in citation.

As always, please address any inquiries about this project (or about any other aspect of the journal) to the editor at kkern @ uakron. edu. We welcome all comments and suggestions.

Kevin Kern

Continue reading In This Issue: Spring 2003