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Main Street, Peninsula, 1950s, including Scotty's Place and the Peninsula Nite Club.
Courtesy/Peninsula Library & Historical Society
Wilson's Mill, 1957.
Courtesy/Cleveland Press Collection
Mid-19th century communities in the Cuyahoga Valley thrived as canal and mercantile towns that linked the growing cities of Cleveland and Akron. The Village of Peninsula, for example, received money and fame as canal traffic and boat building attracted visitors and new industry, including gristmills and cheese factories. Even after the canal's economic decline and eventual collapse, villages continued to act as commercial centers for surrounding farmers.
A visitor to Peninsula in the late 19th or early 20th centuries could step off a train or canal boat and see a town hall, schoolhouse, meeting hall, tavern, and dance hall as well as several churches, general stores, and sandstone quarries.
Although farmers were mostly self-sufficient, they still needed supplies and services from other businesses. Click the following topics to learn more about the local businesses that supported agricultural life throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
Peninsula advertisement.
Courtesy/Peninsula Library & Historical Society
General Stores
General stores were places where rural inhabitants could buy supplies that they were unable to make themselves, as well as socialize with friends and neighbors. These stores also often served as post offices and gas stations. Read and hear more about the general stores in Everett during the early 20th century.
Terry Lumber & Supply Company
Terry Lumber & Supply Company is a third-generation business, started by John J. Terry Montequila in 1940. Terry started the business in the village of Boston, and eventually moved it to Peninsula, where he lived and grew up. He sold lumber, coal, farm machinery, and animal feed. Today, Terry Lumber & Supply still operates in Peninsula. Many residents remember how Terry Montequila helped their families during hard times. His dedication to the community illustrates the close relationships and cooperation between village neighbors in the mid-20th century.
Terry Montequila
2011 Oral History Project: Daniel Schneider, former resident of the Schneider Farm (now the Coonrad Ranger Station), grew up with Terry Montequila's children. Daniel recalls how Terry helped the community.
“Yeah, Terry, I tell you, he helped a lot of people in this valley. Because maybe building their house and they'd run out money or whatever: Go get your lumber, build your house, and when you get the money you pay me. There was no signing all these papers or whatever. Eh, a couple people maybe stuck him over the years but most of the people they finished their project, and as they got the money they went down and paid him and he'd just cross it off. And he helped everybody in his dallying years when I used to haul coal, when everybody had coal furnaces yet, before fuel oil furnaces come around and that. You know, people knew that if they needed coal and they were short on money, Terry would make sure they got their coal and then in the summer, when things picked up or whatever, then they'd pay him.”
Water Hauling
Historically, Cuyahoga Valley residents have dealt with limited access to groundwater. Throughout the 20th century, over half of the valley residents lacked wells on their property and were forced to purchase water from an outside source.
Water Hauling
2011 Oral History Project: Warren Roller, who grew up on the former Coliseum property in Richfield, worked as a water hauler in the 1960s, bringing cans of water to over 400 families in the valley.
“When I got outta school, my dad signed for me, I was seven...eighteen years old, and he signed for me to get a bigger truck, a one-and-a-half ton flatbed so I could haul hay on it. In the meantime a water business came up for sale and I had no clue on what a water business was, but I didn't realize that half of the valley, or more than half the valley, bought water because they couldn't get a well. So in interviewing this fella that wanted to sell his water business he had really basically nothing to sell but a worn off truck and loyal people who maybe wouldn't be loyal to me. So I decided to buy a tank and put hoses on it and advertise and for two and a half years I hauled water to people that had cisterns. It was a pretty interesting job because you really get to know everybody in the valley.”
Boot-legging
The Cuyahoga Valley has a rich and colorful history of illegal side businesses. Bootlegging during the Prohibition Era was a lucrative trade. In the 1920s, some Cuyahoga Valley residents smuggled and sold alcohol from their farms for considerable profit.
Illegal Alcohol
2011 Oral History Project: Ott Wilson, who grew up in Bath, remembers learning about and witnessing Peninsula's boot-legging operations during the 1920s.
“Right there at the railroad track right as you come down across the bridge, there was a place called Shaddy's or Scotty's or something like that. When we went to the dances there . . . right there next to it was a dance hall there . . . we could go over there and buy a pint of whiskey. He'd just reach under the bar and get you a pint of whiskey for fifty cents ~laughs~ when we went to the dance. Then around the corner there was a place that had a {unintelligible} and underneath the sidewalk they had a tunnel . . . it was open I guess under there . . . and I'd take Walter Crams, take him down there, and they'd go down in some place and bring up whiskey for him. Lot of times he'd trade grain for whiskey. There was one on . . . there was some in back . . . ~laughs~ I bet I went to fifteen different bootleg places.”
Wilson Feed Mill
Alexander's Mill, renamed when the Wilson family bought it in 1900, is the last surviving gristmill in Cuyahoga County and one of only a few in Ohio. The mill currently serves as an important supplier of animal feed and other farm products.
Wilson's Feed Mill viewed from the Ohio & Erie Canal Towpath Trail.
Flour milling was one of the earliest industries in Ohio's Western Reserve. With the opening of the Ohio & Erie Canal between Cleveland and Akron in 1827, farmers could easily ship grain to growing markets. By 1840, Cleveland represented the principle Great Lakes grain market, and Ohio became the nation's leading producer of wheat.
Alexander's Mill was built in 1855 by Andrew and Robert Alexander as a custom mill, grinding grist for area farmers. Thomas and Emma Wilson purchased the mill in 1900, and began milling and selling wheat, rye, flour, scratch feed, and shelled corn. With transportation improvements by the 1920s, the Wilsons could sell to larger commercial bakers and restaurants.
Alexander Mill (Wilson's Mill), 1915.
NPS Collection
Also during the early 20th century, the manufacture of commercial animal feeds began to take hold as a popular industry. With the demand for flour diminishing, Wilson's Mill focused on the animal feed industry and the sale of farm products. Presently, Wilson's Mill continues to operate as a feed mill, and has an additional retail store that sells farming and gardening supplies. The mill continued to use water power until 1970 and the mill's water-power system is still in place today.
Mill Operations
2011 Oral History Project: Tom Wilson's family has been milling for six generations, over 150 years. Tom talks about the mill's operations.
“When my great-grandfather and grandfather were running things, there was a larger agricultural presence in the valley. Farming was pretty much it. They were doing grinding and milling for animal feeds for the local farmers whether it was the grain to bring in and process so that it could be sold or ones to be made into feeds. We do very little actual milling per se, we do some mixing, but most of the feed now is pre-processed, pre-bagged. We're buying it from major distributors like Buckeye and Purina. In between we went from using a turbine-powered feed mill to now electric, where back then, until like the mid ‘70s, early ‘70s, my father used the water power, now everything is electric. In the early days, my grandfather once boasted he had one of the finest bread flours in Cuyahoga County. Now we're a little more everything is retail, it's aimed for the pet owner, the bird fancier, the lawn and garden fans, the horse owners. We're quite a bit more broad than we were in those days.”
History of Mill Development
2011 Oral History Project: Tom Wilson's family has been milling for six generations, over 150 years. Tom talks about the mill's history.
“The mill as it is right now is a fairly rectangular boxy building about four or five stories tall, white with its general peak on it. It has on the outside of it right now a modern what we call grain "legger" elevator. It looks like two metal rectangles that go up to the top. What that is is like when we used to offload grain, or we offload grain, a truck comes up, we put an auger to it, which is like a screw mechanism, and it puts it into what is now a conveyor. And these cups take it up and dump it in through the mill. It's perched right on the edge of the Ohio and Erie Canal, which was built that way because it was built to use the water power. On the Northern side of the building would be a "falls" box, or what they call the "mill run," and the water there was diverted underneath the mill and would turn the turbines. So if you can imagine having a water wheel like we see in a lot of pictures that flows over the top, most of the time, the life of the mill was probably turbine powered where it went underneath and the wheels laid on their sides. And then through belts and shafts and different things to, you know, disperse the power did everything from grinding to mixing to moving the elevators. To the Canal Road side of things, where it's now there is a small sales office where we funnel the customers in, that's where we have our showplace, all the bird feed and our feeders and some of the small things that we have right there. There are two buildings, it's one building directly attached to the actual mill portion, it's cinderblock. That was put in probably in fifty-some, sixty years ago. And then there's one gigantic shed, if you will, that handles where we put all our bulk pallets of bird seed and fertilizer and horse feed. The mill was built 1853-ish, so you're looking at inside the timbers are fairly roughhewn, some of the original windows in there that we had some of the glass, you could see how imperfect it is because it wavered. Much of that is still original on the insides. The floors are . . . if you can find a flat piece of ground on the floors, God bless you, because there's really no bedrock underneath the mill being in a flat bottomland like that so... When Dad used to use the turbines, the whole place kinda had a twist and shake, you know, sway to it.”
Childhood at the Mill
2011 Oral History Project: Tom Wilson's family has been milling for six generations, over 150 years. Tom talks about the family's experiences.
“Being down there with my dad when I was a kid, I can remember coming home and using pillows, throwing 'em around like they were sacks of feed because that's what Dad did. You know, going down there and snooping around in the mill and climbing up in the bins and almost swimming in like what would seem like a sea of how the kids do in the balls, except ours are kernels of corn and if you stepped wrong you could basically bury yourself up to your knees and, you know, somebody else could bury you like they buried you in the sand.”
