Old black-and-white newspaper ad for Anderson Mfg. Co in Elyria, Ohio

Sherwood Anderson

The Old Topliff and Ely Plant
Elyria, Ohio

By Doug Sheldon

Sherwood Anderson’s desertion of everything Elyrian was the first literary myth I swallowed whole. A counselor and I were walking along the railroad tracks that divided the north and south sides of town and faced a u-bend in the black river that cradled a mostly empty lot scattered with construction debris and discarded rock (now the BASF chemical plant, oddly apropos to Elyria’s industrial past). He asked me if I knew who Anderson was. Being twelve, I had no idea. He proceeded to tell me that Anderson walked these tracks out of town, wound up in Cleveland, then moved to Chicago to become a writer. It engaged me in a swirl of wannabe masculinity that this man had burned down his life, hiked his way along the retreating wilderness of pre-World War One Ohio, and used Cleveland’s cobweb of train tracks to migrate himself to Chicago, where men became writers.

Again, being twelve, I am sure he left out that Anderson’s migration was spurred by a mental breakdown, a wearying due to the drudgery of manufacturing or the singularity of his marriage or any number of other things Anderson was not particularly talented at.

The tracks follow the river then diverge from it as you moved west. In the nineties, when I was walking with my counselor, Elyria’s past lay along them like a graveyard of iron rods and crumbled limestone. The town’s industrial self-sufficiency was long dead by the time I heard of Sherwood Anderson. Years before my birth, it became a bedroom community where people commuted to jobs in Cleveland. We knew many people like Anderson in Elyria. People who desperation broke, and hope couldn’t heal. I didn’t know then I was looking at the bones of a hulking dragon, ghosts of smokestacks that puffed the Ohio sky with a soot and energy that furnished mail-order solutions to leaky roofs.

These products gave the Andersons status, money, and a house to be envied. Years later, his soon-to-be ex-wife told biographer Walter Rideout, “Roof-Fix carried us to Elyria.” He employed many men, like himself, who were new locals, moving to Elyria from the farming hinterlands with promises that it could be as big as Toledo or Cleveland. A 1910 advertisement listed the name of his factory as “The Old Topliff and Ely Plant” — even his business bore the name of the town’s founder. He was Elyria’s property. In the same year he processed paint, roof tar, and a few dozen other products that spilled their run-off through half-buried pipes and sludged their exhaust over the slate piled along the riverbanks.

For two more years shipments were packed into train cars with a monotony that burrowed itself into Anderson. Then came a fugue state, as Anderson’s contemporaries called it. He just couldn’t process his Elyrian life. On a seemingly normal Thanksgiving morning in 1912, Anderson mumbled something about wet feet to his secretary and wandered out of his office, through the doors of the snow-colored castle on the elbow of the Black River. He abandoned his life, choosing a route where no one he knew would look: the railroad tracks. An umbilical cord to his factory, the railroad disseminated Roof-Fix all over northern Ohio and beyond, routes he had likely reviewed dozens of times a year, mapping an unconscious escape route. He was found three days later in Cleveland, shoeless and babbling, half painted with mud. Writing, and possibly some undeclared trauma, carried him out of my hometown and to the Capital of the Midwest. Which it would do to me almost a century later.

Not much lasts a hundred years in my hometown. Any evidence of Anderson’s thriving business in Elyria is buried under layers of soil and time, a palimpsest tinting the successes of this mini metropolis in faded sepia. It was as if the earth took revenge on Elyrians for amassing all that industrial weight and swallowed it out of spite. Elyria’s problem wasn’t that it burned him out, but it dry-rotted him. Even if you were president of the local business collective, as Anderson was, you weren’t insulated from how a life of denied talent cracks the mind.

Progress, when I was abandoning Elyria, was a slang word for replacing unionized manufacturing careers with stock jobs at Walmart, of which we had three. My high school was collapsing under asbestos tiles and a lack of choices. You either went to the community college, worked fast food, or left town. I am sure there were more choices for wealthier kids, going to the top universities in the state or taking over their father’s car dealership, but for a kid who watched the future of his town melt away as we all crawled toward the 2000s, it was enough to make you wonder what that mud on Anderson’s legs felt like. I am not defending a person ditching all responsibilities at the feet of those left behind because you had to live your vision, but, being an Elyrian, I get it.

Doug Sheldon is a teacher, scholar, and writer living in the Midwest. He can be found either in the archives, reading, or doing something lake related.