Kathleen Finneran

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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.

Image from the Anderson Manufacturing Company catalog, as pictured in Kim Townsend’s biography, Sherwood Anderson (Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

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Fort Crawford
Prairie du Chien, WI

By Christy Clark-Pujara

On November 4, 1834, a twenty-year-old “mulatto” woman named Rachel filed a freedom suit in St. Louis, Missouri. She claimed that a military officer named Thomas Stockton held her in slavery at Fort Snelling for two years and then moved her to Fort Crawford in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. According to Rachel’s suit, Thomas “took your petitioner to … Prairie du Chien for about two years, holding your petitioner as a slave … causing her to work for & serve him & family at that place during that time as a slave at which place her child James Henry was born.” Rachel argued that her residence and her son’s birth in the free territories made them free people. Slavery was prohibited by federal law in the Northwest Territories. But, despite the ban on slaveholding, Black Americans were held in bondage; in fact, federal military officers were given an allowance to cover the cost of hiring a servant or keeping a slave.

Rachel had been extremely vulnerable at Fort Crawford. She lived in a space dominated by armed white men, and she was regarded as property. Moreover, because Fort Crawford was under construction, Rachel was burdened with serving Thomas’s family, which included two infants (born in 1831 and 1832), in extremely crude conditions. Life on the Midwestern frontier became even more taxing when Rachel became pregnant and gave birth to a boy named James Henry, whose father is not revealed in the historical record. Rachel was not protected by status or race or law or family. She had no legal or social recourse against the sexual advances of the multitude of men who had access to her, especially Thomas. And, in 1834, just months after she gave birth, Thomas took them to St. Louis and sold them to Joseph Klunk, who sold them to William Walker — a local slave trader.

Somehow, Rachel and Henry escaped and made their way to the courthouse. Rachel petitioned for legal representation: “your petitioner prays that your petitioner and said child may be allowed to sue as a poor person in St. Louis Circuit Court for freedom & that the said Walker may be restrained from carrying her or said child out of the Jurisdiction of the St. Louis Circuit Court till the termination of said suit.” Her petition was granted, but Rachel lost the case. The circuit court ruled that slavery was not prohibited in the Territories when enslaved people were put to work serving military officers. Rachel appealed, and in June of 1836, the Missouri Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s decision. They asserted that Thomas had violated the ban on slaveholding in the Northwest Territories when he purchased Rachel from the slaveholding state of Missouri after he was stationed at Fort Snelling. Rachel’s courage and audacity are palpable, seen especially in her use of a legal system created to disempower her.

I first visited Fort Crawford two years after I accepted a faculty position as a historian in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I knew enslaved people were held at forts throughout the Midwest, but I did not associate Midwestern frontier forts with the larger institution of race-based slavery in the United States.  Mainly, I understood these frontier forts as part of American westward expansion and empire building that violently and viciously displaced Indigenous peoples. The area around Prairie du Chien, where the Mississippi River meets the Wisconsin River, has been home to Indigenous peoples for over 12,000 years, most recently the Meskwaki, Sauk, Ho-Chunk, and Dakota peoples who had been repeatedly forced off their ancestral lands. Prairie du Chien had been a center of French fur trading since the 1680s, the oldest European settlement on the Upper Mississippi River. Both the French and British claimed territory in the region. Fort Crawford, founded in 1816, would come to represent American hegemony in the region. Built from local oak timber, it formed a square of 340 feet on each side. In 1826, the fort was severely damaged by a flood. In 1829, construction began on a new elevated fort made of limestone, which was completed in 1834.

Rachel was brought to this contested space. She was enslaved in the hinterlands of the American empire, and she bore witness to the daily realities of the displacement and violence of “manifest destiny.” She literally witnessed the physical building of the American empire in the “West,” and she was forced to contribute to that process in service of Thomas, his wife, and his children. At least seventeen African Americans were held in race-based bondage in and around Fort Crawford between 1820 and 1845. Slaveholding at Fort Crawford, like forts throughout the Midwestern frontier, was a part of the expansion of race-based slavery in America. And slaveholding officers served to undermine the ban on slaveholding and permit its practice in the region. Race-based slaveholding was so embedded in white American culture that its practice persisted even when it was explicitly and legally banned. As a life-long Black Midwesterner whose maternal family settled in Nebraska before it was a state and a historian of American slavery, I was astounded about how little I knew or had even considered knowing about race-based slavery in the Midwest.

Midwestern frontier forts, like Fort Crawford, are places that illuminate and expand understandings of American slavery and Black people’s tenacious pursuits of freedom. People like Rachel are part of a larger history of slaveholding in the United States. Stories like hers transform how we experienced these places. For me, these forts have become archives, places to contemplate Black history and experience. And while I am frustrated that stories of people like Rachel have only recently — and often marginally — been included in the historic presentation at these sites, I am inspired when I imagine that maybe I have walked where Rachel walked, maybe touched a wall she watched being built. My current book project Black on the Midwestern Frontier: Contested Bondage and Black Freedom in Wisconsin, 1725–1868 seeks to tell the stories of people like Rachel and expand how we understand American slavery, the social-cultural formation of the Midwest, and Black people’s pursuits of freedom and liberty.

Christy Clark-Pujara is a Professor of History in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (NYU Press), and her research focuses on the experiences of Black people in small towns and cities in northern and Midwestern colonies and states in British and French North America before the Civil War. Her current book project, Black on the Midwestern Frontier: Contested Freedoms, 1725–1868, examines how the practice of race-based slavery, Black settlement, and debates over abolition and Black rights shaped race relations in the Midwest.

Rachel’s petition and other documents related to Rachel v. William Walker (1834) can be found on the Digital Gateway of the Washington University in St. Louis.

The image is a detail from a painting by A. Brower, circa 1840, that was reproduced on a 1908 postcard published by A.C. Bosselman & Co.

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Main Street
Metamora, Indiana

By Heather Chacón

My first memory of Metamora, Indiana, is of being twelve and sitting on a wooden bench on the front porch of an old house-turned-shop with my friend, Holly. It is December. Above us hang several pieces of artwork for sale, paintings of landscapes and animals on reclaimed barn wood done by a local artist. We are sipping hot chocolate with lots of whipped cream and laughing while her parents shop inside the crowded building, the laughter making what happened next all the more startling. A man suddenly grabs a painting off the wall above our heads and takes off running. He nearly makes it off the porch before being tackled, suddenly and fully about the waist. Other people, whether patrons or employees we do not know, secure the painting. There are murmurs of “shoplifter” amongst the crowd, and eventually the store owner appears to loudly berate the man and ban him from the store. I do not remember any police being called, but the collective scorn from that crowd frightened me regardless.

Had I been more familiar with the history of Metamora, I would have also understood that the concepts embedded in this event — artistic ownership, community censure, thwarted commerce, repurposed materials as the start of mythos-building — were as much a part of this town’s history as the nineteenth-century buildings and homespun atmosphere I loved.

You see, Metamora got its name from the play Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags (1829), written by John Augustus Stone. Stone entered this play in a competition sponsored by one of the (many say the) most prominent American actors of the nineteenth-century, Edwin Forrest. Keen to find a play he believed would be well-suited to his style of acting and physical presence, as well as show that the young nation could produce works of literary and dramatic merit, Forrest offered $500 for the best original “tragedy, in five acts, of which the hero, or principal character, shall be an aboriginal of this country.” From among the fourteen plays submitted, the Committee of Award (headed by William Cullen Bryant) chose Stone’s.

Initially Stone was elated to win the prize and have his work performed by such an important thespian. This pleasure soon turned to worry and dismay, however, as Metamora became a meteoric success that helped establish Forrest’s professional reputation and personal fortune without yielding such stability for its author. The play’s popularity hinged, in part, on Forrest’s acting talent, but it also gave the American people the opportunity to celebrate a uniquely “American” history.

While some brochures and websites mention the town is named after a play, very few include any details of its plot or popularity. Set in 1600s New England, the melodrama tells the tale of Metamora, a fictional chief cast in the “noble Indian” mode, who eventually kills his wife to protect her from the terrors of settler colonialism and enslavement before being slain by white pioneers. Importantly, by 1829 New England was largely under the control of white settlers, thus allowing northeastern audiences watching Stone’s play the chance to experience catharsis rather than fear of Native American retaliation. Yet Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, passed in 1830, insured white Americans’ interest in stories dramatizing the usurpation of Native American lands and “disappearance” of their earlier inhabitants. The play became such a cultural phenomenon that it inspired the name of Metamora, Indiana, when the town was platted in 1838. This was not unique, as towns named Metamora can also be found in Michigan, Illinois, and Ohio — locations that had more recently been settled on the frontier.

Forrest performed Metamora to great acclaim until his death in 1872. The play spawned at least 35 additional “Indian” dramas and Forrest made thousands by playing the role. Stone, meanwhile, never saw additional remuneration above his $500 prize money, unless you count Forrest buying Stone’s headstone after Stone committed suicide by drowning in 1834. When Stone died many whispered that Forrest’s unwillingness to share the profits of Metamora contributed to Stone’s melancholy. The scandal clung to Forrest for a while, but ultimately did little to impact his popularity.

Today visitors to Metamora, Indiana, will find little evidence of why the town bears this name or the fact that it was established on land that used to be the home of Miami and Shawnee peoples. Instead, public memory centers largely on its identity as a “canal town.” Metamora was established along the proposed route of Indiana’s Whitewater Canal, an infrastructure project designed to transport raw materials from the state’s interior to the Ohio River. Construction of the canal section in Metamora began in 1836 and was completed by 1847. Yet the canal was unfortunately prone to flooding due to the relatively low elevation of the surrounding land and its proximity to the Whitewater River. By the 1860s, the railroad supplanted canal travel as the preferred means of transporting goods.

With this change, Metamora met challenges well known to much of the rural Midwest: declining populations, gradual shrinkage of family-owned farms, a dearth of well-paying jobs. A resourceful bunch, Metamora residents still used the canal to power several grist mills in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one of which still operates at the Whitewater Canal State Historic Site under the care of the Indiana State Museum. Their grits are extremely good, particularly on a summer day when you can watch them be freshly ground and placed directly in the bag.

In the last few years, interest in the town has risen somewhat, in part due to renewed interest in preserving historic architecture like Metamora’s nineteenth-century shops and municipal buildings. The town’s beautiful natural setting, affordability, and relative proximity to Cincinnati draw visitors who want to stroll around antique shops or take the family on a historic train or canal boat ride. It’s a pity most visitors to Metamora’s functioning wooden aqueduct, the only one still in existence in the United States, have no idea they’re also visiting a town named after the “last of the Wampanoags.”

Maybe it’s time to make sure that darker history is not also carried off into the night.

Heather Chacón is a proud native Hoosier and scholar of nineteenth-century American Literature. She is an assistant professor in the Department of English, Communications and Media at Greensboro College in North Carolina. When she isn’t grading or in the archives, she enjoys being outside and visiting historic sites—beloved pastimes she first developed in Indiana.

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Marmaton River
Fort Scott, Kansas

By Jeromiah Taylor

The grass is fuchsia, the sky bluntly cold, and the horizon swathed in haze. It is late November on the Osage Plains. In southeast Kansas, the distinction between grassland and woodland, or plain and hill, is blurred by the mile. Technically speaking, it is a tree savanna. As for creeks and rivers, we’ve got a few. On my little stretch of highway between Wichita and Fort Scott I encountered the Osage, the Cedar Hollow, the Bachelor, and the Owl creeks. For the rivers, there were the Little Walnut, The Fall, and The Neosho. And then, roping through the 155-acre Gunn Park in Fort Scott, the river I’d come to see: the Marmaton. 

It took some time to find the river on foot. Like most Kansas rivers right now, the Marmaton is low. In fact, one offshoot was completely dry, allowing me to walk the cracked bottom of the gulch. While I stood in the Marmaton’s dusty vein, the ground as I knew it rested ten feet above my head, with only the ombre sediment at eye level. In my silent memories, the idle river moves slowly, its wooded sentinels bending in the sharp gust. 

At 11 years of age, the photographer, director, composer, and writer, Gordon Parks, was thrown into this river by some white boys under the impression that he couldn’t swim. These events and his circuitous path to fame and fortune are documented in his 2005 memoir A Hungry Heart, a Kansas Notable Book. The river itself is part of a driving tour commemorating the filming locations of the 1969 film The Learning Tree, Park’s landmark film debut, which he wrote, directed, and scored. The film is based on his auto-biographical novel of the same name.

In A Hungry Heart, Parks describes Fort Scott as “touched by all the hands of nature”, and also as “the mecca of bigotry.” A place he refuses to flatten: “bathed in lovely twilights,” yet where “bigotry spewed its venom,” and where he “ate hatred, a lot of it,” as well as “cabbage, cornbread, [and] strawberries.” It was in Fort Scott that Park’s parents and siblings “sowed love’s harvest,” which he learned to share with those “who asked for no more than also to be loved.” 

And it is in Fort Scott that he is buried. After traipsing in the rain through Evergreen Cemetery on 215th Street, the sun-bleached lot markers having been no help, I found Parks’ grave, which bears his poem “Homecoming.” Parks reflects on Fort Scott therein, while also venturing, with a heap of triumphalism, that “hatred is suddenly remaining quiet, / keeping its mouth shut!” The unhappy irony of reading that rain-splattered inscription in 2022 will not soon leave my memory.

In 1950 Parks shot an unpublished photo-story for LIFE magazine called “Back to Fort Scott” amidst the Jim Crow-era turmoil culminating in the 1954 decision of Brown vs. Board of Education.  The Gordon Parks Foundation later published the story in a book. Isabel Wilkerson, in her introduction, describes Fort Scott as “neither North nor South, neither East nor West, right smack in the middle…and at the intersection of what it meant to be American on the eve of The Depression and as-of-yet-unseen social upheaval.”  

As for Parks, Wilkerson deems him the “documentarian of a watershed century.” That sentence caught me in its undertow, as figurative watersheds are a recent fascination of mine. Maybe because I live surrounded by literal ones. Wichita sits on the mouth of the Little Arkansas River watershed and Fort Scott is in the Little Osage River watershed. The Marmoton flows into the Little Osage which flows into the Osage which flows into the Missouri which flows into the Mississippi which empties into the Gulf of Mexico. “Right smack in the middle” starts to feel relative when discussing rivers.

Watersheds, idiomatically speaking, are dividing or turning points. Parks’ writing is filled with recollections of watersheds. For example, as he lay dying, Park’s older brother Leroy, told a 10-year-old Parks, who’d been caught fighting, “Your brain is more powerful than your fists, try using it. You’re to remember that — ok?”  One year later, after being thrown in the Marmaton and left to drown, Parks stayed below the surface, swimming to the opposite bank, so that his white attackers wouldn’t see him escape. A brain more powerful than fists indeed. 

Jeromiah Taylor is a writer based in Wichita, Kansas, who is passionate about the cultural life of his region. He is a staff writer for Fauxmoir Literary Magazine, and his non-fiction has appeared in The Kansas Reflector, The Sunflower, The Penn-Capital Star and others. Get in touch at jeromiahtaylor.com.

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