The Falls and Hudson Hard Hit

AKRON & SUMMIT COUNTY

Karl H. Grismer,

Summit County Historical Society,

Akron, Ohio c. 1950 Chapter 5 p 159-160

Akron was not the only community in Summit County which suffered during the 1850s. Cuyahoga Falls and Hudson also declined.

Historians who wrote during the 1880s and 1890s insisted that the Falls was seriously affected because Henry Newberry sold valuable water power rights to Dr. Crosby for the Chuckery project and also because the P. & 0. Canal took water out of the Cuyahoga River. Actually, the Falls was hurt by the same things that hurt Akron: lack of trunk railroads, dependence on water power in a day when steam power competition was becoming intense, and, above all, by the hard times which prevailed generally throughout the country.

Hudson suffered a grievous blow as a result of the collapse of rail­road building schemes in which its people had invested heavily.

Because it had boomed with the building of the Cleveland & Pitts­burgh Railroad, Hudson fondly believed that if more railroads would be built, more miracles would come to pass. So they invested heavily in a proposed Clinton Air Line Railroad, from Hudson east to the Pennsylvania line; in a proposed Clinton Line Extension, from Hudson west to Tiffin, and in the Hudson & Painesville Railroad, an extension of the Akron Branch.

All these railroad ventures crashed and the Hudson investors lost every dollar they had spent for stock. The only thing that saved the Hudsonites from complete disaster was that records of the Clinton Air Line became conveniently "lost" after the road went bankrupt and, as a result, stockholders escaped being held liable for an amount equal to their holdings, as then was required by law. Had not this so-called loss occurred, the entire business community would have been finan­cially ruined, old historians related.

Even as it was, Hudson was sorely beaten—and never again did it aspire to fame as a manufacturing or business center. Instead, it gave more attention to educational affairs and became noted throughout the Middle West for its Western Reserve College.

The good old town of Middlebury was not too badly affected by the disastrous 1850s. It couldn't be. It had been hurt almost as badly as it could be hurt when Dr. Crosby's Cascade Mill Race put North Akron on the map. The race did not cause grass to grow in Middle­bury streets and turn it into a goose pasture, as the doctor had pre­dicted, but it robbed the town of its once thriving industries. Years passed before it recovered from the shock. It never regained its former eminence.

By 1860, however, two industries were getting well started in Middlebury which in the years to come were destined to play a major role in the development of this locality—the clay products industry and the match industry. We shall hear much more about them later.

During the 1850s Akron would have suffered more than it did from the industrial decline had it not been for the fact that the town was steadily growing in importance as a shopping center.

It was during this period that Akron merchants first truly appre­ciated how much the town had gained when it won the county seat battle in 1842. With industrial payrolls dwindling, purchases made by out-of-towners after coming in to go to county offices often meant the difference for an Akron store between survival and bankruptcy. This business was not enormous but it was steady—and therefore highly prized.