Sometimes you can find old “friends” when you go down history’s rabbit hole.
After the recent death of my Dad’s cousin, I ended up with a small pile of family papers that she left behind. Among them was great grandfather Albert Hornung’s purchase agreement for a new, black 1921 Ford truck from Miami Motor Cars in Hamilton, Ohio, the city where I grew up.
A quick Google search of that name gave me the address, 319 South Second Street, and a Google search of that address gave me a photo of the old building located at that spot today. I instantly recognized it. When I was a boy, it was the site of the Sears and Roebuck garden/farm store that was located a block down the Second Street from the main Sears store.
I was in there a few times as a kid although I have no idea why; it will come as no surprise to my neighbors that I didn’t grow up with deep, abiding love of garden tools. Sears may have used the store to peddle Christmas trees and decorations during the holiday season which would have been more interesting to me than grass seed and weed whackers, but that probably still wouldn’t have left much of an impression.
I wonder if I wouldn’t have been more interested to learn that this garden store had once been a place you could buy a new Ford. I’m sure that would have been way more interesting to me than lawn mowers.
My voyage of discovery wasn’t finished, though. The paperwork for that truck also included the address of the plant where it had been produced: 660 Lincoln Avenue, Cincinnati. Google that address and you are immediately presented with a photo of the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, which occupies a building next to I-75 that bears a strong resemblance to the old Ford model T assembly plant on Cleveland Avenue in Columbus.
Sure enough, a little more research revealed the building had built for Ford in 1915; the structure had been used as an assembly plant for 23 years. It ceased production there in 1938, and the plant become a distribution center for – wait for it — Sears and Roebuck farm equipment.
After Sears exited, the building fell into such a state of disrepair that a Cincinnati newspaper apparently named it the “Blight of the Week” sometime before it was refurbished about 2005. The hospital’s medical center apparently landed there several years later.
This is the classic example of a guy burning a lot of time he didn’t plan to because of his curiosity about an old Ford sales receipt – anybody who has ever found themselves lost in a maze of old YouTube music videos knows how that works — but there really is a point to this:
Those non-descript buildings that you pass on the way to work or your kid’s soccer practice sometimes have interesting stories to tell.
Rabbit holes can consume a lot of time. They can also show us a world that we didn’t even know existed, right in our midst.
