By Fred Steiner, www.BlufftonForever.com

In the early 1920s a Bluffton business on Spring Street served as a depository for dead and dying livestock. Providing an important service for farmers, it was a shipping point to a Kalida glue factory. Even though the Bluffton business wasn’t a glue factory, people referred to it that way, since it was the collection point for the factory. Some animal parts contain collagen, historically used in making glue, from hooves and bones of horses, mules and cattle. The need for collagen to produce glue created a demand for dead livestock.

The following story, is part of an interview Fred Steiner conducted in 2004 with his mother, Margaret Hahn Steiner, who grew up on Elm Street, around the corner from this business. 

The Lewis property included a brick house where Vine Street touches Spring. Several buildings stood behind the house. None exist today, as this location is Bluffton University’s Riley Court. 

The glue factory story

When I was little, growing up in Bluffton around 1920, we called the Spring Street site the glue factory. When I was in the summer of my second grade my neighbor playmates and I would watch the animals graze in the pasture. The factory was behind the George Lewis house. My friends and I would watch the lower pasture grounds from the top of the hill behind the Elmer and Bessie Diller house on Spring Street. George and Elizabeth Lewis owned the pasture.

When a farmer had a dead horse, pony, mule or cow, often during harvest season, it took too much time to bury the animal. Instead, farmers would bring the animal, dead or nearly dead, to Mr. Lewis. He would buy the animal and then hire someone to take them to the real glue factory in Kalida. The Lewises were a very friendly couple. Their land had several buildings, all gone now. There were barns, chicken coops and other buildings. Today this pasture is where the Sauder Visual Arts Center and Riley Court buildings stand at Bluffton University. The buildings that I remember were constructed so that a wagon could be driven into them. The dead animals were stored in these barns.

The Lewis pasture bordered Riley Creek. On the other side of the creek was another pasture. My parents owned a cow that grazed on that side of the creek. We called our cow “Addie.” I used to take care of it.

When we’d watch the animals in the Lewis pasture, the usual group of neighbor kids included Manley Thompson, Dorothy Basinger, Treva Lewis, Ruth Berry, Dwight Diller and myself. Dwight’s mother usually watched us from her house to make certain we were safe. I remember that it was fun to watch these animals, although it was sad, too. Some of the animals limped pretty badly. 

We’d watch them walk and sometimes they’d fall. We became upset when that happened. For fun, we’d give the animals names. If they’d fall, we’d pray that they would get back up on their feet. There were horses, mules, driving horses, ponies and sometimes a cow or two. The animals usually were gone after three days. That meant that they died and were taken to Kalida. We were too young to realize that. I believe that in addition to glue, the Kalida factory also manufactured fertilizer from the dead livestock.

My older brother sometimes helped transport the animals from Bluffton to Kalida. He was in high school at the time. He worked for Mr. Lisk, who did the transporting. The Lisk family lived on the corner of Spring and Elm. If a cow died, the Lisk family would tan the hide. Farmers would use the hide for coats. These were really heavy coats. Mr. Lisk owned a team of horses and a team of mules. My brother told me they would go to Kalida, sometimes with dead animals in the wagon and sometimes with sickly horses following, hitched behind the wagon. Mr. Lisk would alternate his team from horses to mules, more than once along the way to Kalida. This was because the trip took such a long time. One team couldn’t haul the load the entire trip. My brother told me there was a feed box and water bucket hanging from the wagon.

There was one very interesting thing about these trips. The trips were made at night. The wagons had night safety traveling lanterns swinging from the bed of the wagons. You see, daytime trips were impossible. People opposed daytime trips. It looked too cruel to the animals.

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