• /

Unusual snapshot reveals a forgotten Bluffton of 100 to 125 years ago

By Fred Steiner
www.BlufftonForever.com

Yes, this is a Bluffton street intersection. But, where? Only one clue reveals the location. A street sign on the right side of the intersection reads “GROVE ST.” A second street sign on the pole next to the Grove Street sign, not readable however, identifies what is today’s Kibler Street

A handwritten sentence on the photo’s back side confirms the location. It reads: Bentley Road and Grove Street Bluffton, Ohio – looking into Kibler Street.

Below the handwriting it is a stamped “Neu-Art Studio, photographers, Bluffton, Ohio.”

This photograph came from Paul Klassen, one of Bluffton’s oldest residents, today in his ninth decade.

CONTINUES

  • /

Involving 40 Bluffton High School students during the noon hour

By Fred Steiner

Can you imagine a book burning frenzy in Bluffton? That happened exactly 105 years ago on the banks of the Big Riley, according to an account in the Bluffton News. 

The story from April 1918 Bluffton News:

The German text books used by the German classes in the high school were burned by a party of about 40 students Thursday afternoon.

  • /

In 1943 a Bluffton man sat beside General Pershing in a bus

By Fred Steiner
www.BlufftonForever.com

Spoiler alert – You’d better read this entire feature to the very end.

The longest-running column in the Bluffton News titled “Mainly Personal,” ran weekly from the very early 1940s to the late 1960s.

Next to sports and obituaries, it was the most watched-for column in the paper. Ted Biery created it, Milt Edwards continued it and Charles Hilty kept it going.

What was it? Let’s put it this way–It was 80 years ahead of Twitter, TikTok and any social media conception imaginable. It included several very short pieces on Bluffton residents and former residents, basically being themselves.

At the bottom of this story is a 1943 sample of one of the columns.

Here is a Bluffton brush with history, posted in the April 8, 1943, Bluffton News Mainly Personal column.

Meeting an internationally famous general most unexpectedly was the experience last week of Willard Lee, residing northwest of town, while on a bus between Toledo and Detroit.

Lee took a seat in the bus beside an elderly looking gentlemen and the two struck up a conversation touching on such topics as the weather, crops and the war.

CONTINUES

  • /

By Fred Steiner
www.BlufftonForever.com

A little known, interesting Bluffton fact is that the community has been home to African-America residents and visitors earlier than most people realize. 

Recent discoveries found in Bluffton News microfilms prior to 1910 sheds light on this early history.  This feature examines many of these residents and visitors.

  • /

By Fred Steiner
www.BlufftonForever.com
 

What did the twin Gerber brothers witness flying over their farm in the summer of 1923?

The following account of their experience is a reprint from the Fall, 2019, issue of the Swiss Community Historical Society of Bluffton and Pandora “Newsletter.” 

At the bottom of this story, is one suggestion of what the brothers may have seen. This story is part of a new book to be released later this summer titled “Where Bluffton’s Ghosts Sleep.” The book is a collection of ghost stories and other unusual and sometimes unexplained events that took place in our community. Fred Steiner has compiled the book.

The story follows:

Only the sky is the limit. Happening 24 years before a flying saucer crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, twins Vernon and Vilas Gerber became admonished by their mother not to make up stories when they told her about something they said hovered in the sky one summer afternoon in 1923. 

The twins, born in 1912 on the family farm in Riley Township, Putnam County, would have been around 11 at the time. 

Vilas described the event this way: It happened in 1923 on a farm three miles from Pandora, where we grew up. 

On this farm were two large cherry trees. We loved cherries, so my twin brother and I climbed up in the trees. Vernon sat in one and I in the other ready to reach for a cluster of cherries. 

While in the trees I suddenly saw an object. It was cylindrical, cigar shaped, perhaps four feet in diameter. Its length I never saw or don’t remember. It appeared metallic in structure, dull gray in color. It had no wings, made no noise and just hung motionless in the air about 15 feet off the ground, 20 feet from the tree. 

Page 1 of 2 CONTINUES

  • /

Ever hear of Cannonsburg, Hassan, Webster, Armorsville…

…the story of Bluffton’s neighboring ghost towns

By Fred Steiner
www.BlufftonForever.com

A Bluffton News item from Oct. 29, 1896, tells that J.S. Jennings of Armorsville received a letter from his cousin, William Jennings Bryan, Democratic candidate for president. 

Not quite three years later a Bluffton News legal notice published July 10, 1899, proclaimed Armorsville as “absolutely extinct.” Gone without a trace. J.S. Jennings was once a real person living in a real place called Armorsville. 

You could find it just down the county line, north of Ada. Today it’s a ghost town. At the time of its death, or extinction, there existed no mourners, no visitation, no funeral and no final words of comfort. 

None of it remains today. Even its cemetery disappeared, to where, no one knows. The graves might still be in place under a farmer’s field.

Armorsville isn’t the only ghost town on our invisible horizon. There are other places, each literally wiped off the map, existing only as spirits that once represented visions, hopes and efforts of pioneers who created them. Scant details remain of these settlements, today mostly crossroads in the country. Most of what is known of these ghost towns is buried in the pages of 1880-era county history books. 

CONTINUES

Pages