30)   Roads and Transportation

Road Trip in a 1916 Ford

(Drexel Lantz)

The biggest change I saw in my 90 years was from horse and buggies to cars.  I know my dad bought a 1916 Ford and built a thing on the side of it where you could store stuff on the fender.  There were four or five of us kids and our whole family drove in it to Nebraska.  We had a tent.  The first day, we left Newark at ten o’clock and we stayed all night just this side a Springfield.  You drive a little over a hundred miles a day and you’re really traveling!

Horses and Cars in the 1920s

(Ed Deeds)

Practically every house then had a barn behind it, because people had horses and buggies.  And in the 1920s, you would see about as many horses and buggies as you would automobiles in town.  On the streets you had to watch where you walked because on the pavement there would be this fine, yellow, granular stuff which was what happened to the horse manure when it disintegrated.  It was just an ever-present sort of golden snow over the street. 

We were experts and could tell what kind of car was coming.  Of course, model T Fords were by far the most common then, and they were very distinctive.  The next most common were the Chevys, probably followed by the Buicks.  And there were lots of cars that don’t exist anymore, like Willy’s Overland and Reo.

Col. Deeds Electrifies Cash Registers (1900)

(Ed Deeds)

After Nabisco, Col. Edward Deeds [ my uncle ] worked for the National Cash Register Company. In those days the cash register always operated with a lever or a crank.  The company wanted to operate it with an electric motor so you would just press a button.  So my uncle was put in charge of doing that.  Now he had been trained as an engineer but not particularly in electricity.  So he asked Professor Cole at Ohio State if he knew of any recent graduates that knew a lot about electricity.  And Cole said, “Yeah, there’s a guy that graduated recently and is teaching high school up in Loudonville.  He’s a queer duck but he knows a lot about electricity.  C. F. Kettering is his name.”  So my uncle got him to come down to Dayton to interview and Kettering got the job. 

Back in those days all the electric motors were big heavy things with lots of iron in them because you get more power out of the motor if you have heavy iron to help make the magnetic field stronger.  Relatively few wires and a lot of iron --  that’ll do the job.  But Kettering figured that to operate this cash register you only needed to have the motor run for a second or two to do the job.  A small motor would be overloaded and burn out if you kept it running steadily, but for just a few seconds you could have this little tiny motor and get a lot of power out of it for a short time.  So my uncle and he succeeded in electrifying the cash registers that way.

Local Inventor Pioneers the Car Battery

(Ed Deeds)

Another thing back in those days everybody cranked their cars by hand -- they didn’t have starters.  So my uncle and Kettering decided to use the same principle for making a starter for a car.  And they built this thing in my uncle’s barn back of his house in Dayton and they called it the Dayton Engineering Laboratory Company (Delco).  They started originally making power plants for farm houses that didn’t have electricity.  They would have a batch of batteries with acid and lead in them. And they would charge them up with little gasoline engines, and then these batteries would operate the lights and stuff in the house.  One of the first of these power plants was installed in the house next door here, the Deeds family homestead.

Anyway, to start a car, the battery is used to run the starter and then you’d use the motor of the car to drive the generator to charge up the battery afterward.  And it worked!  They later sold the patents to the Cadillac Motor Company which later became General Motors.

Interurban to Newark  (1920s)

(Clark Morrow)

When I came to town in the 1920s the Granville Historical Society building was the Interurban Stop.  The train, the Interurban, came from Columbus went to the Buckeye Lake area and then Newark and then eventually it came to Granville.  The tracks were set right in the middle of the street.  It used to back into an area between the Park National Bank now and the Historical Society.  They backed in there to load their people.  Then they pulled out and went back down to Newark.  You could go to Newark for 25¢ and could go back for 25¢.  High school and college students used to do that a lot and I used to do that myself.

 Newark-Granville Road in the 1960s

(John Klauder)

I had a buddy who moved to Newark probably about in sixth grade, and occasionally my parents would take me over to Newark to visit him.  And I have this real distinct memory of how far it felt to drive from Granville to Newark – that Newark was clearly a different town and it was a distance to get there.  We’d always take Newark-Granville Road and back then we’d go by acreage that was predominantly owned by Sallie Jones, the land where Bryn Du is now.  And she’d have all her cattle grazing there and so you felt like you were really going through the country.  I’m sure that psychologically it made you feel that there was a great distance between the two communities, which you don’t have any more now.  But Granville was really its own little identity back then.

Newark-Granville Road in the 1970s

(Robin Bartlett)

When I came here in 1974 there was nothing on Newark-Granville Road between the golf course and Newark -- your first thing you saw was the Imperial Palace Restaurant, which everybody still went to then.  There was no housing.  There weren’t any churches, weren’t schools along that road.  And that was a really pretty thing when you would get off 16 from Newark and come back into Granville and you’d drive down through the country and it was just rolling hills.  Bryn Du development wasn’t there.  All of that was just pasture.  There were cows and then the town began at the golf course.  And the town really ended at the Broadway Square apartments to the west.

Route 16 Bypass

(Robert Kent)

This may sound surprising but I don’t think Granville’s changed that much in fifty years.  I know that there’re a lot more people in the area and there’re a lot more houses in the surrounding areas, but downtown Granville still looks very much as it did when I first came.  Gregory Hardware is gone and that was a nice old building. And the expressway, of course, is through Granville.  That’s for the good because the route sixteen used to go right up Broadway.  I remember one particular merchant fought that tooth and nail because he thought that would be terrible for Granville to lose Route 16, but Granville’s very fortunate that he didn’t prevail and that traffic was taken out of town.  So, Route 16 is different but down through downtown it’s still a very rural and small town.

<- Back  /  Forward ->

        If you have website technical questions or corrections email Bill Holloway, at wehollo@gmail.com
        Copyright © 2008 Granville Historical Society
        Last modified: 02/07/08