Day of Adventure - Part 3

The potato digger was envisioned by Isaac W. Hoover of Avery, in Milan Township, when he submitted a model to the Federal Patent Bureau in 1885. His patent granted, he began manufacturing diggers in a shed on Strecker & Kelly Roads. The first ones were sold to waiting neighbor farmers, but they attracted the attention of farmers all over the country. They revolutionized the gathering of potatoes all over the country. They easily separated earth and weeds from the potatoes and could be used on hilly as well as level ground, allowing a man with a team of horses to dig as much as 500 bushels a day.
Soon a very profitable company formed and in 1916 the extensive plant covered 4 acres, producing 5000 machines per year, shipped to every civilized country in the world. In 1926, the company merged with John Deere Plow Company, and I.W. Hoover retired from the business. The operations moved from Milan Township the following year. The plant was located where CertainTeed Corporation is today, about two miles north of Milan.
Isaac Hoover continued to be creative and resourceful, refining his digger, producing planters, cutters, bag holders, weighing devices, and a potato garden capable of one hundred bushels an hour. His potato sorter was patented when he was 92 years old.

How ‘bout that!

Day of Adventure, Part 2

Just a few feet from the sign announcing the Edison Birthplace as a national registered building (see previous post for pic) there was a sign about the Milan Canal Basin. Now from almost the moment we had entered Milan we learned that when the Huron Canal was built in the 1840, little Milan, landlocked Milan, quickly became one of the largest grain ports in the world, second only to Odessa Russia. Of course there was a sign right behind the one pictured here that forbid up from even seeing the Canal Basin, as it is not open to visitors.

A quick few blocks from the Basin and the Edison birthplace was the Milan Historical Museum, a collection of buildings ranging from an old blacksmith ship to the Edna Roe Newton Memorial Building built in 1969 in the memory of the wife of one of the founding members of the Milan Historical Society. Here are some pictures of a 4 seasons garden and a plaque for Milan's Japanese sister city.

Perhaps the most exciting discovery of the day was the Hoover Potato Digger.

I will do the next entry on this miraculous invention.

After we had toured the Newton building, the lady who was hostess took us to one of the other buildings and after Jim and I quickly walked through (by this time we had been Milaned out) we tried to escape to our car but the hostess of the Newton Building was standing out front of it and tried, unsuccessfully, to get us back into the building we had missed. We politely said we were hungry and quickly got back into my car and headed out to Marblehead.

Day of Adventure Part One

After an endless number of weekends where Jim and I would ask each other to do something fun and we would undoubtedly end up at a movie or watching videos, I decided to plan an actual “Day of Adventure.” The day started out driving from Cleveland to Milan, Ohio, the birthplace of Thomas Alva Edison.

Edison’s father built the house around 1841. Thomas was born in the bedroom right off the Parlor (I saw the room) in 1847. The young woman who was giving us the tour claimed to be a relative of Edison’s, although I am sure Thomas Alva would have had problems with her hippy dippy dress and flip flops. It became painfully clear about halfway through the tour that the house was more of a memory for Edison’s daughter because there were many more artifacts from her life then from her fathers in the house.

I have no pictures from inside the house because it was forbidden, but here are some pics from the Milan town square and of the house itself. There is also some pics of a cool empty Victorian house just off the square that was empty and in need of a nice gay couple to buy and fix up into a bed and breakfast.

(Funny moment number one: As we were standing in the basement kitchen of the Edison birthplace house, the tour guide in one breath completed her last fact and then stated the tour was over.)