Odd hometown history

friedgreencorrado wrote:

RexSeven wrote: Methuen, MA was the birthplace of Robert Rogers. His Roger's Rangers were an irregular infantry group that fought in the French and Indian War just before the Revolutionary War. Even though he may have massacred Indians and sided with the Redcoats, his tactics were so effective that the U.S. Army Rangers use a variation of his Standing Orders and claim to have been inspired by Roger's Rangers. Methuen was also home to Edward Searles, a millionaire interior and architectural designer who built two castles, stone walls, and a church-like concert building to house an 1860s pipe organ. Most of the walls still stand. The ruins of one of the castles is open to the public, the other is a Catholic convent and high school that is closed to the public. The organ hall still stands. Here's a picture of the beast:

Whoa. Man, I love those things. I wish every place with a pipe organ would let guys like us that want to see how machines actually work would let us go inspect the pipes & bellows & stuff.

Me too. The Methuen pipe organ still works and still provides regular concerts. That sucker is LOUD. I plan on appropriating the pipe organ for myself once my plans for global domination are unleashed. Every supervillian needs a massive pipe organ, right?

better to appropriate the one from Atlantic City. You can probably take the while Hall while you are there. I think it is STILL the worlds largest freestanding structure (no internal supports).

You can (and they have) played football and even done autoracing inside the main room.

I did talk to the guy in charge of the restoration on the organ. He says the hardest part of playing it is the lag between pressing a key and hearing music. The two playing points are quite some distance from some of the pipes

It happened yesterday, so I guess it's history. President Obama made an unannounced stop in my home town yesterday, on his way from Red Wing, MN to Decorah, IA.

Not necessarily "hometown" but about an hour from here is Wolf Creek Dam, on Lake Cumberland, one of america's biggest ticking timebombs.... sorry nashville!

John Brown wrote: Lansing, Mi was going to be called El Dorado... splains all the Messycans.

I grew up in Lansing as well. Here are a few interesting facts.

Famous people that lived in or are from Lansing.
1. Ervin "Magic" Johnson
2. Malcolm X
3. Burt Reynolds
4. Rosie the Riveter
5. Ransom E Olds. (founder of Oldsmobile and REO trucks)
6. John Brown. (Everyone's favorite GRM Megadork)

Interesting little known history. The Durant Motor Company was founded on the west side of town. William Durant founded General Motors, co-founded Chevrolet. After being fired from GM in 1921, he tried to duplicate what he'd done by acquiring a bunch of brands to compete compete with GM. The company folded in 1931. For those who live in Lansing, the Durant Motor factory was at the corner of North Verlinden and Osborn streets. In 1935 it became the Fischer body plant that extended south to Michigan Avenue by Sexton High School. All that's left now is the foundation since GM decided to tear everything down a couple of years ago.

how do you get fired from the company you created? He must have really angered somebody

pete240z wrote: I grew up in Downers Grove, Illinois Emo Philips Denise Richards Randy Savage Tony Granato Downers Grove prides itself on the presence of a large collection of Sears-Roebuck Catalog Homes.

5725 Pershing Ave here! (Well, not there anymore).

bumping this thread with something I just found out tonight about my hometown. - Alstead, NH, pop- 2,013 located 2 hrs northwest of Boston

Apparently Edgar Winter ( yes, of The Edgar Winter Group) would visit to eat at a quaint little restaurant called "King Taco". He'd try to stop by whenever the band would tour in the Boston/Hartford,Ct area back in the 70's

Roselle, NJ- home to Roosevelt Greer(NFL great and Robert Kennedy bodyguard), 1st electric streetlights There is a small building on 1st Ave with a plaque commemorating it and Thomas Edison who created the lights.

oldsaw wrote: Until I was four, my hometown was Gas City, IN - significant for little else except that it changed its' name from Harrisburg when large natural gas deposits were discovered.

Gas City sucks, just as it did before.....although we have on occasion had a rather large sofa sitting on the centerline of SR-22 right in front of the police station.

I am from outside of Summitville, IN.....which aside from making bricks, nothing other than corn happened. However, the next town north(Fairmount, IN) is the "hometown" of James Dean and Jim Davis(Garfield)

Ballston Spa, NY. Reminds me of Mayberry, only in color.

County seat, birthplace of Abner Doubleday (invented baseball). The Way We Were was filmed here, as was the Horse Wisperer.

In 1803 had the largest hotel in America, also where the inventor/manufacture of the flat bottom paper bag set up shop during the Civil War. Home to the National Bottle Museum.

They still show movies in the park on the side of a building every Saturday night for free.

Home of the Bischoff Chocolate Factory for decades.

Newburgh In,

The first town north of the Mason-Dixon line to be captured by confederate soldiers in the civil war. The city surrendered to the confederate troops after being threatened with a "Cannon." The cannon was actually a log, some wagon wheels, and a stove pipe that the troops had placed on the southern banks of the Ohio River across from the town and arranged to look like a cannon.

My hometown is where Kenny Perry (golfer, number 11 on all time money winners list) is from, Annie Potts (in Ghost Busters) is from and Jim Bowie, of Bowie knife and Alamo fame, was born in our county (well technically it was Logan county at the time but our county was divided out of that and he was born in what is now my home county).

Brett_Murphy wrote: Albany, NY is the oldest chartered city and the 6th oldest continuously settled city in the USA. Volkswagen used to import cars to the Port of Albany, and most of the cocoa used by Hershey used to make port there as well.

Also the capitol of NYS.

Technically, my hometown is on the better side of the river, but in the late 1700s, when Cincinnati, OH was settled, they originally called it Losantiville (bits of words from four different languages that essentially was supposed to mean the city across from the Licking River). Because the local indian tribes had been on Britain's side during the revolutionary war (each tribe may, or may not have known they had an alliance), Britain decided to cede not only their own claims to land, but the indian tribes' claims as well. Usually without informing those tribes, and certainly without checking with them first. So, when the white man showed up with bits of paper claiming that the land was theirs, the natives were understandably a bit confused and pretty angry about the whole thing. Despite a few births and some people moving in to town, the skirmishes with the indians kept the Losantiville population pretty much flat.

To solve that problem, the army sent some folks out to establish a fort to protect (the white) folks, and they originally built the blockhouse in North Bend, OH which is a couple miles downstream. There are conflicting reports about this, however, there is a story that one of the army officers saw a beautiful woman in North Bend and became a bit infatuated. Her husband didn't take too kindly to that and eventually decided to pick up and move upstream to Losantiville/Cincinnati. The army officer told his unit to pack up the fort and moved the whole operation to Cincinnati where he established Fort Washington. The records are a bit spotty, being from the 1780s, so there isn't any definitive proof, however, there is a record of that army officer marrying a widow in Cincinnati a little while after Ft. Washington was built. No record of how the widowing happened, though.

My hometown is Hingham, MA. It's about 23 miles south of Boston. Some interesting facts:

-Founded in 1635, and has the oldest continuously used house of worship in the United States (Old Ship Church)

-The town once had a HUGE ammunition depot that was in operation from 1903-1961. Munitions were manufactured there for both World Wars. The ruins now occupy two state parks (Wompatuck Park and Bare Cove Park). As a kid, we used to go to both of them and ride bikes through all the paths and roads. Many of the storage bunkers have been torn down, but some still exist. It's still fun to go through there by bike.

-Speaking of military manufacturing, Hingham Shipyard was built as a wartime shipbuilding facility in 1941-42. They built Destroyer Escorts, High Speed Transports, LST's and landing craft for coastal invasions. The main building there was HUGE and cool. There were many outlying buildings there for various manufacturing as well, one of which was repurposed into a rehearsal studio for my old band. They tore everything down in 2006 to build a yuppie outdoor mall and town houses.

The town's current purpose is perpetuating the yuppie lifestyle. So sad.

Missed this the first time around. My adopted hometown is probably best known for a notorious witch trial in the late 1600's (spoiler alert: she floated).

More recently, we got a stoplight.

A local family had a movie made about them. A Gift of Love: The Daniel Huffman Story

http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0207492/

jrw1621 wrote: Speaking of river's, the Maumee River in my birthplace of Toledo is the largest single contributing river to the Great Lakes. More water flows down the Maumee River and into the Great Lakes than any other tributary.

An almost bloodless conflict between Ohio and the Michigan Territory, called the Toledo War (1835–1836), was "fought" over a narrow strip of land from the Indiana border to Lake Erie, now containing the city and the suburbs of Sylvania and Oregon. The strip—which varied between five and eight miles (13 km) in width—was claimed by the state of Ohio and the Michigan Territory due to conflicting legislation concerning the location of the Ohio-Michigan state line. Militias from both states were sent but never engaged. The only casualty of the conflict was a Michigan deputy sheriff—stabbed in the leg with a pen knife by Two Stickney during the arrest of his elder brother, One Stickney—and the loss of two horses, two pigs and a few chickens stolen from an Ohio farm by lost members of the Michigan militia. In the end, the state of Ohio was awarded the land after the state of Michigan was given a larger portion of the Upper Peninsula in exchange. Stickney Avenue in Toledo is named for One and Two Stickney.

Lots of weirdos from Toledo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_from_Toledo,_Ohio

John Denver wrote a song about Toledo that's super accurate. Kenny Rogers and YES also wrote songs about/inspired by Toledo.

Tony Packo's is delicious, but only on the East side. Speaking of the east side, the city of Toledo fairly recently finished construction the I-280 bridge, which is big, fancy, and pretty, but leads to a giant toilet.

I80 and I75 intersect in Toledo.

For some odd reason, they still build Jeep here. My middle-school counselor(and best friend's step-dad) wrote a highly inspirational song about why Toledo loves it's Jeep's. Google "Eddie Boggs- Keep Jeep in Toledo." You'll probably cry because it's so touchingly beautiful. He also has a stupid clean '90 Miata he's been trying to pawn off on me for years.

My mother knows EVERYONE in Toledo. Seriously. I can't walk into a place without being recognized.

Our mayor is a biker and likes to get E36 M3faced wasted with my dad.

I think we have more trees per square foot than any other city on earth? Something along those lines.

We make more glass than anyone else.

Champion and a ton of other companies used to be headquarted here.

We're also the most depressed/hateful people in America.

Toledo has frog statues everywhere.

We have a pretty bad ass zoo.

The Toledo Mud Hens are one of minor league baseball's oldest teams in continuous operation, having first played in 1896.

My personal odd fact of Toledo.
From Kindergarten through College I lived in the same house.
I walked to all of the schools. Never rode a school bus.

Toledo's definitely an odd city. I like it here though.

Columbia SC has the distinction of being one of the first planned capital cities in the country. Some plantation owner donated the land and later remarked that he had ruined a damn fine plantation to create a damn poor town. The legacy of this is the main streets downtown are wide (~150 feet), giving drunk legislators and lawyers plenty of staggering room.

From a brief history of Columbia: The commissioners comprised the local government until 1797 when a Commission of Streets and Markets was created by the General Assembly. Three main issues occupied most of their time: public drunkenness, gambling and poor sanitation. Sad to say, these are still the three main industries here. The drunkeness and gambling could and still can be directly linked to the General Assembly.

Sherman burned the place in 1865, doing several million dollars worth of improvements.

Doolittle's Raiders trained here for their famous one way raid of Japan early in WWII. Some say they should have concentrated the bombing closer to home to finish what Sherman started.

Lake Murray was built in the 1920's and 1930's, at the time it was the largest man made lake in the US. As is typical of the region in everything, it was quickly surpassed and is now #28.

Scranton PA was the first in the country to use an electric trolley system.

My Dad's home town of Liberal, MO. Apparently at one point, they built a barb wire fence to attempt to keep the Christians out of town.

From the December 1, 1938 edition of the Sikeston (Missouri) Herald (via wikipedia):

The founder of this unique community experiment, George H. Walser, was born in Indiana in 1834. He went to Barton county immediately after the war, where he was soon recognized as one of the best lawyers in southwest Missouri. He was elected prosecuting attorney there, and became a member of the 25th assembly. With an eye for future developments he purchased 2,000 acres (8 km2) of land and selected the site of Liberal as the home of an experiment in intellectual community living. He was an agnostic and placed himself in open opposition to organized religion. "With one foot upon the neck of priestcraft and the other upon the rock of truth," he declared, "we have thrown our banner to the breeze and challenge the world to produce a better cause for the devotion of man than that of a grand, noble and perfect humanity." In harmony with the purpose for organizing the town a number of unusual institutions designed to promote the ideal community were tried during the 1880s and 1890s. The first of these was a Sunday Morning Instruction School, where children were taught from "Youth Liberal Guide" and from various works on physics, chemistry, and other sciences. In another class organized for older young people elementary experiments in the physical sciences were performed under the supervision of teachers whose avowed function was to encourage and direct free intelligent discussion. In the Mental Liberty Hall lectures were given each Sunday evening, and scientists, philosophers, socialists, atheists, Protestant ministers and Catholic priests were invited to speak—respectable decorum being the only limitation placed upon any speaker. Large enthusiastic crowds gathered each week in the interest of mental liberty. The Liberal Normal School and Business Institute was another institution organized by Walser to promote liberal education free from the bias of Christian theology. This school was well advertised and soon had a large enrollment. According to a tract published in 1885, the Liberal Normal School and Business Institute was "located in the liberal town, taught by liberal teachers and courted only the patronage of liberal patrons." Out of this organization developed Free Thought University, which opened in 1886 with a staff of seven teachers.

I'm from San Diego. We invented great weather.