Having left the Toledo area, our next stop was to find a tower of beetles. The automotive kind. The Tower of Beetles is located on the lot of a pawn shop in Defiance, Ohio.
After the tower, the next checkpoint was the Museum of Postal History, in Delphos. Closed at the time, unfortunately.
Who would have thought the world’s first automobile accident would happen in a small town in Ohio? Ohio City, not far from the Indiana border, commemorates the location of the 1891 crash where the driver hit a tree root and crashed into a hitching post. As cars did not move very fast back then, there were no injuries. The driver was John Lambert, who developed one of the first automobile companies and held hundreds of automobile and gasoline engine patents. Lambert (the company) was voted one of the best in America in 1905, but was overtaken quickly by Ford when the Model T was introduced.
Following that checkpoint, we continued to the next–the Deep Cut of the Miami and Erie Canal. The canal stretched from Toledo to Cincinnati, but the 6,600 foot long Deep Cut was constructed by cutting as deep as 52 feet into a hard blue clay ridge. The site is now a national historic landmark, and multi-use trails are located along the parkway.
After all these stops for trains, automobiles and watercraft, who would have guessed space ships?? If you know your NASA history, you would know that the first dude to leave footprints on the moon, Neil Armstrong, boasted Wapakoneta, Ohio as his hometown, and the Armstrong Air & Space Museum is located right off of I-75. While we didn’t have time to visit the actual museum, the grounds outside the building feature numerous craft operated by NASA.
Next up? “Phoebe Ann Mosey’s famed rifle (kind of).” This sent us over to a monument out on a narrow road adjacent to a farmer’s field in Yorkshire. The (sort of) famed rifle is in the rear left corner of the monument. Mosey, of course, was better known as Annie Oakley, a sharpshooter and entertainer who traveled in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.
From here, we departed for Piqua, home of the long-defunct Piqua Milling Company, a grain mill famous for their White Foam Flour, located along the banks of the Miami River. Piqua also became well known for milling linseed oil back in the day.
I found a historic photo of Main St. in Piqua taken in 1912, showing a smaller building which Piqua Milling Company used for grain storage (left). It was part of a collection of survey photos for the railway through town.
The last checkpoint of the day involved two modes of transportation and, if you’re up on your aviation history, you would recognize the Wright Brothers who owned a bicycle shop in addition to tinkering around with enough aircraft designs until one of them was capable of flight. Our task was to find the bicycle shop, which is part of the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park, operated by the National Park Service.
The “Find It” task for the day was one that I missed. The objective was to find the blue Ohio-shaped markers along the rivers which indicated the water level of the Great Flood of 1913, which today remains as Ohio’s largest weather disaster and deadliest natural disaster, as well as being Indiana’s worst flood on record. The flood occurred between March 23 and 26, with 8-11 inches of rain falling on some parts of the Miami River watershed which submerged downtown Dayton under 10 feet of water. Other states beside Ohio felt the devastating effects of the storm system, and the flooding eventually spread to 20 states.
While I missed the blue markers, I did stop downtown in Dayton at Van Cleve Park, where four concrete monuments show the level of the 1913 flood (the “stripe” midway on the monument).
With the checkpoints done for the day, our end-of-day meetup was at the Packard Museum.
The museum is set up inside like a Packard dealership back in the 1930s. On display are dozens of restored Packards, from all eras of production.
I had close ties to Packard, as my grandfather worked at the Packard plant (pictured in Part 1) for over 25 years; I am the keeper of his anniversary pocket watch.
Our growing congregation turned a few heads that evening…
I stayed up at a Holiday Inn Express in Beavercreek, and found a Mexican restaurant not far from the hotel that was still open at a late hour–Don Patron Mexican Bar & Grill. I fueled up (myself, and the car) and headed back to the hotel to plot the next day’s checkpoints.