The Medina Fire That Wasn't

Many people are aware of the two large fires that devastated Medina, one in 1848 and one in 1870.

The 1870 fire in particular is well documented in newspaper articles of the time, and in subsequent history books. In the 1970's, a University of Akron student, Edward Kilbane, wrote his thesis paper on them. And they were a topic for a Medina Bicentennial talk by assistant Fire Chief  Mark Crumley earlier this month. Gazette  article HERE.

The first edition after the fire is dated 27 May 1870.
The above headline was top and center on the front page.

The Medina Gazette's offices were at the corner of Washington and Court street and were among the burnt buildings. It took them over a month to get up and printing again.



The site Everything Medina site has a picture from the Medina County Historical Society of the 1870 fire:

Photo from the Medina County Historical Society.

But if you go to the Cleveland Memory Project and search for Medina Fire, two of the five results are to photos of the Medina Fire That Wasn't.

This is the first of two photos that are attributed to the Fire of 1870.
Caption reads "Business people and citizens of Medina, Ohio watch as Firefighters attempt to put out
the blaze in the historical buildings of Medina County Square, Ohio."

This picture is taken from a slightly different angle.  Its caption reads "After the disastrous fire of 1848, Medina again
 "rose from the ashes" like the mythical phoenix in 1870 after another fire that wiped out the historical business district. Given the massive reconstruction required, Medina is considered to provide one 
of the most complete examples of late 19th century architecture in the state of Ohio"

Notice how the second two pictures look nothing like the one from the Historical Society. Most of downtown Medina was destroyed in the 1870 fire, not just one building. Also, notice the "electrical" poles and hanging light in the two pictures. Look at the clothes on the people. See the bowler hat, the caps, the large flowered hats of the ladies?  All of these clues point to a later time period than 1870.

And that is because these pictures are NOT from the 1870 fire in Medina.

They are from another devastating fire that occurred in Seville in 1910.

Medina Gazette  9 Dec 1910, page 1.

The photo is quite dark in the above headline clipping. So I lightened it to get more of the detail:

Compare the roof line in the Cleveland Memory photos with the newspaper photo. Identical, right?
Even the rubble where the building walls used to be and the scorched sign on the half wall match up with the photos.

So how did such a mix-up occur? Simple human error.

And I have to confess, I played a MAJOR role in the confusion. And this is my attempt to fix it.

A few years ago a couple of graduate students were working on a digitization project towards their Masters in Library Science. They were working with the Medina Library's small collection of photographs. They came to me with the two photos and asked if they were pictures of the 1870 fire. And I said that it was the only fire I was aware of.

MISTAKE #1 - I should NEVER have assumed that Medina County only had one (or two) disastrous fires.

MISTAKE #2 - I should have researched it better at the time. Because these students were in post graduate school, I felt they were capable of doing the research to verify.

MISTAKE #3 - They took my word for the photo identification.

 A few years went by and I started noticing that details in the picture didn't match the time period. I reached out to trusted experts in Medina County History - Joann G. King and Tom Hilberg. Both have been curators at the Medina County Historical Society Museum and past presidents of the Society. Both came back with the same answer. That the pictures in the Library's collection were most likely of a Seville fire. That information gave me a place to start. Browsing through Lee Cavin's book, A Book About Seville, Ohio 1816-1966, I found this photo of the Walker Block before the fire:

A Book about Seville, 1816-1966 by Lee Cavin, page 63.
Follow up newspaper articles detail how Pharmacy owner, Frank Saal  was fatally burned in the fire.

Parts of the roof line and the surrounding buildings were a match to the photos. With the information from Cavin's book, the newspaper articles were easy to find and confirmed Joann's & Tom's identification.

UGH!! I had made several horrible mistakes and now it all was immortalized on the Cleveland Memory Project web site.

I reached out to the then head of the project and explained the foul up. He said that he couldn't just change it on my word. The original people who had digitized and uploaded the photos needed to log in and change it. Unfortunately, the person who knew the sign in information has left the area.

MISTAKE #4 - No way to make corrections to a history site???

I will submit this information to the Cleveland Memory Project again. Perhaps it isn't too late to correct this fiasco.


"To err is human..." - Alexander Pope

UPDATE:

William Burrow of the Cleveland Memory Project worked with me to correct the mislabeling of the the Seville fire photos on that website. The updated information can be viewed HERE.


SOURCES:
A Book About Seville 1816-1966 by Lee Cavin
Everything Medina: The 1870 Fire: a Phoenix Rises from the Ashes
History of Medina County and Ohio 
Images of America Medina by Gloria Brown
"Lightening (sic) Strikes Twice" by Edward Kilbane, University of Akron, circa 1974.
Medina County Coming of Age 1810-1900 by Joann G. King.