Early Akron's Industrial Valley by Jack Gieck

Author:Jack Gieck
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Kent State University Press

A Valley Line steam locomotive in 1910. (CLPA Archives)

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Meanwhile, the downtown portion of the city adjacent to the industrial valley had grown substantially. By 1870 the population of Akron exceeded 10,000, and people were finding the time and money for entertainment. They could afford to have fun. It was the year that Dr. James Peterson built his Ice Palace at the bottom of the Market Street hill, near the bridge over the canal, by grading a shallow pool flooded by the canal, 161 feet long by 62 feet wide, letting nature take its course at what he called “the coldest place in Akron.” To light (and to glorify) his ice rink, Peterson surrounded it with five circles of gas burners, with twenty-five flaming torches in each circle. And on January 7, the night the Ice Palace opened, music was provided by Marple’s Band and Keating’s Orchestra. As the Summit County Beacon reported, “Some skaters danced the polka and the schottische [while others] skated gracefully over the flint-like ice as the men linked arm in arm with their favorite companions, laughing and singing.”

Two years earlier Julius Sumner had built the forty-eight-room Sumner House hotel on the southeast corner of Howard and Federal Streets (then called Tallmadge). In addition, as what he hoped would be a mark of gentrification, he built a single-story frame building with a small stage at one end. The bare wood floor was covered with folding chairs, which could be removed for dances. He had the hubris to call it the Sumner Opera House. But his Opera House was eclipsed in 1871 with the completion of the architecturally grand Academy of Music at Main and Market. Built of brick and sculptured stone, the lavish four-story theater opened with fanfare on Monday, June 12, with a production of Lady Audley’s Secret, a play that ran for two nights. It was followed on Wednesday evening by Leah the Forsaken, East Lynn on Thursday night, Hunchback on Friday, and, finishing out the week, Shakespeare’s Macbeth on Saturday. In reviewing the opening performance, the Akron City Times declared the Academy of Music was “the neatest and handsomest place of public amusement in the country.”

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Although the Ohio & Erie Canal continued to haul substantial freight, the Pennsylvania & Ohio encountered a direct onslaught by the Cleveland & Mahoning Railroad, which ran between Cleveland and Youngstown. It was in their Youngstown office that the railroad executives witnessed the hundreds of tons of iron ore arriving daily in the steel city by canal boat. Unable to compete with the economics of transporting eighty tons of ore by three mules in tandem when speed didn’t count, the railroad embarked on a plan to put the canal out of business and it began buying up P&O stock until it had acquired a controlling interest—after which, as the majority stockholder, the road insisted on boosting canal toll rates. The incessant rate hikes imposed by the railroad eventually dropped toll receipts on the canal from $8,790 in 1856 to

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