My guest is local author Tedd Long. We discuss his new book, The Toledo Papers, a fascinating compendium of letters and ephemera stretching back 200 years offering a never-before-seen glimpse into the past.
Staying in Contact with London Mitchell
Guest: Tedd Long, The Toledo Papers
Let's take a few minutes away from the music to discuss issues affecting the quality of life in our communities and introduce individuals working to address those issues and who are helping us to understand our heritage. Staying in contact, I'm London Mitchell. What if it was possible for you to read letters dating back to a hundred years, it might give you a whole new perspective on our history? Well, that's what local author Ted Long has done. He has researched such letters, and there is a lot more drama in all these letters than you might expect. For example, the Toledo police chief's warning that "Pretty Boy Floyd Was Still Amalous." The book is titled "The Toledo Papers," published by the University of Toledo Press. Ted Long is my guest for this episode. He has written several books around Toledo history and even developed the unholy Toledo tour that you can self-navigate on the internet. Before we talked about the Toledo Papers, I asked Ted what triggered his fascination for the history of the greater Toledo area. You know, I wish I knew growing up as a kid I was always interested in history. My mom was also in the history, and as I got older, we should share history books, nonfiction books. I think more than anything else, Toledo just has so much character. As I started to pick up local history books about Toledo, I was just fascinated by the military history that took place here, the industrial history, the labor history, political history. It's got a little bit of everything. I grew up in Mansfield, but I've been here 35 years, and I kind of considered it my fully adopted home. The more I learned about it, the more fascinated I became with the local history. But you don't consider yourself a historian, rather, I think I've heard you refer to yourself as a storyteller. Yes, you know, that's important to me. I mean, I know a number of true historians who went on to get a PhD and did the work that's required to be considered a historian. And so rather than kind of insult what they've done, I really look at myself more as a storyteller. Yes, I love to do the research, and I do the research myself. I kind of consider myself a curator too, in some sense, because oftentimes, with a lot of history. You're using material that somebody else actually developed, and you're just kind of curating it for the storytelling or presentation or whatever it might be that you're doing. But somebody else did a lot of the legwork. You're just kind of piecing it together. So this new book that you have really does piece together a lot of information, a lot of personal stories about Toledo. Yeah, it does. And it really came about through some friendships that I've developed over the years. I was on the board of the Toledo History Museum a handful of years ago and met Mark Snyder and through Mark, a couple of other people who are just incredibly talented collectors. And I say talented because they find all this stuff, and I don't know how they find it and buy it at such a great bargain price. But Mark's collection is phenomenal. Peach Mitt, also a good friend, is a big collector. And the more I looked at what they were collecting, I was really interested in the private letters. Mark, for example, collects a lot of letterhead. And I think the letterhead's cool, very artistic, a lot of history. But then what I get into is what's on the letter. It might even just be a bill of sale. And what's the backstory? And so I just decided to take the letters, the ephemera, and just one by one, dig in and find out the backstory. Now we have these letters that were written by people who were actually living the Toledo story. I ask you to give us a peek without giving away the entire book, but give us a peek into what some of these stories tell us. Yeah. I'd love to talk about it. It was a passion for almost a year of spending a lot of time on the internet and a lot of time down at Main Library. The first letter was one of the ones that I find most interesting. It was written in June 25th of 1805 from Fort Industry. So this is before there's a Toledo, before there's a Port Lawrence Service Jula. And it's basically written by a gentleman from Connecticut to another person in Connecticut. And it allowed me to take a really deep dive into the whole story of the Western Reserve and the firelands, because these people were at Fort Industry for the signing of the Treaty of Fort Industry, which opened up the firelands, Erie, Huron County, that area for settlement. And I got into this just wild story about the speculation that was going on, the money that was made, the money that was lost, all from this brief letter in which the letter writer is basically saying, you know, we got here and we're excited about what's going to happen next. You must have been enthralled by so many of these stories. Yeah, and I have bits and pieces of some of the stories in my head from previous research and frankly, you know, lectures I've attended or stories I've heard. And then when you see, you know, the physical items that really drive it all and then you you know, do the research, it was, for me, I say, I'm a history storyteller, I also tell, I'm a history geek. So you know, I was just, I was, I was where I want to be, just, you know, soaking it all in. I'm going to put you in the corner here. What have you learned about Toledo today from all the research you've done about Toledo yesterday? You know, the one thing I will say, and this is not a knock on Toledo at all, but I just, one thing I've always kind of wondered is why Toledo didn't really step beyond where it's at, and I think, you know, we had a chance when you go back, look at it historically, you know, we were in a good position to be the Chicago or the Midwest in terms of grain and shipping on the Great Lakes. I think things move too fast and kind of pass this by and then we tried to really focus on the industrial side. But the one thing that's always been there in my back of my mind, and there's a chapter in the book about this, is just how politics and people get in the way of Toledo becoming something bigger and better. I mean, I see it today in certain ways where you think there's going to be some progress and then somehow some politician or somebody gets involved and then it gets twisted around and oftentimes it just gets left in the wind and people walk away because it becomes kind of a monstrosity compared to what it originally was supposed to be. Does that make sense to you? You lived here. How do, what are your thoughts? You know, it, it really does a couple of thoughts, Ted. Toledo politically, you would say, is very liberal in politics, but when it comes to actually investing in Toledo, we're very conservative and, and I'm thinking about the downtown mall, the downtown, walking mall, tried and got rid of. And yet other towns, the size of Toledo, have very successful walking areas downtown that actually bring people here or to their downtowns. Yeah. In fact, I think our people will tell you that our walking mall was the model, the success of several others. Yeah. I have a chapter in the book about the greatest event that never happened in Toledo. And that was basically a world's fair that was going to happen here in 1904. And it was going to be the Ohio Centennial celebration. And then it became bigger than that. It became the Northwest, you know, ordinance anniversary celebration. And they were going to spend millions of dollars. They started dredging the area around Bayview Park maps were drawn, buildings were blueprinted. And then the greed came in and it just, the whole thing blew up in Toledo's face and the state of Ohio said, sorry, and they ended up spending 10 grand and had a very quiet event in Cholacothe. I never heard of that before. Yeah. It's amazing. The, I'm a big fan of John Gunkle, the founder of the newsboys and what eventually became the Boys and Girls Club. And you know, I've done a lot of different things with him, his story. And I stumbled onto this. There's actually a old street car map that showed what the venue was going to look like and it had all the buildings laid out. One of the buildings was a giant bass with its mouth open and the people would walk into the mouth and into this giant bass where they would have a fisheries exhibit for the Great Lakes. And I come to find out it was designed by John Gunkle, who was a big fisherman. All that's covered in the book and I've got those pictures in the book as well. They're actually, some of them are pretty hilarious where they went. They just, they went over the top and you can just see how people, you know, the old cartoons were at the dollar signs or in their eyes, you know, and they ended up, they basically, they talked to federal government into putting up a million dollars in the state of Ohio, I think got up to about a half million and the people in the city of Toledo went back down to Columbus and said, look, you either give us a million bucks or we're not going to do this. And the state of Ohio said, I guess you're done. Well, a lot of people who have grown up here who are native Toledo ones don't really think a lot of Toledo, but we really have a lot to offer, not just today, but in our heritage. Oh, absolutely. And I've said this before, when we moved here, we were pretty disappointed actually. The more local people we talked to about, you know, we're excited. We just moved here from Chicago. What does Toledo have to offer? There's nothing to do. You should have stayed in Chicago. There's, you know, and the people who actually told us more about what, what was happening were transplants like us and they're like, oh, you're going to love it here, particularly people who knew what Chicago was like, they're like, hey, you can get anywhere in 20 minutes. They got a great symphony, great opera, good restaurants, you know, all the things you need that you'd have in a big city, plus you've got, you know, a great place to raise a family. Yeah, I do believe so. And as you, as you know, I spent over 30 years working in the social service system within Lucas County. And I think one of the things that we don't talk about when we market Toledo is how strong the community is in the way of social services, whether it's developmental disabilities or mental health or children's services. We do add to that quality of life and as the story often not told. Oh, totally agree. In fact, you know, we were just talking before we started here that I did a tour of Woodlawn a week ago on we called it Wine Women and Song and we covered the lives of four women who are interned at Woodlawn and one of whom was a seacore who actually was one of the founders of the Toledo Day School. And there's a great story people don't know that talks about that social aspect. That's I guess the oldest daycare facility in Ohio and the sixth oldest in the United States and it was founded originally in a bar on Adam Street. And it was a group of people who said, you know, these immigrant children, it's not fair that their parents are, you know, having to go to work and leave them at home. And so they started this, this operation where the kids got a bath, you know, a meal and then the parents could come back after they worked their shift and pay the nickel, you know, to cover the cost. And that started in Toledo, you know, think about, you know, the people who stood up to make that happen. I think it's a great story. People we run out of time, I have to ask you how people can get in touch with you or find out about your books, your blog, your tours that you give talks. Sure. Well, the best place is holytoledohistory.com and that's where you'll find all the information. And if you're interested in the new book, which is called The Toledo Papers, that's published by University of Toledo Press. We just opened up a couple of new tours, we just did a two-part walking tour series of Bowling Green, downtown Bowling Green, those are fun. And I'm just finishing the warehouse district, which will be added to the two other architectural, downtown architectural tours. And then my biggest, I guess, assignment that I have right now is I'm working on finishing up a tour of the Fallen Timbers battlefield. Little storyteller, Ted Long, the new book is called The Toledo Papers and we just had late word from Ted, the book is now available on Amazon. I'm really looking forward to getting this book out and go on the circuit and talk to people about it. Ted's website is holytoledohistory.com. I'm London Mitchell, inviting you to send me some email through my webpage, LondonMitchell.news. And please, join us next week, staying in contact. Previous episodes of staying in contact with London Mitchell are available on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Podcasts, Podbean, the Suite 419 app, and LondonMitchell.news.