This real photo postcard captures a crowd listening to Ohio Governor Andrew Harris give a speech in Centerburg in October of 1908. The photographer also inadvertently caught what would a year later become a crime scene. Credit: Image courtesy of the Memories of Knox County Facebook group.

History Knox

Mark Sebastian Jordan authors a column each Saturday reflecting on the history of the community.

CENTERBURG — This peculiar postcard photo captures a common moment during a political campaign stop in Centerburg in 1908, but does so in a manner unlike any I’ve seen before.

At first glance, the photo offered little insight to exactly where this took place in town.

Such talks were often delivered from the back of a train, so that the candidate could hit as many towns as possible in one day.

But the tight focus of this shot only shows enough space behind the small crowd to suggest that the background is part of one of Centerburg’s streets, with a shop building in the background, and a residential house.

One of Centerburg’s two railroad stations is still standing, south of Ohio 3 on the western edge of town. But it doesn’t look like the spot where the governor spoke. (Image source: Google Maps.)

There were two railroads passing through the area at this time, and they crossed just north of the current location of the Dollar General store on Ohio 3, west of town. Google Maps shows the old Toledo & Ohio Railroad station just south of the highway, across from the retail store.

Is it possible that the Governor’s train stopped here, either on its way to or from Columbus?

It’s hard to say for sure, because any residential structures that were around this spot have yielded to commercial buildings over the years.

The Toledo & Ohio Railroad station was located on the western edge of Centerburg. (Image source: 1896 Knox County Atlas.)

The Cleveland, Akron & Columbus Railroad had a station between the grain elevator and that railroad, which is now the Heart of Ohio Trail. But the surviving houses around there don’t seem to match anything in the photograph, either.

It was at this point that I ditched the idea of a whistle-stop campaign and instead used Google Maps to roam around town, looking for the house with the distinctive upstairs window.

The Cleveland, Akron & Columbus Railroad had a station on the north side of Centerburg, but it also fails to match the speech locale. (Image source: Kent State University.)

I finally found it. Just off Centerburg’s public square, on South Clayton Street, is a house that matches what is visible in the postcard. A tree now blocks part of the house, but the distinctive window is still there, and the layout of the house and porch are the same.

Right next to it is a two-story commercial building, but its façade is very different from the one in the photo.

If the building is the same, but just with a different modern façade, we can refer to Kent State University’s archive of Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps for further information. These maps, however, tell a more complicated story.

The same spot as the original postcard photo can be found on South Clayton Street, on the southeast corner of the square. (Image source: Google Maps.)

Insurance maps were done for the town in 1900 and 1909.

In 1900, town hall was much smaller than later, with a small jail lockup building just to the south of it.

After Cherry Alley, there was an agricultural implements store, then a vacant lot where the house should be, then the intersection with Washington Street.

The 1909 map shows an expanded town hall, incorporating the town fire station, the telephone exchange, and an opera house performance area on the second floor.

Where the agricultural implements store was is a box labeled ‘ruined by fire.’ The house with the circular window is now there, on the corner of Clayton and Washington, as it is today.

Sanborn Fire Insurance maps from 1909 show the house (marked in blue) and the building (circled in red), but the building is marked as being ‘ruined by fire.’ (Image source: Kent State University, with author’s additions.)

That rang a bell — ‘ruined by fire’ — so I dug into my previous History Knox columns and found the saga of the Foster Gang, which plagued Centerburg in the early 1900s.

A large circle of thieves who covered their tracks with arson, the Fosters and their henchmen wreaked havoc in the town, but got away with it for over a decade thanks to the magic of corruption.

Right there in the column, I note that the C. L. Bowers Implement Store was burned down on Dec. 11, 1909.

An earlier Sanborn map shows that the building in the picture was a farm implement store. The 1908 location of the governor’s stand in marked with a red star, the photographer’s point of view with a blue arrow, and the future location of the house with a blue pentagon. (Image source: Kent State University, with author’s additions.)

It turns out that this postcard catches the corner of the original farm implements store a little over a year before it was burned down by the arsonists. (At least, I’m assuming that the photographer meant to write “1908” instead of “198.” Keep in mind that photographers had to write on photographic plates to get them to turn out the right way in the image, so mistakes like these were common.)

Zooming in on the most recent Google Maps image, one can read the decorative stone at the top of the building, which, sure enough, says: “C. L. Bowers.” Though gutted by fire, the building survived and was rebuilt inside, and remains in use today.

So, the house with the distinctive circular window was built between 1901 and 1907, and is seen here in the 1908 postcard when it was relatively new.

A closer look at the capstone on the building proves that it is the same building as the C.L. Bowers agricultural implements store which burned down in 1909. (Image source: Google Maps.)

The stand for the governor to speak was put up in the southeast corner of the square, and this picture appears to show just the corner of the stand, with its striped bunting.

Is anyone aware of a companion postcard which actually shows the governor speaking? It’s unusual for a photographer of this period to focus more on the crowd than the speaker.

And just who was this governor who couldn’t even hold the photographer’s attention? His name was Andrew L. Harris, and he served as Ohio’s governor from 1906 to 1909.

He was originally installed as lieutenant governor in 1905 in a split election, where the Democratic candidate, John Pattinson, was elected governor, but Harris, a Republican, got more votes than the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor.

This likely happened because Harris was widely known to Ohioans, for he served as lieutenant governor for two terms under William McKinley in the early 1890s. Due to this unusual party split, the governorship changed from Democrat to Republican when Pattinson unexpectedly died in 1906, and Harris became governor.

He was re-elected late that year (as the office only lasted two years in those days), but his 1908 run was unsuccessful.

Though generally well-regarded for such actions as driving for a new law that prevented corporations from making political donations, he was also friendly to the temperance movement, which saw a concerted effort by pro-alcohol advocates to defeat him in 1908, which they did.

Though Harris was distinguished, and had an honored background as a Civil War veteran, he was unable to overcome the opposition forces, and retired from politics after leaving office.

Andrew Harris served as Ohio’s governor from 1906 to 1909 before narrowly losing reelection. (Image source: Columbus Metropolitan Library.)

I found a larger version of the photo of Harris that can be seen hanging from the bunting at the edge of the stage. At least he appeared to be commanding the attention of most of the hat-wearing crowd, for only a child in a parked buggy seems to have looked over to see what the photographer was doing.

Can anyone confirm the objects on the sidewalk? I presume, since we’re outside a farm implements store, that these are animal food troughs someone has just purchased, and they put them down on the sidewalk in order to listen to the governor’s speech.

Many thanks to the original poster on the Memories of Knox County social media page, who shared this image of an interesting moment in the fall of 1908 with us.