[PRCo] Marietta, Ohio local service

[Fred Schneider]

Regarding car 30 and its siblings in Marietta, Ohio ....
This was one of those curious small town systems which perhaps should never have been built and lasted longer than it probably should have.   It's longevity was probably similar to West Penn Railways in that we cannot get rid of it because too many people connect it with the power company and we might be evil if we did away with it even it the sucker is losing money hand over fist.     

Marietta is a city which has had a remarkably stable population for more than a century.  In 1900 there were 13,348 people enumerated in the census.   It peaked at 16,861 in 1970 and there are still 14,085 in 2010.  Why?  I suspect that the presence of Marietta College has a lot to do with it.   For those who do not understand, the U. S. Census Bureau counts college students at school if the school is in session on April 1st of the census year.   (I have seen some crazy swings in small town numbers if spring break happened hit during the census.)   Today the college has 1417 full-time students ... that's about 10% of the city population.   

(By the way, for those unfamiliar ... there are other anomalies such as this that you need to understand in evaluating populations.   Think of other institutional populations.   Let's use Centre County, Pennsylvania as an example of a county with huge institutional populations.   The 2010 census showed 153,990 people.   Of those, 44,817 were full-time students at Penn State.   Another 256 were confined to the Centre County Correctional Facility.   And about 2,100 more were locked up in the Rockville facility of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.   That leave 40% of the population actually potentially in the labor force ... and we can reduce it even farther by the time we take out the old people and those in hospitals.) 

Did the college contribute materially to the trolley riders?   Probably not because it was south of 5th and Putnam back in that era; today it encompasses a big chunk of the area bounded by 4th, Putnam, 7th and Greene Sts.   It was only a few blocks from downtown.   The theaters were on Putnam between 3rd and 2nd.   Downtown for a college kid was within walking distance.

What industries that existed were in the northeast along the Pennsylvania Railroad and up the Muskingum along the B&O.   There used to be a chair factory on 7th many years ago (without a rail siding) but it has long since become a part of the college.   

That residential loop up to Montgomery also served all the industries in the northeast.   It also served the poorer neighborhoods along the Ohio River northeast of downtown ... the Hart Street area.    I suspect it was busy briefly in the mornings to take the workers out to the northeast, and again in the afternoons to bring them home.   

The photo that Herb attached of 30 was taken across from the carbarn on Greene Street at Warner.   All of those houses are still there.   This link shows all the houses in that picture.   

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=greene+and+warner+sts.,+marietta,+ohio&hl=en&ll=39.417712,-81.429548&spn=0.010145,0.018754&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=42.445866,76.816406&vpsrc=0&hnear=Greene+St+%26+Warner+St,+Marietta,+Washington,+Ohio+45750&t=h&z=16&layer=c&cbll=39.418699,-81.430847&panoid=N84KzV90ueqMZR4D3ke-uw&cbp=12,312.01,,0,-1.65

No damn it.   I'm not a know it all.   My father grew up in the area just outside the 3rd, Montgomery, 5th, Putnam trolley loop.   My grandparent's home was 612 Washington St., two doors south down from Washington and 7th.   I walked all over Marietta as a teenager.   

I can share some of the stories from my father....

1)   If you went downtown to shop on Friday night, you didn't waste money on the trolley.   You walked.   Trolley fares were expensive.   You reserved that for the return trip when your laden down with packages and the kids were tired, ready for bed and rutchy.   Think about that.   If inflation is roughly equal to moving the decimal one place every 50 years, then going downtown with two kids and a wife .... four nickels each way ... why that's four $5 bills each way today.   Would you spend that if you were a working man?  NOT ON YOUR LIFE.   Every part of the residential part of that city served by the trolley was no more than a mile from downtown ....  you really want to spend that kind of money to drive downtown to shop?   Pittsburgh when its three or four miles, Yeah.   Small town, No.   OK ... I hear you.   Two of the kids may be under the fare paying age and riding free.   Still, are you going to pay $20 in today's money to save walking a mile into town and a mile back if you are working in a non-union job in a factory?   My granddad was a cabinet maker in a furniture factory ... that was the guy who fixed the defects.   If there was a dining room table with a bad leg, he made the new leg and fixed it so the table could be shipped.   He worked until age 75 because he needed the money.    

So it was a marginal operation because it was in a small town where you could easily walk anywhere ... three cars and a spare older car for the West Marietta line and the dog-bone loop.   It is similar in scope to Warren, Columbia, Titusville, West Chester, Hanover, Lewistown, Huntingdon, Monessen, Meadville .... all those little towns that quit running in the 20s and 30s.      

And it (and those like it) probably served only those people who absolutely could not walk.   So by the time we had a few automobiles, it was gone. 

The last cars ran in 1934 in Marietta.

2)   By the way, the interurban north to Beverly quit five years earlier in 1929.

3)   You did not cross the Ohio River in the "olden days" without paying to do it.   The bridges were all toll bridges.   Or you paid to use a ferry.   In the 1940s and 1950s there were bridges at Wheeling, then a ferry Sistersville, a bridge at St. Marys (which was identical to the one at Point Pleasant which collapsed in the 1960s and which torn down after its pattern collapsed), a bridge at Marietta, a bridge a Parkersburg, a bridge a Point Pleasant and so forth.   The tolls tended to isolate one state from another.   My father remembered that Williamstown, WV and Marietta, OH were two separate and very distinct communities that existed totally independent of one another.   You didn't cross the river to shop because you had to pay to toll to drive across or even walk across until sometime in the 1940s or early 1950s.   Today?   Well I-77 crosses north of Marietta.   A new free highway bridge has been built on the piers of the old bridge between downtown Marietta and the village of Williamstown.   North of Marietta on Ohio route 7 is a lower grade shopping center ... the kid that has WalMart of KMart and Krogers or some food store and some chain drug store ... you get the idea.   And the big mall for the region today is south of half way between Marietta and downtown Parkersburg on the West Virginia side of the river.   And downtown Marietta is dead.

(The only bridge I can think of that is still toll on the upper Ohio River is the one at East Liverbile ... and if you ask for a receipt our used commuter tickets, the still read Newell Bridge and Railway Company.         

4)  If my grandmother went to visit her brother, who lived down in Pomery, she would take the B&O from Williamstown to Parkersburg and Mason, WVa.   Then her brother would row the boat across the Ohio River and meet her and then take her back to his farm in the wagon.     My grandparents in Marietta only briefly had an automobile.   That was back when you didn't need a drivers license.   Grandpa gave up driving when he accidentally removed someone's porch with his Franklin and had to spend the summer rebuilding their home.   Until he died in 1960 he depended on either Marietta Bus Lines, friends or the Shoe Leather Express.  

5)  Did it ever occur to you that perhaps medicine has advanced too much?   That maybe we keep people living too long?   I've had those discussions with a high school buddy who is a doctor (no it isn't Rich Allman).   Well here's a great one.   Marietta, Ohio did not have a hospital when my dad was a kid.   Marietta Memorial Hospital was established in 1929.   That was the year my father moved to Cleveland to work in the steel mill between his sophomore and junior years in college.   So if you needed surgery before 1929, how did you do it?   Well, when my dad was a lad he had his appendix removed .... IN THE DOCTORS OFFICE.   That was probably about the time of World War I.    They did have anesthesia then.   The doctor knocked the kid out with chloroform.   Then he handed the chloroform soaked rag to my grandpa and said, "If he moves, put it back over his nose quickly."   Well, he survived.   I'm here to talk about it.   I had mine removed in Bellevue Hospital (suburban Pittsburgh) in 1953 and got a two week extension of my Easter school vacation.   Now days it's day surgery and home the same day!  

6)   If you have the CERA book on West Penn Traction, you will notice a lot of pictures credited to S. Durward Hoag.   Durward didn't take them.   He was a collector.   A local historian.   He was a stringer for the Marietta Times who wrote the bygone memories column for the newspaper for many years.   I think his entire collection might be in the Marietta College today.   I know that when Harry Fischer, who owned a local photo studio, sold the place, Hoag was instrumental in getting all the steam boat pictures that Fischer had taken moved to the college library.

7)   I wish I could remember her name.   Ohio used to have a system where all the school kids had to buy their own text books.  My father worked as a school kid in a store in Marietta which sold text books to the high school and college kids.   Dad once told me ... and I wish I remembered the details ... a tale about how he managed to get Durward Hoag's sister, who worked in the same store,  caught in a waste basket ... butt into it ... in such a way that the poor lass was unable to get out without help.  One of the joys of small towns is everyone knows everyone.   

Thanks guys for posting the item on that single truck car.