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About Gordon
© By Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was born in Gordon, Ohio in 1934. Just over 69 years
ago Abe and 22 students from all eight grades posed for a school
picture with their teacher, Beatrice Brown. In August of 1994, “Abe”
noticed the date of his picture “1944” and wondered what had happened
to the kids from Gordon school over the last half century.
He spent a lot of time and money sending letters and making phone calls
to former Gordon school students and asking them to send him a picture
of themselves now and a brief story about their lives since they got
out of school. He also asked if they knew the whereabouts of any former
students and was able to get a lot more information about the kids he
had gone to school with. Many individuals cried when they learned that
he was going to make a book and call it, “Kids from Gordon,” and
send it to them as a kind of Christmas present.
Encouraged by the responses and still wondering what happened to other
kids fromGordon, he went on to search for anyone who had ever gone to
the little red brick schoolhouse west of Gordon.
Former students began sending pictures to him and among those was the
oldest student, Alma Barklow, who was then 104 years old. The youngest
students were all in their mid-fifties and nearly all sent him
photographs. In the end he had received 263 photographs and he was able
to use a lot of them in the book of 78 pages that he mailed out to each
former student as a Christmas present.
He became so enthusiastic about what he was doing that he began digging
for historical information about the town, the people and the
businesses located there. This led him to places like Garst Museum in
Greenville where he discovered an 1865 newspaper clipping how laborers
had sawed through a dead man’s head, “just above the eyes,” while
sawing up old logs. Nobody seemed to know who the stranger was who
happened to have $400.00 in his pockets. It is one of Gordon’s oldest
mysteries.
At the Recorder’s Office at the court house in Greenville, Abe found
the original survey of the plat of Gordon done by John Wharry in
October 1849. David Lair lad out the town that consisted of 27 lots,
two chains deep and one an one quarter chains across the front.” Main
Street, Centre Street and Perry Street were two chains wide while North
Street (which would become State Route 722) was only 50 links wide. Abe
also found actual plat maps that he used to locate all of the
businesses located in Gordon and usually the names of the business
owners.
He discovered that Gordon has two hotels, a restaurant and a saloon.
There were knife fights between drunks who sliced stomachs open and if
they could walk to the doctor he would sew them up while they waited.
Abe said, “We lived at a time when everyone had a skeleton key that
could unlock every door in town. Mother would invite hobos from the
railroad tracks to wash up in the yard using a basin of hot water and a
cake of lye soap and eat a bowl of hot soup.
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