In the late 1800s, when Ohio was feeding the nation’s woolen mills as well as the lamb-loving population of the eastern seaboard, King David reigned over an empire of sheep. He needed a public relations campaign, however, for opponents painted him as ornery, remarkable, arrogant, stubborn—and a mysterious Mason. He was known as the only man who refused to take off his hat while visiting Benjamin Harrison’s White House, where the dinner table possibly included a serving of his mutton; a windbag who claimed to own an entire county in Texas; and a businessman who enjoyed telling people about his town—the appropriately named Harpster in Wyandot County.
Opponents also claimed King David Harpster was looking out for the rich. But the one thing they could never say was that he was meek. The pioneer political lobbyist was Ohio’s wealthiest sheep farmer—and one of America’s. He knew practically everyone in politics and agriculture, from U.S. senators to county commissioners, and he wasn’t afraid to share his opinions on tariffs and how to protect America’s jobs. One of the late-nineteenth century’s more influential lobbyists, he never failed to influence someone with logic and a handshake. He was the voice, soothsayer, and force behind the American wool industry.
In Harpster’s day, Ohio was the nation’s sheep state. Wool was an important commodity because so many things were made from it—baseball uniforms, military uniforms, carpets, dresses, trousers, sweaters, blankets, horse blankets, hats, pennants, coats, and even bathing suits and sometimes underwear. During wool’s heyday in America, David Harpster thrived, and so did his small town.
David Harpster as he appeared in the 1880s. (Courtesy Wyandot County Historical Society)
When national and local newspapers referred to him as “the Wool King,” they weren’t always complimentary. Often they were hostile opponents of the country’s controversial wool tariff, which Harpster protected like a sheepdog guarding his flock. One can imagine him thundering to fellow sheep farmers at their 1888 convention: “The wool-growing industry … cannot exist in the United States to any considerable extent in open unrestricted competition with wool production in Australia, South America, and some other countries.”
His views came from observation. For decades, wool growing had been a poor occupation. Competition from imported British wool prompted a depression in the wool industry, which began in the East in 1826 and continued for years. When the American Civil War began in 1861, however, business flourished, as wool was used to produce military uniforms, socks, and blankets. When the war ended in 1865, Ohio had more sheep than people—8.6 million. More sheep lived in Harrison County per square mile than in any other place in the world. After the war, though, farmers and wool speculators lost money as the demand for their product diminished, and as they also competed with a healthy supply of cotton from the South and fine wool from the West and New South Wales. In 1867, when the price of wool decreased from $1 to forty cents per pound, wool growers and manufacturers called for government protection, and Congress responded by passing the Wool Tariff Act. But the damage had been done: as a result, Ohio’s sheep population would fall from 7,688,845 in 1868 to 4,928,635 in 1870.
The tariff helped stop a disaster. As Harpster would say in 1888, “Under this wise legislation, both industries prospered, and the cost of clothing for all the people was reduced in price. The numbers of American sheep largely increased, the wool product grew vastly in amount.” He added that farmers raised more sheep and that production of wool and related goods increased, giving jobs to “multitudes of men, women, and children” in factories, on farms, and in buying, selling, and shipping.
In the twenty-first century, wool doesn’t sound too exciting, but in the 1800s it was a controversial and heated subject. The wool tariff was both celebrated and reviled, depending on one’s perspective. Tariffs of all kinds were on most people’s minds because they either protected or damaged livelihoods. Tariffs had contributed to the animosity that started the Civil War; because of tariff disagreements, South Carolina had considered seceding decades before 1861. In general, southerners, mostly agrarians, wanted low tariffs or none at all, and the industrial North, particularly New England, wanted protection for its factories. Unfortunately, when one industry received tariff protection, another often suffered when a trading partner retaliated by imposing a new tariff or increasing rates on an existing one.
Harpster, who was not afraid to speak out in favor of any tariff, became known in politics as the man who championed protectionism. He didn’t mind criticizing the president, Congress, or anyone else who stood in his way of earning a fortune and saving the worker. “The ball has been set in motion, the line of battle has been formed, and we will fight it out on that line until victory crowns our efforts,” he told the 1888 convention.
David Harpster wasn’t born rich, but he always worked hard, and he knew business. His parents, George and Catharine Thomas Harpster, were of German American ancestry from Muffin County, Pennsylvania, where David was born on December 28, 1816. His grandfather had served in the Revolutionary War.
When George Harpster died, David was only eight. Two years later, his mother moved the family to Wayne County, in northeast Ohio. There, the family was so poor that young David could attend school for only fifteen months before quitting to work on a farm with his brother. Despite his youth and lack of education, David was smart. In 1828, at age twelve, he came to a small town named Bowsherville in Wyandot County to accept a clerk’s job in Bowsher & Green’s store. The community of Bowsherville was born of potent drink. Founder Anthony Bowsher knew the law prohibited anyone from selling liquor on the Indian reservation that occupied most of Wyandot County, so he opened a saloon next to the reservation and sold drinks to Indians and anyone else who could pay. A town grew around the saloon, including Bowsher & Green’s general store, a hotel, a dry goods shop, a pottery, a hattery, and a racetrack, which attracted more drinkers. David did not appreciate Bowsherville’s reputation, and he, like everyone else in town, was aware of its description in old newspapers as “the most ungodly place in the world.” Perhaps in response, parishoners of the town’s only church removed the building from its foundation, picked it up, and carted off to nearby Pleasant Grove.
After three years of hard work in the store, at just fifteen, Harpster became a partner. In 1836, he sold his interest in the business and began raising cattle with partners Thomas Hughes and James Murdock. From 1838 to 1840, he drove cattle to Detroit, and then he joined new partner David Miller in raising cattle in Illinois and driving them to the East.
Harpster earned his money the hard way—with back and brain. He also did it against all odds of economics and common sense, especially when he became a wool man.
A small part of Ohio’s sheep industry—called mutton raising—continued to make money, despite what most people, who favored beef and chicken, thought of the meat. Butchers had been selling mutton for years by calling it “venison ham,” to make it more more appetizing to customers, who believed mutton was a tough meat.
But wool was soft, warm, and necessary, and it had definite insulating advantages over its major competitor, cotton. So wool was bound to come back, and Harpster knew it. Although the early 1850s seemed a poor time to jump into the sheep business, David Harpster took a giant leap and brought other entrepreneurs along. If the business turned sour again, of course, he could simply buy more cattle and use his grazing land for that endeavor. He was always thinking ahead, gauging the political temperatures.
In the mid-1850s, Harpster bought land one half mile north of tiny Fowler City, in Wyandot County, and started a sheep farm. Over the next few years, he bought an additional 3,100 acres—a large farm, even by today’s standards—in Wyandot County’s Pitt Township, 1,300 acres in that county’s Mifflin Township, another 4,000 elsewhere in Ohio, 240 acres in Iowa, 600 acres in Nebraska, and 2,240 acres in Illinois. And he planned to buy more.
At the same time as he progressed professionally, Harpster focused on his personal life as well. On April 6, 1847, he married Rachel S. Hall, whose father, James Hall, had been a soldier in the War of 1812 and a settler in Pickaway County. The couple had three children: Sarah; Ivy; and another child, who died young. During his marriage, Harpster spent many nights driving cattle. He worked with Miller for six years and then continued on his own for a few more. Then he started spending more time raising sheep. He began shearing nine hundred a year, and he increased that number annually until the early 1880s, when he was clipping as many as eighty-two hundred sheep in a single year on his Wyandot farm.
The nearby town was named for C. R. Fowler, a local landowner, but that name didn’t last long. David Harpster partnered with John Wood, who owned most of the town’s land; they started building houses, and they renamed the community Harpster. The Wool King cofounded the Harpster Bank with John L. Lewis, opened a general store with Cyrus Sears, and started other businesses too. He sold lots and occupied himself with the community, when he wasn’t worrying about wool. Locally, he became a very influential citizen. Nationally, he was known as a self-made millionaire who influenced politicians, started new firms, and charmed or chagrined everyone with whom he did business.
When Harpster’s wealthiest citizen heard rumors that the railroad planned to come through Wyandot County, he offered the Columbus, Hocking Valley & Toledo Railroad Company a free three-and-a-half-mile easement through his farm—plus an annual wool clip. “It was a hefty bribe considering that [his] wool production … averaged about 40,000 pounds a year, enough to fill six rail cars,” writer Gene Logsdon—a Harpster resident—wrote in Ohio magazine in 1991. “The bribe was extolled as public-spirited generosity, and, of course, accepted.” The offer probably wasn’t worth the railroad’s time, but its executives reconsidered when the King, just to be safe, bought $10,000 of the firm’s stock. (Ultimately, he received $23,000 for his efforts—a fortune in those days.) Today such an offer would be considered bribery and more, but back then, to Harpster and other wealthy business people, it was just plain good sense.
The railroad’s arrival in Harpster doomed old Bowsherville, where young David had first started out. The town had no rail connection, and the community had already been slipping, because of intense commercial competition from Harpster and Little Sandusky, which local people referred to simply as “Little.” By 1880, Bowsherville would no longer appear on the county map, a fact that would please Mr. Harpster and others ashamed of its liquor-fueled bad behavior; and by 1900 the town would disappear into a dark corner of history.
When Rachel died in 1867, Harpster stayed sane by focusing on increasing his land holdings and raising sheep. Work was his salvation. Ten years later, he married Jane Maxwell, whose grandfather had edited the first newspaper published in Cincinnati. Twenty-six years younger than Harpster, she was described as “a refined and accomplished lady, and a member of the Baptist Missionary Church.” He didn’t mind a little Baptist fire: he was a Methodist temperance man, and proud of it.
Just when everything seemed to be going well, the sheep industry’s recent financial success began to reverse itself. The decline could be traced to one infamous day—March 3, 1883, when Congress reduced the tariff on wool and on woolen and worsted goods. One year later, at the Ohio Wool Growers’ convention, Harpster could say, “The results have been disastrous.” Farmers cut back on their flocks. Wool imports, including carpet wool, increased significantly. So King David went into action, battling Democrats, free traders, malcontents, the uninformed, the unenlightened, rogue Republicans, and anyone else who stood between him and profit. He wanted workers and farmers protected from cheaper foreign competition.
The 1884 History of Wyandot County described David Harpster as “a strong Republican without political aspirations.” Although he was never interested being a political candidate, he enjoyed entering politics as a combatant. If Congress hadn’t tinkered with the tariff, Harpster might have remained an obscure figure in American politics, but as it was, he spoke his mind.
In truth, Harpster had political aspirations aplenty for himself and the Ohio Wool Growers’ Association. In 1884 he had just been elected president of the group, and he wanted to expand its influence throughout the nation. It didn’t take long. Soon more newspapers around the country were referring to him as the Wool King of America, and Democrats were attacking him personally for supporting tariffs. He didn’t mind; he wanted to give sheep farmers and wool manufacturers a strong voice far beyond the borders of Ohio.
In the 1880s and 1890s, Republicans generally supported tariffs, and Democrats did not. One lifelong Democrat, John Stalter, of Cowley County, Kansas, for example, changed his registration to Republican in 1884 because he was a sheep farmer who wanted protection. “What difference is it to a farmer if the clothes for his family under protection cost him $25 a year more when he gets $100 to $1,000 more for the products of his farm [as a result of a tariff]?” Stalter told the Winfield (Kansas) Courier. “I am in favor of protecting American labor, American factories, American farmers, and American stockmen against unreasonable and degrading foreign competition, and as the Democratic party is not, I am henceforth a Republican.”
Harpster supported such determined men as Stalter, a former Ohioan who changed parties the same year Harpster succeeded Columbus Delano as president of the Ohio Wool Growers’ Association and turned it into a national lobbying group. Stalter was a mini Harpster, the top sheep man in his township, having nine hundred head as early as 1875. He maintained in his 1884 Wool Growers’ speech that “every wool grower in the United States is convinced that a further reduction of the tariff on woolen goods and wool would destroy the domestic sheep business.”
His prediction was halfway correct.
In Logan in 1891, the Ohio Democrat rebuked Harpster and two important wool-growing lawyers who often worked with him to influence national policy on tariffs. The other two men are all but forgotten now, but were then highly influential—Columbus Delano, of Mt. Vernon, and William Lawrence, of Bellefontaine. Both had strong connections with nearly anyone who counted in Washington, D.C., where Delano had served twice in the Congress, later as the Internal Revenue commissioner, and finally as President Grant’s secretary of the Interior. Lawrence, who led the National Committee of Wool Growers, had once been a congressman and had helped create the Justice Department and the American Red Cross. He also had been the comptroller of the Treasury Department. So the lawyers were loaded with contacts, and the three took turns as president of the Ohio Wool Growers’ Association during the 1880s and 1890s.
Delano and Lawrence were big-time sheep men too, so they were interested in tariff protection, thus allying themselves with David Harpster made sense. And their political prominence could not compete with Harpster’s savvy when it came to politicking. Delano, in particular, had been receiving newspaper criticism for years; in 1875, for instance, the New York Tribune called him “a man who from time of his entry into politics thirty years ago has been followed by constant suspicion; a man who by some sad circumstance, or else by some innate perversity of character, has always and everywhere been suspected of taking care of himself and his family and friends at the expense of the public.” Of course, Delano said such attacks were inevitable with politics. But he might have been especially disliked by an Indiana judge who once struck him on the head with a walking stick over a personal dispute in Washington.
When the three wise men of Ohio went to the capital to speak with legislators about strengthening all kinds of tariffs, the opposition mocked them as “the lobbyists,” “the third House,” and “the wool trinity.” The Ohio Democrat continued in 1891:
We earnestly advise David and William and Columbus to order Congress during the last few weeks of its existence as a Republican combine to enact a law fixing fifty cents a pound as the price of domestic unwashed wool and requiring the woolen manufacturers, or somebody, it doesn’t matter who, to buy at that figure all the wool that David Harpster and William Lawrence and Columbus Delano offer them.
A good while ago, during the Dark Ages, an English King who wanted to help the Delanos, Lawrences and Harpsters of his day decreed that the dead should be buried only in woolen shrouds. Something of this kind might help the three Shepherd Kings of Ohio until something adequate could be provided. If they would settle their claims against the country for pensions of, say, $100,000 each annually, it would be economical to buy them off.
The story was reprinted in other papers, which started a round of new rumors. People started repeating them as if they were headlines: “Dead to be buried in wool, Harpster decrees! Wool to be used for everything, Harpster says!” It was as though David Harpster really was the king of wool.
Harpster’s rise as the wool industry’s national spokesman came slowly. He served as president of the Ohio Wool Growers’ Association for about ten years, being reelected annually as the planner for farmers who earned their living from sheep.
Before Congress changed the wool tariff, Harpster seemed pleased with the state of the industry. But afterward, the Wool King became livid. “No portion of the people familiar with American interests asked for or desired any changes,” he told members of the Ohio Wool Growers’ Association in Columbus on January 24, 1888. “The Ohio senators and representatives in Congress neither asked for or desired any change in the law which secured these beneficial results. Every loyal heart was animated with just pride that our people had reason to believe that they would soon cease to be dependent on foreign capital, enterprise or skill, for any kind or amount of wool or woolen or worsted goods.”
Harpster argued that what was good for American farmers and workers should be good enough for politicians. This viewpoint made him something of a populist, for he wanted Americans protected from foreign workers. But not every sheep farmer agreed with him. At a meeting of the Ohio Wool Growers’ Association in Columbus on September 5, 1889, D. E. Williams of Licking County stood and opposed the group’s plan to ask Congress for more tariff protection, saying the price of wool would go up if the product didn’t have a tariff. It was like David standing up to Goliath and losing. Expressing such “arrogance” before the lock-step group took nerve, and it resulted in some name-calling. By then the association had become so important that the New York Times reported on its session. “He was opposed by many members,” the newspaper said of Williams, “and the discussion grew personal. David Harpster, the wool king of Wyandot County, finally denominated Mr. Williams, who is a young wool grower and a Democrat, as a ‘smart aleck.’ The address was adopted with but one dissenting vote—that of Mr. Williams.” The newspaper headlined the story, “A ‘Calamity Howl’ from Columbus.”
By the time Harpster visited the White House in September 1890, he was unhappy about what he perceived as a lack of tariff support. He did not remove his hat. No one knows why, but it is likely that he just didn’t believe the president took wool seriously enough. The issue became another anti-Harpster story for the newspapers; after all, civil Victorians had strict rules of etiquette about when a man should remove his hat—always inside a building, and always at the dinner table, during the singing of the national anthem, and at other times when a man should show respect. So when Harpster, an invited guest, failed to remove his hat at the White House, opponents claimed he was insulting President Benjamin Harrison as well as anyone in his presence.
During the previous presidential election, Republican Harrison had campaigned on a tariff protection platform, but after taking office he compromised on the McKinley Tariff Law of 1890 by making reciprocal trade deals with America’s top trading partners. Ohioan William McKinley, then a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and a Republican expert on protective tariffs, had deliberately set certain tariff costs too high to ensure that corresponding foreign goods would not enter the country, thus protecting American workers in that field. As a result, the tariff would boost both production and consumption of those goods. So perhaps Harpster was sending a message to the president. “The President’s assumption that the wool tariff is for the exclusive benefit of ‘those who have sheep to sheer’ is unsupported by fact or reason,” he said. “In his anxiety to inaugurate a system of legislation ‘necessary for the benefit of foreigners,’ he may have the distinction of finding one that benefits no American system.”
The Wool King asserted that a new wool tariff would benefit all workers in the long run. “All the foreign wool-growers—our rivals—our commercial enemies—desire a repeal of the tariff,” he said. “They do not desire it for our benefit but for theirs. It is safe for us to ascertain what our rivals want, and then see that they do not secure it. The President consults our enemies and proposes to do what they ask. We consult our friends—the American people—and propose to do what their interests require.”
The Democrat newspapers responded with all their firepower. In the fall of 1890, Frank G. Carpenter wrote in the New York World: “The question of a wool tariff has brought one of the most remarkable farmers in the United States to Washington. This is David Harpster of northern Ohio. He has thousands of sheep on the Western Reserve and is one of the millionaire sheep-raisers of the country. He has large estates scattered over other parts of the Union, but does not look as if he were worth a dollar.”
When Carpenter began describing Harpster for his New York readers, several city-country stereotypes and prejudices of the era came to mind. “He is about five feet, four inches high, is as broad as he is long, and he has a round, cannon ball head, pasted down upon a pair of broad, fat shoulders,” Carpenter wrote.
His roly-poly form is clad in rough goods that might have been put together by his wife, and a big derby that comes well down towards his ears and shades his fat, florid face.
Harpster is a great friend of [Ohio’s U.S.] Senator John Sherman. He was sitting the other day in Senator Sherman’s committee room when John B. Alley, ex-Congressman … came in. Alley is a millionaire. He is proud of his riches and he, I am told, is a little inclined to pose. When he entered Senator Sherman’s room Mr. Sherman introduced him to Dave Harpster, saying: “Mr. Alley, I want to make you acquainted with one of our representative farmers, Mr. Harpster.”
“Ah, indeed,” replied Alley as he shook hands. “You are a farmer, are you? I am always glad to meet farmers for I am something of a farmer myself. I have a farm in Texas consisting of 40,000 acres.”
“You have,” muttered Harpster, “and where is it?”
“It is in such a county,” Alley said, naming the county, “in the central part of Texas.”
“Indeed,” replied Mr. Harpster, “it must be good land, for I own the whole county next to it.”
This surprised Alley and took the wind out of his sails, but his actions showed that his respect for David Harpster, the Ohio farmer, had perceptibly risen.
David Harpster had indeed risen, and he had the power and influence to show for it. He owned a $15,000 mansion one-half mile north of Harpster. The house was his refuge, and it represented his financial and business successes. There he hosted fancy parties, celebrations, and weddings. The townspeople called the place the House of David. In today’s prices, the house would cost at least $5 or $6 million, if a contractor could even find the skilled labor to build such a place.
Meanwhile, as Little Sandusky and Harpster grew, their rivalry became a battle over two methods of transportation—Harpster’s railroad and Little’s old highway for stagecoaches. Little was a formidable competitor: it had a lawyer, a blacksmith, a doctor, and numerous business people, as well as a church and a school. When the automobile arrived in the early 1900s, Little also benefited: its saloons kept the town busy. Everyone knew you couldn’t get a drink in Harpster because The Man discouraged drinking and attached liquor restrictions to deeds when he built and sold houses to families.
“Little Sandusky was a buzzing town with a real going church served by circuit riders,” said Harpster resident Fern Erickson, who was eighty-seven when interviewed in 1995. “But the town also had seven taverns. Eventually, the place deteriorated. I believe it was because of all those bars. Because Mr. Harpster didn’t appreciate liquor, our town wouldn’t allow it to be sold. The town council passed a law prohibiting it. Things stayed that way here for years. Mr. Harpster eventually outsmarted Little Sandusky by giving the railroad a way through his land. He even promised to build a hotel for railroad workers to stay in. Little Sandusky wanted the railroad badly. Many people over there have hated our town ever since. Even when we tried to merge the towns’ two churches a few years ago, they refused to cooperate.”
The good David Harpster was, in fact, the major force in his town until his death in 1898. More than any other Ohioan in this book, he was connected to the land and to his community. The land was his livelihood; the town was his namesake. He worried about the community more than himself. But he worried most about his wool.
Today, his personal empire of wool is gone, lost in a sea of polyester and high-tech fabrics, of international trade and few American tariffs. Yet his town still exists, preserving his name and memory in a time when most people have forgotten him.
The town is all that matters now.
On the state map, a thin red line identified as State Route 294 connects a black dot marked Harpster to U.S. 23 and the world. The lines and dots have changed over the years, but Harpster’s green landscape has always carried a pleasing symmetry: generation upon generation, field upon field, accented by a few white houses and brick buildings. In the middle of it all sits a grain elevator, its silos looking like five silver missiles.
By the first decade of the twenty-first century, however, Harpster had become just another small town fighting to stay alive. The echo of David Harpster’s name had long faded from the marble halls of Washington, D.C., and even from the Statehouse in Columbus. From 1876 to 1985, the Harpster General Store operated on a strategic corner in the center of a cluster of buildings that made up the town’s core. The finest business building in town, once owned by David Harpster himself, has housed an antiques shop and other merchants since the early 1990s.
The town still bears the Wool King’s name, though these days wool is not associated with the place. Some people still call Harpster a kingmaker, and maybe he was. The town’s condition reflects his standing in state history: hanging by a thread—though a woolen one, perhaps. The town was his other vision, his home, and his life. Now, it’s a farming community of 204 residents who live fifty-five miles north of Columbus. It is also a village in transition. The elementary school is closed, as are most of the businesses. The village does, however, feature something unusual: the Hickory Grove Country Club and eighteen-hole golf course, set in the middle of cornfields. David Harpster would probably appreciate this bold entrepreneurial gamble, for he built what was once called the world’s largest slatted corncrib, a mansion, a railroad depot, a grist mill, a bank, a store, and his own world.
Harpster is not yet a dying town, although there are warning signs. Harpster represents rural America’s past, present, and future, but especially its present—drowsy, uneasy, expectant. Here, the threats of big farms and school consolidations are just beginning to affect life, and the more general issue of America’s bigger-is-better mentally is not yet welcome. This attitude is not without irony, for Harpster’s wealthy founder grew richer in part on the concept of the big farm. And so it goes on. Modern Harpster is a town on the verge of something, people agree, although nobody knows exactly what. Some believe the town will grow slightly; others say it will remain the same; still others predict it’s headed for extinction.
On its streets, David Harpster’s presence remains, a subliminal image. Some people mention Harpster so frequently that a stranger might think he only recently died. But most don’t know anything about him. He is a ghost of Ohio politics and agriculture. “There isn’t nearly as much talk of him as one may think, given that the town bears his name,” said Roberta “Robbi” Sigler, a Wyandot County extension agent who grew up in Harpster. “There is more talk of the Sears family and J. L. Lewis, who had a later economic impact on the community. Anecdotally, I can tell you there isn’t as much sheep farming in Harpster or Wyandot County as there was even twenty years ago. When I was a 4-Her, there were maybe thirty-some kids involved with the sheep program. Now [in 2013], there are only sixteen. The proliferation of sheep raising is not what it once was.”
Not much is left of the town’s economic structure. A bank still operates—the Commercial Savings Bank branch, and the Pitt Township Volunteer Fire Department building, and a pizza place. In September 2013, the brick building that once housed the Harpster Bank burned, killing three people who lived in apartments upstairs. County officials want to obtain a state grant to demolish what’s left of the burned-out shell.
Because of big changes in farming, the people of Harpster are concerned about the future. They are right to worry, for Harpster’s problems are the problems of American agriculture. All across the country, when small farmers retire or lose their land, they displace the communities around them. Economists estimate that for every farmer who goes out of business, the nearest town loses a worker and a store. Big farms get larger, small towns get smaller, and more farmers leave for city jobs.
Columbus and Franklin County are markedly different from Harpster and Wyandot County. Wyandot has fewer people than some Columbus suburbs. “In 1870,” Sigler said, “there were twenty-two thousand people in our county. Today, there are twenty-two thousand people in our county. But the number is configured differently in other places.” Being flat in some parts, Wyandot also looks like a small version of the Great Plains, except the soil is more fertile. In summer and autumn, when the fields around Pitt Township are full of corn, soybeans, and wheat, strong winds blow inconsistently hot and humid while big combines rummage around eighteen farms that surround the town.
Like most of rural America, Wyandot County has watched its farms decrease in number and increase in size since the Great Depression days. In 1935, the county had 2,509 farms, with an average size of 130 acres, according to the Ohio Cooperative Extension Service. In 1990, the number of farms had dropped to 770 and the average size was 296 acres. In a critical period of the mid-1990s, when small towns were dying across the country, Wyandot County agricultural extension agent Rick Grove said,
Some people call that decline, but others call it progress. I guess it all depends on your perspective. What we’re dealing with is a matter of consolidation—the free enterprise system at work. By getting bigger, farms can become more effective, presumably. If a farmer has enough money to—pardon the word—plow back into his business by buying more land, who’s to say he’s wrong? You could argue that his action is harmful to small towns because it takes more people out of farming. On the other hand, you could argue that some people ought not to be farming anyway. They should liquidate and get out of the business before they lose everything. It’s all in the perspective. But consolidation is happening, and happening big.
The Wool King might have enjoyed this, for he was a megafarm owner before there were megafarms, and he was a certified free-market Republican. Yet he never realized that his own policies would one day affect his town.
In 2008, local freelance writer Gene Logsdon depicted life in Harpster in a novel called The Last of the Husbandmen. He changed the town’s name to Gowler and based an important character, Emmett Gowler, on David Harpster. The village, “just a little spot in the road today, was a very thriving and very wealthy village,” Logsdon told writer Celeste Baumgartner. His book shows the major changes in farming and rural life in the early twentieth century, and how the town was affected.
Even today, some things in town are the same as when the King lived here. The village’s streets are Cherokee, Oneida, and Shawnee. Their names come from history: In the first half of the nineteenth century, most of Wyandot County was an Indian reservation—until 1843, when farmers wanted the land and the Native Americans were removed to Kansas. Since then, the ghost towns of Wyandot County have served as dark reminders to any community foolish enough to think it will last forever: Bowsherville, which opened saloons near the Indian reservation and grew until the Indians left; Brownstown, Pleasant Grove, Scot Town, Wyandot, and other farm towns that lost their economic and cultural bases and died slowly. All are gone now. Since the 1990s, Little Sandusky, to the east, has declined, and Harpster has sat alone. Its prospects for survival change day to day, depending on the whims of business and commerce.
Harpster’s streets sparkle with neatly painted houses built a century ago. Their yards are mowed, trimmed, and planted with flowers. On the east side of town lies the Harpster United Methodist Church and the bank, once the two most important institutions in the community, and both influenced heavily by David Harpster. The bank is now a branch of a bank in Upper Sandusky.
In the 1990s, postmaster Cecil W. Dennis watched people grow up and grow old. He was accepted in the community, some people say, because he treated it as he would his own hometown, although he lived in a neighboring village and originally came from Cincinnati. When the oldest tree in Harpster blew down in a storm, he saved a piece of it to carve a clock for Fern Erickson, the town matriarch. He gladly volunteered in emergencies. And when the school board threatened to close the local school in 1989, he spoke out against the move. “Used to be,” he said in 1996, “people would bring their kids to school and do their banking. Now, the school’s closed and they can’t even get a loan in the bank. It’s just a branch. The larger percent of young people don’t want to live in this town anymore. When the school board was ready to close the Harpster school, I went to the board meeting and chewed out the superintendent. I said, ‘You’ve got a gun in your hand. Pull the trigger and you’ll kill Harpster.’ He pulled it anyway. Now, this town’s not progressing and it’s not dying. It’s standing still.”
Once, Harpster featured a tile factory; a carriage and wagon factory; slaughterhouses; a grocery store; stockyards; a post office; a doctor’s office; and the Harpster Bank, established in 1883 by David Harpster and businessman John L. Lewis. Lewis managed the bank for years and became the second most important person in town. His son, Charles Henrickson Lewis, followed him as president. He married Francis Sears, granddaughter of David Harpster and daughter of Sarah Harpster and Cyrus Sears, who received the Medal of Honor for defending the 11th Battery of Ohio Light Artillery after nearly all the cannoneers and horses had fallen during a Civil War battle in 1862. The Wool King’s other daughter, Ivy, married wealthy dry goods wholesaler William Bones, and soon they moved to his native New York City; Bones couldn’t stand small-town life. Sarah remained in Harpster with her well-respected husband.
Charles Lewis was one of Harpster’s important—and busy—citizens. He served on the village school board for twenty-five years and on the Wyandot County Board of Education for ten years, farmed a thousand acres, raised cattle, published the family’s Daily Union newspaper, and obtained more than seventy patents for devices that could treat polluted water. In 1924, he was elected Ohio’s lieutenant governor (in those days the governor and lieutenant governor were elected on separate tickets). He served one term of two years.
John Lewis and his wife took Fern Erickson into their home when she was orphaned in the 1920s. In the 1990s, she was the only person directly connecting the old village aristocracy—its royalty—to the town’s modern residents. She lived in Charles Lewis’s Victorian home, a tidy showplace, when she grew old. Her memory was sharp, and she remembered the village fondly, noting that David Harpster passed on his sense of community involvement to other important citizens who were younger. Through them, his influence remained for decades.
“John Lewis, or Mr. J.L., as I called him, was a witty, humorous, and scholarly man who graduated from Hillsdale College in Michigan in 1867,” she once recalled. “Early in his career, he owned and wrote for one of the newspapers in Upper Sandusky. He was a staunch Republican, and any time he wrote about people—if they were Republicans—he’d tell a lot about them and mention their party affiliation. If they were Democrats, though, he’d barely mention their names and never their party… .
“Oh, that Mr. J.L. was a character. When he wrote his column, ‘Fowler Fumes,’ he’d use the name Timothy Teedlepitcher or Rodney Rainbeau, just to be funny. At the breakfast table, he was always making jokes in front of his wife, whom I call Auntie Lewis. She’d finally get the point five minutes after he’d told a joke. So English, she was. Those were quite lovely times.”
Erickson grew up, married, and moved to Chicago with her husband. In retirement, they moved back to Harpster to live in the old Lewis mansion, just west of town. Although she liked Chicago, Erickson knew that Harpster offered her things a big city could not—an identifiable history, a personal past, a sense of place. “That’s why I stay,” she went on. “The town just wrapped itself around me. I love it. There have always been so many interesting people here, so much warmth. We wanted the town’s children to keep going to school here, of course, so they could set down their own roots, but the school board had other ideas. We have to live with its decision. I know some people think the town is doomed, but I don’t. Families have lived here for generations. They work hard. Harpster will always be here.”
The village continued to grow after the turn of the twentieth century. Farmers shipped their grain worldwide. When the hotel was torn down, new businesses popped up—a mechanic’s garage, a Ford dealership, a gasoline station. Harpster even had a little park with a reflecting pool, paid for by a wealthy benefactor.
“My mother,” Logsdon told the authors in a 1995 interview, “used to take me to the little Harpster Park. It was our Lake Erie beach. We couldn’t afford to go to the shore, but we could always go to Harpster. July 4 was Al Brendt’s night. He owned the general store, and on the Fourth he’d always have a colossal fireworks display in the park. In 1937, in the middle of agricultural country, that was a big deal. People used to jam into the park. In summer Al would also put on free outdoor movies. That was our theater. Hundreds of us kids would flock into town for the shows—my uncle Lawrence Rall hauled neighborhood kids in his pickup. The man who showed the movies had the projector set up on the back seat of a big Packard, and all he had to do was open the door and turn the thing on, aimed at the screen.”
By 1995, Harpster was suffering from what Logsdon called social consent. He wrote about it in a magazine article: “The murder weapon appears to be the piston engine, which, in the form of automobiles, carries the people away to the city in search of the money they have spent there, and, in the form of tractors, which melds little farms into big ones and sends the surplus farmers away, too.” He argued that Route 23 was “an accessory to the crime, taking traffic from the railroad, which was the reason Harpster existed in the first place.”
Some Pitt Township schools were closed in the 1950s and 1960s and consolidated into a new high school in Upper Sandusky. That caused a fight: rural people do not give up a school easily, nor do they often vote for school levies after consolidations. Without their high schools, Harpster and Eden, towns previously recognized for their outstanding students, became isolated physically and academically. Gradually, local people say, Harpster lost its identity, as teachers persuaded its young people to think of themselves as members of the more cosmopolitan Upper Sandusky School District, not a country-town school, and to think of a city education as better than a country one.
A small town like Harpster is fortunate to have a golf course and country club; it means the place is doing more than existing. The enterprise, founded by farmer Craig Bowman and his son Kyle, gave the town psychological pride. Craig, a fourth-generation Harpster resident, grew up on local farms in the 1940s. His grandfather was Colonel Cyrus Sears, the Wool King’s son-in-law. As a teenager, Bowman trained his pony to enter the general store without flinching. His friend Gene Logsdon had to go to the filling station in town to call his friends on the old crank telephone. Gene said the village operator, Fannie Day, gave callers the latest gossip. The town was busier then, Logsdon said, with people coming and going at the train depot and farmers coming into town to take their grain to the elevator.
These days, so little remains. But, at least for now, David Harpster’s town still is there.
When David Harpster died of complications from a stroke at age eighty-two on October 29, 1898, the wool industry mourned the loss of its champion. His family received telegraphed condolences from President William McKinley, major business figures across the nation, and other important politicians. They took him seriously, for Harpster was a serious fellow. For a half century, he had helped shape wool-related legislation. Sheep farmers across the country looked to him for guidance and advice, so did Republicans on every level. “He made his numerous friends through his pleasant business relations,” a newspaper in Upper Sandusky observed, perhaps a bit too kindly, upon his death.
The end of the Wool King’s empire came just before his death. His obituary explained it best, and bitterly: “The wool tariff act of 1890 was inadequate to make wool growing in Ohio sufficiently remunerative, and the Dingley Wool Tariff of 1897, much less protective, utterly unjust and insufficient, drove him to a considerable extent to change the use of his lands.” He returned to raising cattle, and he no longer made himself a public target. By this time he was simply David Harpster, frustrated Ohioan.
The newspapers, once his worst political enemies, generally wrote admiringly of him at his death. A paper in competing Upper Sandusky carried this headline: “CROSSED OVER.” The long story spoke highly of the man who knew senators, farmers, and congressmen.
He was the second of the Shepherd Kings to go. Columbus Delano had died first—on October 23, 1896, in his hometown of Mount Vernon. William Lawrence would die on May 8, 1899, in Kenton. On November 3, 1898, the newspaper in Upper Sandusky noted that Harpster’s funeral was “undoubtedly the largest ever held in this county. Arrangements were made with the Hocking Valley railroad, whereby their passenger trains were stopped at Harpster, thus enabling the hundreds of friends of the deceased to attend… . The services were of a very simple, unostentatious nature, very impressive.”
David Harpster is buried in Harpster’s Oak Hill Cemetery, under a large monument that still marks the grave of the Wool King and his holy cause, the controversial American tariff.
