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UNDERSTANDING WOOD COUNTY

Winn Stein looked out his front door and saw a group of approximately twenty angry men armed with shotguns assembled on his property. Stein happened to be up and around after midnight on the morning of May 9, 1922, because he and his family were rousted out of bed by the sound of shotgun fire and breaking glass as the mob finished shooting out sixteen windows in the Stein residence.

The reason for the late-night attack was the fact that Stein and his family gave shelter to Otto P. Tracy, the former principal of the Walbridge elementary school who faced criminal charges of sexual activity with students at the school.³

Stein telephoned the county sheriff and then addressed the mob, asking their purpose for the violent “visit.” A spokesman for the armed vigilantes insisted that they “wanted Tracy delivered to them.” After informing the mob that the sheriff had been summoned, the armed men disappeared into the night.⁴

The vigilante attack underscored a feature of life in Wood County in the 1920s: citizens were prepared to take matters into their own hands if they believed that the legal system was not working as they thought it should.

While Wood County in the early twentieth century was hardly a lawless place akin to the Wild West, the limited law enforcement resources in the sparsely populated county meant that citizens sometimes took it on themselves to deliver what they perceived to be justice. Sometimes scores were settled using fists and guns instead of calling the police, and every once in a while, a dead body would turn up in the countryside about which few questions would be asked by authorities.

Unidentified men at Cygnet, Ohio, with weapons collection. Center for Archival Collections.

Most of Wood County was once covered by the Great Black Swamp, a 40- by 120-mile stretch of wetlands that seemed almost impenetrable to early colonists. Due to the pervasiveness of the Great Black Swamp, the first roads consisted of logs placed perpendicular to the flow of traffic, so-called corduroy roads. The presence of malaria-carrying mosquitoes also limited settlement and development, as the area was long noted for being an unhealthy region where travelers and new settlers might quickly succumb to what was known as “fever and ague” (the phrase refers to the alternating high fever and shaking chills associated with a malaria attack).

Settlement, growth and development of the county thus faced significant environmental hurdles that were not solved until the eventual draining of the Great Black Swamp in the second half of the nineteenth century. As the swamp began to be drained, fertile croplands opened up to farmers.

Wood County was among the administrative divisions created by the state of Ohio after a series of treaties with Native American groups who once lived in the region. The state legislature officially recognized Wood County on February 20, 1820. Wood County once stretched north to the border of the state of Michigan, but its northern boundaries were redrawn at the Maumee River when Lucas County was carved out of the northern half of Wood County in 1835.

A home in a swampy area, Wood County. Center for Archival Collections.

The Maumee River serves as a geographical boundary between Wood County and most of Lucas County to the north. To a lesser extent, the Maumee River has also emerged as something of a cultural boundary between the more urbanized Lucas County and the more rural Wood County. During the 1920s, connections across the Maumee were limited to a few bridges, rail lines and interurban rail lines.

Wood County even today is largely rural (with the exception of urban pockets in Bowling Green and the extreme northern cities of the county), and agriculture still plays an important role in the local economy in the twenty-first century. The Ohio Department of Agriculture estimated in 2012 that over 81 percent of the total acreage in the county consists of farmland being actively cultivated.⁵

Grains, soybeans, fruits and vegetables make up the vast majority of agricultural products in Wood County in the early twenty-first century. The county today ranks first among the eighty-eight counties in the state in soybean and wheat production and second in the state in corn production as measured in bushels.⁶ The total value of agriculture in Wood County in 2007 was over $125 million,⁷ and Wood County has long been one of the leading centers of agriculture in the state of Ohio.

In keeping with its agriculture-related tradition and culture, Wood County today is home to the National Tractor Pullers Association (NTPA) championship each year at the Wood County Fairgrounds. For the event, thousands of tractor-pull fans flock to Wood County, and the fairgrounds transform into “Pulltown.”

At the beginning of the twentieth century, agriculture was an even larger component of the county’s economy. The Farm Journal Rural Directory reported in 1916 that “91 percent of the area of the county is in its farms.” At that time, there were a total of 4,357 farms in the county, and around 60 percent of the farms in Wood County were “operated by their owners.” Corn was the leading agricultural product of the county at that time, followed by oats, wheat and potatoes.⁸

Wood County also once boasted flourishing petroleum and natural gas industries. The southern half of the county in particular was noted for the discovery of significant oil and gas wells in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Photograph of Hocking Valley train in front of an oil derrick, 1920. Center for Archival Collections.

By the beginning of the 1920s, however, the boom period for Wood County in energy extraction had started to wane, and production of these energy sources entered a period of significant decline. This contributed to a general feeling of economic uncertainty in the county, and many of the several thousand workers in the county’s oil and natural gas industries would eventually become unemployed or forced to find work in other industries.

DEMOGRAPHICS OF WOOD COUNTY

Slightly less than half of the total population of the county today can be found in two cities: Perrysburg and Bowling Green. There has been a gradual population shift in the county away from rural areas and into the larger cities. Bowling Green and Perrysburg represented only 18 percent of the county’s total population at the time of the census in 1920.

Bowling Green is the current county seat, and the two cities are located about 13 miles apart on Ohio’s State Route 25. Bowling Green in the twenty-first century still possesses more of a small town character, while also boasting the presence of a state university.

Meanwhile, Perrysburg features a significantly larger number of upscale neighborhoods and shopping centers, and the municipality is one of the major suburbs of the city of Toledo. Historically, the city of Perrysburg has also been consistently oriented more toward the Toledo metropolitan area than many of the other Wood County communities.

While Bowling Green and Perrysburg are friendly rivals today, the two cities were for a period of time somewhat bitter adversaries. This was especially the case during the period when the state of Ohio in 1868 moved the county seat from Perrysburg to Bowling Green.⁹ One account described the conflict over the location of the county seat as “intense” and that there was “bitter denunciation on both sides.”¹⁰

During the 1920s, the city of Bowling Green was about twice the size of Perrysburg in total population. This disparity was even greater when taking into account the roughly two thousand college students attending Bowling Green Normal College each year of the decade. (Today, this is Bowling Green State University.)¹¹ Until the census of 1940, guidelines for census-takers stipulated that the parental address, not the college address, was the residence where students should be documented by census workers.

The demographic and financial center of the southern end of the county is the village of North Baltimore, and around 3,400 people resided in the village as of the 2010 census. North Baltimore was once a boomtown with significant wealth during the oil boom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the eventual depletion of oil and natural gas reserves brought to a close the village’s brief flirtation with regional prominence.

While there has gradually emerged greater ethnic and racial diversity in Wood County over the past several decades, the county remains overwhelmingly white. The areas with the greatest demographic diversity are areas on and around the state university in Bowling Green, plus the northern Wood County cities of Perrysburg, Rossford and Northwood, which are as much suburbs of the city of Toledo as they are representative of the demographics of Wood County. The Census Bureau estimated for 2012 that over 93 percent of the county was white, with African Americans, Asian Americans and Latinos combining for a little more than 5 percent of the county’s population.¹²

During the 1920s, the county consisted almost exclusively of white residents. The 1920 census recorded only 248 African Americans in the county, along with 37 biracial residents (people who were described on the census forms as “mulatto”). Residents categorized as white thus constituted 99.37 percent of the population of Wood County.

Contemporary residents of Wood County were aware of the relative lack of racial and ethnic diversity in the area. The 1916 county directory proudly reported that “the farm population of Wood County is almost exclusively native-born white.” Moreover, noted the directory, there were “but few foreign, and only one negro farmer in the entire county.”¹³

The location of African American and biracial residents is of interest in the study of Klan activity in the county. Nearly 95 percent of persons of color who were residents of the county lived in its extreme northern areas (present-day Perrysburg, Rossford and Northwood). The remaining persons of color were mostly limited to a few dozen residents of the city of Bowling Green. Most of the smaller villages in Wood County during the 1920s were exclusively white.

Most of the residents of Wood County in the 1920s were at least second-generation Americans. During the nineteenth century, the vast majority of immigrants who settled in Wood County were native German speakers, and these immigrants principally arrived between 1840 and 1890.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though, there was a shift in the countries of origin of immigrants who arrived in Wood County. Most of the county continued to consist of native-born residents and a small number of German-speaking immigrants, but a few areas in northern Wood County began to attract large numbers of immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe.

TABLE 1

Wood County Demographic Statistics by Municipality and Census Racial Designation

The 1920 census indicated that there were about two thousand residents of Wood County who were foreign born, representing less than 5 percent of the total population. Many towns and villages attracted very few southern and Eastern European immigrants, but two areas in particular emerged as destinations for immigrants from these regions.

In 1920, the foreign-born population of Ross Township was nearly one-third of the township’s total population. The area’s manufacturing and commercial enterprises offered employment opportunities to unskilled and low-skilled workers, and immigrants from such countries as Hungary, Belgium, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Poland, Croatia and Russia flocked to Ross Township in search of work. Over 60 percent of the immigrants in Wood County in 1920 lived in Ross Township.

TABLE 2

Wood County Immigration Statistics by Municipality

Oil-drilling operations also served as magnets for the newer immigrant groups who settled in Wood County. This was especially true in towns that grew during Wood County’s short-lived oil boom, such as Cygnet. Working on oil rigs was grueling and dangerous work, and employers were somewhat less concerned with ethnicity in making hiring decisions than many other area employers.

The heavy concentration of immigrants in just a few areas seems to have contributed to the hardened attitudes of native-born Wood County residents toward immigration, as the relative visibility of immigrants increased with these concentrated pockets of immigrant life. The village of Rossford in particular became the major focal point for the anger exhibited by nativists against newly arrived immigrants.

The issue of the perception of Rossford as a hotbed of illegal activity and moral decay was the subject of a 1924 North Baltimore Times editorial. Many Wood County residents, according to the editorial, saw Rossford as “a rendezvous of crooks, bootleggers, and undesirable foreigners” that was a “good place to stay away from.” The negative perceptions about Rossford, the writer of the editorial claimed, were due to the “so-called ‘Rossford crime wave’ pictured by the Toledo and Bowling Green press.” Readers of the paper were exposed only to the “the booze raids, the cutting scrapes of the foreigners, and the burglaries” instead of positive Rossford news.¹⁴

With regard to religious affiliation, persons identifying with Protestant denominations are the largest segment of the population of Wood County in the twenty-first century. The percentage of Wood County residents who attend a Catholic church is approximately 17.5 percent, which is about average for the state of Ohio, but the Catholic presence is much heavier in cities on the northern edge of the county such as Perrysburg and Rossford. In the early twentieth century, though, Wood County was heavily dominated by Protestant denominations, especially evangelical branches, and the influence of evangelical Protestants extended beyond religious spheres into culture and politics.

The Ohio Federation of Churches noted that in 1922 there were 117 different churches in Wood County, and these churches represented some 27 different denominations. The survey also noted that Wood County’s Catholic population that year was about nine thousand people, translating into about 18 percent of the population. Protestant affiliation in the survey was nearly 75 percent of the county’s residents.¹⁵

The Federation of Churches report also provided information about the number of clergy in Wood County. During the same period of 1921–22, there were fifty-six full-time clergy members and seventeen part-time members in the county to serve the religious needs of the population. A significant number of these seventy-three church officials would soon appear on the membership rolls of the Wood County chapter of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

As an indicator of the power of churches in the lives of Wood County residents, the Ohio Federation of Churches report noted that ten of eighteen communities with populations under one thousand people had four or more churches each. The towns of Bloomdale and Walbridge each supported six churches despite the fact that these municipalities contained less than one thousand residents.¹⁶ In fact, one of the principal recommendations of the report was that Wood County would benefit from an effort to consolidate churches, resulting in greater efficiency and the ability for each congregation to have its own minister.

ECONOMIC CONDITIONS IN WOOD COUNTY IN THE 1920S

The 1920s, at least prior to the stock market crash of 1929, is popularly known as the Roaring Twenties due to a lengthy period of sustained economic growth, especially in sectors such as consumer goods and construction. The annual growth rates in gross domestic product (GDP) in the United States were as high as 11 percent in the middle of the 1920s.

The spectacular growth in personal incomes experienced by some Americans in the middle of the 1920s, however, was not mirrored in many American counties that were more rural and dependent on agriculture for economic activity. Wood County certainly fell into this category of agriculture-dominated regions, and news accounts in the county during the 1920s exhibited a near-constant concern about the weak agricultural sector.

For many residents of Wood County, the 1920s was a time economic uncertainty. The depression of 1920–21 stubbornly persisted months after recovery had begun to occur in many other parts of the United States. Agricultural producers in Wood County especially bore the brunt of the tough times, experiencing falling prices for agricultural commodities and decreases in land values.

Farmers cutting grain in Wood County. Center for Archival Collections.

An economist in 1924 observed that falling farm incomes and rising taxes were a deadly spiral for Ohio farmers. In layman’s terms, “it required over twice as many hogs or beef cattle, two and a half times as much corn, or a half more than the prewar amount of butter to pay the taxes.”¹⁷

Life for industrial workers in Wood County was similarly difficult. Wages fell during the depression in the first part of the decade, and incomes were slow to recover. Business owners and political leaders were staunchly anti-union, and it would be decades before organized labor made any significant inroads into improving the economic fortunes of industrial workers.

This economic uncertainty—as evidenced by historically high unemployment rates, declining farm incomes and sluggish postwar economic growth—was one of the most important factors in the rise of the reborn Ku Klux Klan in Ohio during the 1920s. Concerns about the economy were regularly expressed in news stories and editorials in local and county newspapers throughout the years of the Klan’s peak influence.

In addition, newspapers frequently contained articles and editorials that warned of a coming economic catastrophe. This apocalyptic fear of impending financial doom was an emotion that Klan organizers would exploit in their recruiting efforts, especially among farmers, agricultural laborers and workers in industries like energy extraction.

Oil derrick in southern Wood County. Center for Archival Collections.

The Wood County Republican captured many of these concerns in a 1924 article on the plight of farmers in Northwest Ohio. In addition to the flat or declining prices at which farmers could sell agricultural products, there were burdensome price hikes for most of the machinery and materials that Wood County farmers regularly purchased. Farmers were “hard-pressed to make a living” with the cost increases.¹⁸

In addition, local newspapers noted the increasing participation by farmers of Wood County in the political process. A 1920 editorial in the Perrysburg Journal commended area farmers for demonstrating “clear, incisive, earnest thought” that was “marked by loyal Americanism,” adding that farmers in Wood County were “involved in solving political, social, and economic problems” to a greater extent than ever before.¹⁹

It was into this troubled economy and energetic political process that the Ku Klux Klan interjected itself, and Klan organizers effectively tapped into economic discontent in their efforts to rapidly expand the power of the Klan in Wood County.