However, after the attack on Ft. Sumter on April 12, 1861, this little building served its  most dramatic purpose.  This was where young men from the village of Medina and the surrounding townships came to volunteer for military service in response to President Abraham Lincoln’s call for troops to put down the “War of Rebellion.”

Initially, there was great enthusiasm for the war.  But when the Army of the Potomac, under the leadership of General George B. McClellan fared poorly against Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia during that first year and a half of the war — enthusiasm waned. Casualties were high,  the Confederates continued to present a serious threat, and confidence in General McClellan dwindled.

So, unfortunately, did the number of volunteers appearing at the recruitment center at 56 Public Square. This prompted Medina’s two term Congressman, Harrison G. Blake (1859-63) to write the following plea to Abraham Lincoln on July 28, 1862:

Dear Sir,

As one of the representatives from the State of Ohio, I regard it as my duty to say to you that I shall sustain you in all measures you deem proper to take to put down this rebellion… It is proper, however, that I should say to you that there is great dissatisfaction among your friends about the manner that Gen. McClellan has manage the army under his command — most men here doubt his ability, and very many question his loyalty.

…We find it very difficult to to get men to enlist here, they say they will be put to guarding rebel property or digging ditches in some swamp instead of fighting the enemy. We shall do all we can to get the men to enlist, and we are offering from $25 to $50 in addition to all the bounty that Government pays, but it goes hard.

If the people could know for a certainty that a more vigorous prosecution of the war would obtain, and that our men would be placed under competent commanders who desire to put down the rebellion, I have no doubt we could get any number of men to enlist.

I trust you will receive these suggestions in the kind spirit they are dictated….

Yours truly,

H.G. Blake

(Later that year, after the Battle of Antietam in September of 1862, Lincoln did indeed relieve General McClellan of his command of the Army of the Potomac.)

*This letter (portions of which are quoted here) is from the Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress. Transcribed and annotated by the Lincoln Studies Center, Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois.

She died in 1932, a few months shy of her 90th birthday in the grand Victorian home that she and her husband built during the Gilded Age, and where her descendants still live.  As a young woman, she experienced firsthand some of the great events of the mid-nineteenth century –  the Underground Railroad and the Civil War.

Her father was Harrison Gray Blake — lawyer, Congressman, founder of the Old Phoenix Bank, and Medina’s most celebrated citizen. An abolitionist, he was active in the very risky enterprise of giving shelter to runaway slaves and smuggling them to other stations on the Underground Railroad

One of Elizabeth’s most vivid childhood memories was of  seeing slaves in the family home. It has become, of course, the stuff of family legend.  Her great-granddaughter, the late Betsy Whitmore, described the event  in her 1988 reminiscences:

Mrs. Whitmore wrote, “Her [Elizabeth's] father said, ‘Come with me. I want to show you something that will make you hate slavery forever.’

“He took her up into the attic where there were two terror-stricken runaway slaves.  One was almost white, the other black.  Her father showed the back of the black slave.  It was covered with great raw ridges where he had been whipped and where salt had been rubbed as a disinfectant.  It seemed that he had run away once before, been caught, returned to his owner and given a whipping.”

That picture of horror, shown to Elizabeth Blake McDowell on that eerie night, never faded from her memory.

In 1861, Elizabeth and her mother had a brief, but memorable encounter with Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln at the Weddell House — an elegant,  long-gone hotel in downtown Cleveland.  She described the event in a 1932 Plain Dealer interview given three months before her death. Lincoln was on his way to Washington to be inaugurated, and, despite threats of assassination, he stopped in many cities on his journey east.

“Mother and I were on the portico,” Elizabeth recalled. “Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln came down the hotel steps.  He looked around, saw us and lifted his hat and smiled — oh, the sweetest smile.  I’m sure it was to mother and me that he bowed. There was no one else there.

“Then he handed Mrs. Lincoln into the barouche, and Mrs. Lincoln had on the black stockings everyone said she wore.  Ladies were expected to wear white.  And you didn’t see as much of stockings then as you do now.

“His guards got in with them. Then the president turned to us again, lifted up that old stove-pipe hat and waved to us and smiled again.”

Elizabeth’s father, H.G. Blake was serving in Congress when Lincoln was elected and his daughter joined him in Washington. “We had entree to about every affair. I didn’t miss many opportunities,”  she recalled in the Plain Dealer interview. As a result, she was a witness to the resignation of Lincoln’s Confederate counterpart, Jefferson Davis,  from the U.S. Senate.  (Governor Dennison of Ohio had given her his seat in the gallery of the Capitol.)

She recalled 71 years later that, “Jefferson Davis was a remarkable figure, handsome with a West Point carriage and the manners of a southern aristocrat.”

After Davis gave his speech outlining his reasons for secession, she recalled that he lingered at his desk.

“He rearranged his papers, then put his hands  around the edge of his desk regretfully.  He got up and slowly walked to the door.  Then he came back, patted the desk … as he would an old dog, Then…he walked to the portals.  He paused, then, erect, turned and looked all around at the Senate chambers, at the flag, at the now empty desks, at the gallery, with a look of inexpressible sadness.  His head dropped, he turned on his heel and went out.”

She recalls the atmosphere in wartime Washington as fraught with danger. “My father always went armed,” she recalled in the interview. “All the legislators carried pistols and came close to using them. It was also common for members of Congress to practice pistol shooting. Father considered it necessary. Hardly a man in Congress but practiced at least once a week.”

Elizabeth married Lieutenant R.M. McDowell in 1863. Two years later, when Lincoln was assassinated, Lt. McDowell was stationed near Baltimore, at the railroad aqueduct over which all northern troops and supplies passed. Elizabeth, pregnant with their first child, was living nearby at the old Relay House south of Baltimore.The search for the conspirators in the assassination plot took place in this area, and one of them, George Atzerodt, was captured there.

Lieutenant McDowell was given charge of the prisoner. He ordered the regimental blacksmith to weld Atzerodt in irons and then asked his wife if she wanted to see him.

She declined.

On the night of April 14th, 1870, according the the “1881 History of Medina County and Ohio”,  “The alarm sounded…calling the people unceremoniously from their virtuous couches and in a few short hours, almost the entire business district of Medina was in ashes, much of it for the second time.”

The village still did not have a fire department.  At about 3:00 A.M., A.W. Horton mounted a horse and galloped off to Seville to borrow their hand engine and rouse volunteers.  In the meantime, the townspeople resorted to a bucket-brigade to fight the fire.

When the fire finally burned itself out the next morning, practically the entire business district around the square was destroyed — 45 buildings including barns and stables.  The photograph above shows the southwest corner of Public Square and the charred remains of H.G. Blake’s three-story brick building.  The square black object in the middle of the street is a safe.  Blake had started a bank in the back room of his Phoenix Store and the safe was the only item to survive the fire.

The following morning, business owners absorbed the shock and regrouped.  Fortunately, this time many did have insurance and they quickly began to rebuild. The “1881 History” goes on to say, “So far as adding to the beauty of the town, the great fire, like that of Chicago, was beneficial, inasmuch as it was the means of building up a much better class of buildings than are generally found in a town the size of Medina.”Within a decade Public Square was filled with handsome Victorian buildings, some featuring ornate brickwork and ornamental cornices.  No two buildings were exactly alike, but all were of a uniform architectural style.

The photo above shows the south side of the square with H.G. Blake’s new Phoenix Block at the far right.  It housed a bank (now substantially expanded from the safe in the back room of his store), a drugstore, law offices and a large public auditorium on the third floor.

It took the outbreak of a third fire — a small one in 1877 — to finally convince the townspeople to create a fire department.  In the meantime, the elegant Victorian buildings have survived intact, and thanks to a nationally-lauded restoration in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, continue to make Medina’s Public Square a showplace of Victorian architecture.

Medina in 1846 from: "Historical Collections" by Henry Howe.

The story goes like this:  On the evening of April 11, 1848, two young men — drifters, probably — were playing cards in the back room of Barney Prentiss’s shoe store.  One of them blew out a candle and tossed it into a pile of trash in the corner. But he was careless — the candle was still burning.  A fire broke out.

Medina was originally built on the New England model : white clapboard structures surrounding a village green called Public Square. Those wooden buildings quickly caught fire and by the next morning, twelve buildings on or near Public Square had been lost — six businesses, four dwellings, and two barns. The loss in dollars was estimated at about $40,000.  This had a significant impact on the little village of 118 souls.

There was, unfortunately, no fire department, and the insurance company –Medina Mutual Fire Insurance– that had insured some of the buildings was practically insolvent, so very little of the insurance was ever paid.

Nevertheless, the citizens rallied and rebuilt. The net result was the construction of  sturdier, more substantial buildings in brick. For example, H.G. Blake, a lawyer and merchant who lost his two-story frame building, built a three- story brick building in its place. He also poetically  named his his shop on the first floor, the Phoenix Store, after the mythological bird that rises from its ashes.

The village residents probably heaved a collective sigh and thought, “This will never happen to us again.”

They were wrong.

And the two card players?  According to the story, they disappeared the next day and were never heard from again.

H.G. Blake's new brick Phoenix Store on the southwest corner of Public Square.

H.G. Blake in the uniform of the 166th Regiment of the Union Army

Harrison Gray Blake (1819-1876) routinely ignored the Fugitive Slave Laws and hid runaway slaves in his handsome home home on East Washington Street. It was a terrible risk in those days to harbor slaves — the fines were prohibitive and could bankrupt a family.  Blake had a great deal to lose. He had come to Medina as a penniless orphan and, within a decade,  had become a wealthy and influential man: a lawyer,  Speaker of the Ohio Legislature, U.S. Congressman, founder of the Old Phoenix Bank.

H. G. Blake's house was a busy stop on the Underground Railroad.

The  older of his two daughters, Elizabeth Blake McDowell, told her descendants the story of how she discovered that the family was hiding slaves.  She noticed that her mother would occasionally cook very large amounts of food – far more than was needed for their family of four.  She began to ask questions, and finally her parents explained the situation to her –  that her father had undertaken an important mission and that  secrecy was essential

After that, when she saw a large ham disappear or heard strange noises in the attic over the kitchen, she was no longer surprised. To insure discretion, Elizabeth and her sister were kept out of school when slaves were in the house.

Elizabeth Blake McDowell

Another time Blake said to his two daughters, “Come with me, I want to show you something that will make you hate slavery forever.”  He took them to the attic and showed them a terror-stricken slave. The man’s back had been whipped and salt had been rubbed in his wounds as a disinfectant. It was a sight that neither daughter ever forgot.

A short time later Blake sent the slave on to Oberlin, the next stop on the Underground Railroad.  The next stop after that was Canada and freedom.

In 1848 Blake was elected president pro tem of the Ohio Legislature by a slim margin of one vote and led the effort to repeal the Black Laws. These were statutes in effect in Ohio which curtailed the civil rights of African-Americans, and had been  enacted to discourage them from moving to Ohio. To commemorate his role in the repeal of these onerous laws, he was awarded a silver cup by the Young Whigs of Ohio.

Blake  later served two terms in Congress — 1959-63. After that joined the Union Army and was appointed Colonel of the 166th Regiment, Ohio Infantry Volunteers.

In a brief biography written near the end of his life, he wrote, “I ardently supported President Lincoln and all measures to put down the rebellion.  I was always an ardent anti-slavery man and a friend of the slave.”

Presented to H.G. Blake to commemorate repeal of the Black Laws