Our last stop before leaving Marion was Stewart’s Root Beer, a drive-in that has been around since 1924 and doesn’t look like it’s been upgraded much since then.
I ordered a cheeseburger and onion rings. The cheeseburger was typical drive-in quality, but the onion rings were exceptional, as was the root beer.
After touring the popcorn museum, we wandered around the other museum in the same building. This was essentially a local historical society, with all the typical local historical society museum stuff donated by people who don’t know what else to do with grandpa’s suit or grandma’s pincushion collection. There were a few exhibits that were more notable, however. Like Napoleon’s horse, Prince Imperial.
The horse didn’t belong to Napoleon Bonaparte, but to his nephew, Emperor Napoleon III. It was claimed that the horse had the longest mane in the world — 9 feet, 10 inches (with a tail seven feet long). A local breeder traveled to France in 1869 and bought the horse for $3,000. Back in the States, he exhibited the horse as “The Greatest Living Curiosity of This or Any Other Age.” Which seems to be doing it up a bit rich, if you ask me.
The horse died in 1888, but that didn’t stop the clever businessman. He had the horse stuffed and mounted and displayed it during the summer. In the winter, he kept it in his living room. The breeder passed the horse on to his sons and their sons and then it was sold to another showman who put it on wheels and pulled it in parades. Eventually, probably about the time there was nobody left who knew who Emperor Napoleon III was, the horse was donated to the museum.
There was a display about Harding in the basement, but it mostly consisted of photographs of photographs.
Here I am sitting at a desk from Harding’s newspaper office.
And here’s the red chair in a chair from the Harding’s home.
The museum was open from 1-4 on this Sunday afternoon. We arrived around 2 and left around 3:20 and there were no other visitors during that time. I think it’s safe to make a claim that we were the only visitors on the day. We were greeted at the door by two kind women, one of whom really, really wanted to give us a guided tour. We declined, but she followed us anyway and showed us several working popcorn machines. She was hovering again when we went into the main museum and jumped in to tell us things whenever we showed more than just a passing interest. She was very kind and seemingly knowledgeable, but she was not a gift speaker and a guided tour would have taken a great deal longer than we thought the museum warranted.
At one point she got an embarrassed look on her face, put her hands up over her mouth, and said, “I probably shouldn’t say anything about this.” Then she took us into the next room and showed us this photograph, just donated to the museum, of Harding’s mistress, Carrie Phillips. It’s a bit distorted because I had to photograph it at an angle through the glass case.
As we wandered about, a guy came in with his dog. He claimed to be another volunteer, but immediately got into a lengthy argument with the woman in the gift shop about whether the Bible is reliable or not. His view, of course, is that it isn’t. The woman remained unshaken in her faith (she sounded like a committed Christian) and did what she could to end the conversation. The guy would have none of it and pontificated at length while we walked around in the next room listening in and rolling our eyes at his inflated opinion of his own intellect. When we walked out, he attempted to engage us in conversation, but we answered minimally and got past him with little trouble. His dog, which was a lot more pleasant than the guy, wandered around after us and seemed to share our desire to be at a distance from him.
There was a room in the basement done up to look like an old general store, which basically means that it was done up to be a dumping grounds for any old product they could get their hands on.
A huge draw for my wife in the city of Marion was the Wyandot Popcorn Museum. It was located in a room in Heritage Hall, the museum located in the old post office building.
There were probably 50 popcorn machines in the room, of all sizes from trucks and wagons to table-top varieties. There were also displays about the history of popcorn as a snack, about popcorn packaging and, of course, about Wyandot Snack Company, the local popcorn company that owns the museum machines.
1909 Dunbar Horse-drawn Wagon formerly owned by Paul Newman to promote his Newman’s Own Popcorn.
The machine on the right is a 1930 Emerson.
1927 Model T Cretors Popcorn Truck. It originally ran on white gas to drive the steam engine, pop the corn and operate the peanut roaster. There are only seven of these still in existence.
Several of the machines had little clowns like this one that “turned” the crank. Some of them were inside the cases, and I have no idea how the operator kept them from getting saturated with oil.
1922 Cretors Store Front Popper and Peanut Roaster. The clown in the photo (above) stands on this machine.
The machine in the middle is a 1930 Holcomb & Hoke. The one on the left is a 1918 Holcomb & Hoke. It was very complicated and required weekly maintenance. The 1930 machine is a simplified version. The video is of the 1918 model.
The machine in the right foreground is a 1910 Bartholomew. This machine has never been restored.
1899 Cretors Wagon. The photo shows what it looked like before it was restored.
On the right on the counter is a 1910-1920 Holcomb & Hoke economy model. The side storage compartments are mini-rolltops.
On the right is an Empire Peanut Roaster and Warmer. It operated on alcohol.
The blue-fronted machine on the right, a 1928 Star Advance “Profit” model, advertises “French-fried Popcorn.”
The one on the left is a 1939 Manley Lifetime Popper.
This one was my favorite, although I’m not sure I can tell you why. It’s a 1905 Kingery wet popper. The sign is original.
A 1948 Auto-Pop 10-cent Popcorn Vendor, used for only three weeks.
We had a hot air popper much like the one on the left in this next photo. It made popcorn with no taste whatsoever and with the texture of Styrofoam.
The museum also featured an exhibit on Cracker Jacks, with a display of prizes given away in boxes over the years.
On our way out, they gave us each a box of stale popcorn to go.
The visitor center for Harding’s home is a small cottage in the backyard. Harding had it assembled from a kit for the use of reporters who were covering his Presidential campaign in 1920.
Harding had the home itself built in 1890 as a wedding present to Florence, a divorcee five years his senior.
The couple lived there until they left for the White House. They never had children — Florence had a son by her first marriage. The boy was raised by Florence’s father, who was a wealthy tyrant who disowned his daughter twice — after each of her marriages.
We watched a video in the visitor center and looked at the few displays. A woman then sent us up to the house and asked us to wait for her on the front porch. This is the famous front porch from which Harding conducted his “front porch campaign” the last such in history. Crowds of people would come to stand in his yard and in the street to hear him give speeches.
Notice how the houses across the street are at an angle. The street itself doesn’t run true north to south or east to west, but the houses were still aligned that way. We’ve also noticed this on some streets in Columbus. I’m not sure why they were built this way.
Shortly after our tour guide arrived, a family of five showed up. They knew the tour guide — she greeted them with hugs. At first, she seemed rather acerbic, but we warmed up to her as the tour went along. She knew her stuff, took her time and answered all our questions.
I wasn’t allowed to take photos in the house. But after our tour, I held my camera up to the cut glass panels alongside the front door and got these two photos of the entrance hall. Warren and Florence were married in this room, at the base of the steps visible on the right in the first photo.
I also bought two postcards in the gift shop. This is the master bedroom. Harding wore the tuxedo on his inauguration on March 4, 1921.
The library, where Harding wrote his speeches.
Over 90 percent of the furnishings are original to the Hardings — the house was made into a museum just a couple years after Harding died. It isn’t a large house. The main floor has five rooms, the parlor, the library, the dining room, the entrance hall (above) and a kitchen. At the time of our visit, the kitchen was torn apart in the process of reconstructing it to look as it did when the Hardings lived there.
The second floor has three family bedrooms, a maid’s room and a bathroom.
After our tour, I walked around outside and took these photos.
Our tour guide is in the green shirt.
Next to the visitor center was a mobile voting booth, used in Columbus from 1880 to 1940.
After Harding died, Florence moved back to Marion and took up residence at the White Oaks Sanitarium, operated by Charles E. Sawyer, the incompetent local physician who served as Harding’s doctor in Washington and whom, according to many, completely misdiagnosed and mistreated the President and so was, in part, responsible for his early death. Florence died at the Sanitarium in November, 1924, just 16 months after Harding. A few of the sanitarium buildings, although not the one that Florence occupied, are still in existence, squatting in the middle of a poorly-maintained park on the outskirts of Marion.
Warren G. Harding died of a heart attack in August, 1923 while on a trip to the West Coast. His hometown of Marion, Ohio, immediately began collecting money for a memorial to him. It was finished in 1927, and Harding’s body was moved there along with the body of his wife, Florence, who died in 1924.
Harding grew up in central Ohio and bought a newspaper in Marion which got him involved in politics and eventually the presidency when the Republicans couldn’t decide on one of the major candidates.
The town is very proud of Harding and has nothing but good things to say about him. “Yes, there was the Teapot Dome scandal, but that involved wrongdoing by Harding’s cabinet members and the President knew nothing about it until just before he died. Yes, he did have an affair, maybe several affairs, but we don’t want to talk about that. Let’s concentrate on what he accomplished — he dedicated several memorials, he started the veterans hospitals and he kept every promise he made during his candidacy.” Whatever that means. Little mention is made of the fact that he is widely considered to be the worst president in history.
The memorial is impressive.
The grave of his one acknowledged mistress, Carrie Phillips, is in the same cemetery, across a road and perhaps 300 yards away.
