100 (PLUS) YEARS IN MY HOME TOWN

Lynchburg, the town where I grew up in Highland County, Ohio, was a robust community at the turn of the twentieth century, much because of a successful distillary that was located there. However, the economic times were soon to change, when the local women's temperence union was successful in obtaining political pressure to remove the distillary from the area. If you click on the letter written by the owners of the distillary in 1915 warning of the economic impact, you will see that they were saying they were not so much interested in selling it locally as they were interested in exporting it. These local church women, some possibly from the church pictured below, won the day. The rest, as they say, is history. click Crusades to learn more

Today the WCTU is the oldest voluntary, non-sectarian woman's organization in continuous existence in the world. The WCTU is a founding member (1888) of the National Council for Women (Frances Willard was its first president) and the International Council of Women in 1893.

The gray-toned picture was taken after part of the distillary was converted to a feed mill (Ewing's) Below are my junior high school, the local Christian church, and a recent downtown scene. The other feedmill picture below and taken more recently is much more similar to how it looked when I was there in the 50-60's. By that time it still functioned as a feed mill. The building in front was the locker where we kept our frozen meat that we had butchered.

These last pictures were taken after the turn of the 21st Century by a photographer whose family is from Lynchburg, along with a picture I found of the new local library. I am very happy to read of how large and active the library is. When I was a girl growing up that is where I spent many of my afternoons. Mrs. Wilt, the librarian, was always helping me discover new good books. The covered bridge was on our route home to the farm from town and now the road has been re-routed to help form a park.