Lima: The Vibrant Life and Uncertain Death of a Train Town

From the later 1960s through the 1990s, the once-mighty industrial Midwest—for a century the symbol of the nation's economic heartland—shed millions of manufacturing jobs in wave after wave of plant closures. This was a transformation so shocking and monumental that it soon took on a new connotation in Americans' minds as a region having shifted in a few short years from industrial powerhouse to a sad state of postindustrial decay, to a new dust bowl, a "rust bowl."¹

Two decades later, scholars are still wrestling with how to evaluate this watershed historical moment. One way has taken shape around a basic narrative of declension. This theme figured prominently, for example, in a book of essays put together in 2003 by prominent Ohio educational leaders as part of the state's bicentennial. Political scientist Herbert Asher and former Ohio State University president William Kirwan both portrayed Ohio largely as a state left behind, its economic golden years receding rapidly into the past. The same theme has been grounded historically in analyses like that of historian Jon Teaford. His depiction of Ohio in the fundamental narrative of economic declension is conveyed by the very subtitle of his 1993 book: Cities of the Heartland: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Midwest.²

At the same time, other scholars have phrased a more nuanced narrative of industrial change. The economist Barry Bluestone—whose 1982 book The Deindustrialization of America has been credited by some as a key text for coining the phrase—has argued that the era of deindustrialization was itself something of a shorter phase in the larger history of the United States' economic development. Recent enhanced rates of productivity growth, rooted in the simultaneous emergence of the information revolution, he argues, may be moving the nation now beyond it. Taking their cues from Bluestone, Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott have argued that "from the vantage of a new century … deindustrialization seems both less profound and more so." Many midwestern cities hard hit by job losses have experienced their own new spurts of economic renewal, even as the tone and content of these various local eras of "renaissance" have changed. Indeed, to these scholars, the new academic literature on deindustrialization must encompass qualitative as well as quantitative aspects. It needs to "work as hard to understand the mental and cultural frameworks of deindustrialization as it has to grasp the political, technological and financial dimensions."³

This article seeks to expand Cowie and Heathcott's analysis by exploring the experience of industrialization and deindustrialization in Lima, Ohio. For the city's response to both processes clearly proceeded along the contours shaped by its regional subculture and inheritances from its past. In the 1990s, as I have argued elsewhere, Lima's history and regional cultural understandings played a central role in its ultimately successful efforts to save one major prop to its local economy—the city's mammoth, century-old oil refinery—from near-certain closure and destruction by its corporate owner, British Petroleum.⁴ Another illustration for the centrality of such qualitative strengths can be seen in the city's once powerful and still lingering heritage as a train town.

For the first five decades of the twentieth century, the railroad cemented itself into the center of Lima's economy and subculture, both of which were powered by steam. Already by 1900, the city had become the junction for five major passenger and freight lines. Three decades later, upwards of thirty passenger trains stopped in the city every day. As late as the end of World War II, with a total population of less than fifty thousand people, Lima still reverberated to the rhythms of five major railroads, three passenger depots, two classification yards, two roundhouses, and a number of repair shops, around all of which a residential and commercial infrastructure revolved.⁵ Perhaps as many as one in every five local jobs became tied in one way or another to the railroad, with thousands of local men working as switchmen, telegraphers, conductors, firemen, engineers, or as hands...