Ashland, Ohio's Main Street in 1884, label by label

Main Street in Ashland, as the Sanborn Map Company drew it for fire insurers in August 1884, read label by label. An opera house on the second and third floors, with "stage, scenery & footlights". A public telephone upstairs across Main. F.E. Myers & Bro.'s haying tool works, the firm that by 1915 was Ashland's biggest manufacturer. A gas works and its round gas holder by the creek, a foundry, a pump works and a roller flour mill rated at 50 barrels a day. Blacksmiths, wood shops and livery stables, a block off Main. Then the same blocks from the air today.

What stands on the opera house corner today? Tell us.

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Sources:
- F.E. Myers & Bro.: Farm Collector, 'A History of F.E. Myers and Bro.' (founded 1870 by Francis E. and Philip A. Myers; by 1915 Ashland's biggest manufacturer, nearly 800 workers)
- Sanborn abbreviations (Bl. Smith, Opera Ho., M'f'g Co.): Library of Congress, 'Interpreting Sanborn Maps'
- 1884: Sanborn Map Company, Ashland sheet 1, Library of Congress
- 2019: Ohio Statewide Imagery Program (OGRIP)