THE GREAT FLOOD

Jumping its banks was not unusual for the Great Miami River that courses southwest through the Ohio cities of Sidney, Dayton and Hamilton before spilling into the Ohio River just west of Cincinnati. The Miami had flooded eight times in the nineteenth century -- three times since the arrival in Hamilton in 1872 of the author's paternal grandfather, George Adam Rentschler (known as "Adam"), who had come to town as a 26 year-old immigrant from Germany and become one of its most prominent citizens.

But this instance was dramatically different: the rain -11" in total – started in Hamilton on Easter Sunday, 1913, and did not quit for three days, and the Miami, which bisected the center of the heavily-industrialized city of 35,000 people, rose from 3' to 35'. AND THAT'S NOT A MISPRINT! The worst weather-event in the state's history, the storm killed 467 people across Ohio -- some 200 in Hamilton alone

The disproportionate loss of life in Hamilton was attributable to a new bridge constructed for the Cincinnati, Hamilton and Dayton Railroad – people then used trains to go any distance (horse-drawn vehicles still out-numbered automobiles in 1913 Hamilton). Built with more gusto than acumen, the CH&D's structure "featured concrete abutments sunk 30' below the bed of the river and a steel span with solid sides 10' high. Until it finally collapsed, the span not only withstood the force of the river, but, with debris piled against its northern side, formed a dam that diverted the current down into the east part of the town," where most of the city's businesses and homes were located.

The tragic demise of their fellow citizens was, of course, the chief concern of Hamiltonians, who quickly gathered and prepared for burial the dead they could find. Then came the job of dealing with the property damage when there was no flood insurance.

Fortunately, Adam hadn't lost any relatives in the flood, but his original and likely most profitable venture, Sohn & Rentschler Foundry, was completely washed away. Additionally, some of his other businesses suffered very serious damage and mucky water was 3' deep in the first floor of his house.

Adam, though, was used to hardship.

THE ROAD TO HAMILTON

Adam had been born in 1846 in the tiny village of Schmieh, perched atop a mountain 30 miles west of Stuttgart. The youngest of seven children, Adam was 6 years old when his father, Jacob, a wood-cutter struggling to feed his family, decided to stake out a new life in America after his wife's death in 1852. How Jacob raised the money for passage is not known, but the family settled in Newark, New Jersey, surrounded by other German emigres.

Adam attended grade school until he was 11 when his father died. To support himself, he worked in an iron foundry for seven years, taking classes at night. In 1863 at 17 (we suppose, too young to be drafted into the Union Army to fight in the Civil War) Adam married another German immigrant living in Newark, Christine Maria Graff, nicknamed Kate. Producing a son, George Jr., the next year, they moved to Peru, Indiana, in the north-central part of the state to be closer to her parents who, themselves, had emigrated from Germany to a farm near Fulton, twenty miles north. Living in Peru, a railroad town, allowed Adam to commute to work as a foreman of an iron foundry in Indianapolis.

After giving birth to a second son, Henry, in 1866, Kate tragically died aged 22 in 1869. Initially confused what to do with his motherless boys, Adam in 1873 decided to move to Hamilton, Ohio, where the Indianapolis foundry had relocated. He would take along Henry, now 7, but leave George, 9, with his maternal grandparents in Fulton where he and his future eight sons would spend their lives farming.

For the rest of his life, however, Adam would keep in close touch with his Indiana offspring.

Ohio was no "backwater". In 1870 the geographical center of America's population was 48 miles north-east of Cincinnati and in 1920 it was 15 miles west of Bloomington, Indiana. Upon Adam's arrival, Ohio was the country's third most populous state, and provided seven out of 12 Presidents of the United States during the half-century he lived there. In fact, in the Presidential election of 1920 (the last in Adam's life-time) both candidates came from the Buckeye State – for the Republicans, Warren G. Harding, U.S. Senator, and for the Democrats, James Cox, Governor.

He would remarry a woman from Hamilton and have a second family but only after he had solidly established himself in business.

CASHING IN ... AND OUT

Two years after moving to Hamilton, in 1875, Adam decided he would no longer work for someone else. He started up an iron foundry with $2500 and a partner, Henry Sohn (a bookkeeper for a brewery), and the firm was named Sohn & Rentschler.

Its early years proved extremely difficult, as described decades later in Adam's obituary: "Money was hard to get, orders were slow in coming and young Rentschler traversed the country for miles with horse and buggy soliciting orders. He got a few, at first, but it was hard to realize even enough to pay the small work force ... In these lean times, young Rentschler after getting the orders would go to the shop, take off his coat, and work with the rest of the men ... they developed new ideas in castings and soon the firm ... became known throughout this section of the country for the excellence of their work."

"Along about 1887" (we intervene to remind the reader that the foundry is now twelve years old!), "Mr. Rentschler, who was still selling products of the firm, was in Dayton calling on an old customer. 'There's a new firm starting up down here,' said his friend. 'It's very small, has little money, but you might get some business there'".

"So Mr. Rentschler went down. He met a couple of young men in a shop (who) showed him some patterns. 'I'll take these', said Mr. Rentschler, 'and go down to Hamilton this afternoon and have castings up here by tomorrow.'"

"He kept his word, and from that moment, Mr. Rentschler and John H. Patterson, founder of the National Cash Register Co. of Dayton, were staunch personal friends and their business relations were always of the best."

"The Sohn & Rentschler Foundry made all of the castings for the NCR for 25 years or until the flood of 1913 took away their shop. Mr. Patterson had built a foundry himself but he would never consent to its existence so long as the Hamilton plant was able to provide him with his needs." Adam had another casting firm untouched by the flood, The Hamilton Foundry & Machine Co., but it had numerous customers, whereas Sohn & Rentschler had been singularly dedicated to making parts just for NCR.

What a ride it had been for Adam: " ... cash register sales, barely 1,000 in 1886, reached 15,000 in 1892 and 100,000 in 1910. The following year NCR sold its millionth machine. In 1884 there was no discernible demand, (but) by about 1910 (NCR) had made the cash register the essential tool of retailing, as necessary to the merchant as the block to the butcher or the anvil to the blacksmith." He was victimized by the collapse of that new railroad bridge.

Not all of his business ventures succeeded. With Joseph B. Hughes, Adam in 1879 had started The Hamilton Tile Works to make floor and wall covering. It failed in 1897 and, though re-incorporated as Ohio Tile in 1901 with Henry Sohn as a partner, was dissolved for good in 1911.

CORLISS -- FOR A TIME, PEERLESS

In 1880, five years after the foundry was launched, Adam with two friends organized his second major buiness, called The Hooven, Owens, Rentschler Company (or "H.O.R.", less formally). The concern, which would become Adam's main legacy, was focused on building Corliss engines whose heyday lasted from around 1850 until 1920. Named for its New England inventor, George Henry Corliss, the concept tied together a natural gas engine and a steam engine, the high-temperature exhaust from the former fueling the latter, essentially anticipating its successor, the gas-turbine, in the 1920s. Diesels would not appear until the 1890s.

To produce his engine, in the 1850s Corliss built a factory in Providence, Rhode Island, that ultimately employed 1,000 workers, and to protect his concept he amassed 60 patents. In 1867, competing against 100 of the best steam-engine makers in the world at the International Exposition in Paris, he won first prize.

Unfortunately for Corliss, his basic patent expired in 1870. "Competitors leapt to copy his work, and their products became known as Corliss engines." Nevertheless, with his own money, Corliss built an engine for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. "... 10 million from all over the world came to see its 30,000 exhibits. The center of attention was Machinery Hall, which covered 13 acres.

"Powering all the Hall's devices was the world's largest steam engine, with a shaft 352 feet long and a flywheel weighing 56 tons, which operated almost silently. Corliss had paid the massive engine's $100,000 cost (equal to $2.3 million today) out of his own pocket."

It is conceivable, however far-fetched, that Adam went to see the Exposition. It is a fact, though, that one of its attendees was a William Ford, who couldn't wait to relate what he saw to his 13 year-old son, Henry, when he got back home to their hard-scrabble farm in southern Michigan. "(Henry) was already filled with enthusiasm for all things to do with steam." In fact, his first job when he left the farm for the city would be in a steam-fired power plant belonging to Detroit Edison.

The significance of Henry Ford's interest in Corliss' technology will become clear later in this book.

THE MAIN CHANCE

Evidencing complete confidence in the growth potential of Corliss engines, Adam and his partners went about building their business with avengeance. They assembled a management team. Believers in vertical integration, they constructed nearly a dozen huge buildings, sprawling over some 30 acres north of downtown to accommodate the casting, forging and machining of steel and iron components. A few of these buildings were several hundred feet long and a hundred feet wide and fifty feet high to accommodate overhead cranes straddling the bays to move materiel. H.O.R. soon was employing several hundred workers.

Adam had managed to arrange outside financing (a $1 million loan, collateralized with the buildings) from a Cincinnati bank. It was also important that, in order to hog out their massive components, Niles Tool Works, builder of the largest milling machines in the world, was right next door, and that two major, north-south railroads straddled both sides of the complex to allow efficient flow of incoming raw material and outgoing finished product.

Photographs of H.O.R.'s factories at the end of the nineteenth century do not exist, but Adam's son-in-law, Sidney D. Waldon (Helen's husband), writing at the end of World War II when the successor company employed 4500 people (making a different type of engine), reported that "the present shop with its very high bays was completed in 1902", and an artist's rendering of the complex in 1945 appears towards the end of this book.

By 1900, H.O.R. had built over 700 Corliss engines and was the largest producer of them in the world. With 800 or so workers, it also was Hamilton's second largest employer, just behind Champion Coated Paper.

The 1913 flood did tremendous, though not irreparable, damage to H.O.R. In parts of the cavernous complex, the water was 40' high! Unlike the fate of Sohn & Rentschler, however, the Miami did not deliver a knock-out punch to H.O.R. – the physical plant was plain too massive. More importantly, the determination of Adam and his sons to persevere would prove too invincible.

A SECOND FAMILY

In 1883, his first two businesses under way, Adam, now 38, was married for a second time. His new bride, only 21, was Phoebe Schwab, from Hamilton. Her father, Peter, like his son-in-law, was a German immigrant and aspiring entrepreneur. He had founded the Cincinnati Brewing Company, whose beer had "met with such universal favor that ... the company was incorporated with a capital of $250,000 in 1882,"

The year they were married, Adam and Phoebe produced a son, Robert Peter . The next year (1884) they bought a 131-acre farm in Fairfield township, five miles east of Hamilton, and, in its modest, sandstone farm-house, they produced four more children: Gordon Sohn (1885), Frederick Brant (1887), Helen Dorothy (1890) and George Adam, Jr., or "Bud" (1892).

The time and toil of the buggy-rides to-and-from the city pretty soon trumped the peace and tranquility of the place in the country, however, and the family moved back to Hamilton in 1902 and sold the farm in 1906. (Gordon, though, then just finishing college, vowed he would someday buy back the farm!).

Further expanding his clutch of businesses, Adam at this time was constructing a 6-story structure downtown at the corner of High and 2d Streets to house offices, including his own, and his two banks (Dime Savings and Citizens, run by Henry, the son from his first marriage). The Rentschler Building opened in 1906 and, aside from the Butler County Court House (across the street), would be Hamilton's tallest structure for 25 years.

The Rentschlers purchased a house at 643 Dayton Street, a commodious three-story Victorian mansion complete with stable. Their new home was on the far-east side of town, for Adam, half-an-hour to the office on foot, ten minutes by horse-and-buggy. Henry Sohn, Adam's first business partner, was next door. Adam and Phoebe would live there the rest of their lives.

Nominally Lutheran, the Rentschlers typically didn't go to church on Sundays. The author, in fact, does not recall his father, Bud, or aunt, Helen, ever going to church other than attending a wedding or a funeral. German wasn't spoken at home -- the author's father knew only a few words in German. Vacations, when taken, were ordinary, not extravagant. They would go by train to see Adam's oldest son, George, and his family in northern Indiana or to spend some time at French Lick, a resort some 50 miles northwest of Louisville. Adam never returned to Germany. Likely it never even crossed his mind.

THE HALLS OF IVY

Frugal in many respects, Adam and Phoebe believed that their children should receive as much formal education as possible. Encouraged by a minister (whose name is long forgotten), they sent their four sons after high school in Hamilton to Princeton University and their daughter, in lieu of local high school, to Ogontz, a preparatory school outside of Philadelphia.

The boys majored in liberal arts, except Fred who studied engineering. Robert was class of 1906; Gordon, 1907; Fred, 1909; and George, Jr., (Bud, as he was called), 1915. Robert, unfortunately had a nervous breakdown and was institutionalized his senior year.

His brothers' personalities, though, started to become manifest.

Gordon emerged as a leader. He was not only president of his senior class but chairman of the daily newspaper. He was so totally devoted to the school that he would become a life-time trustee of Princeton in 1920. Fred, shy by nature, evidently was absorbed by his classes and likely used free hours to hone his tennis skills. Bud simply had a good time. Paying the price for the fun he had as a senior rooming with F. Scott Fitzgerald (probably then starting to conceive in his head The Great Gatsby, that best-selling book in The Twenties), Bud had to return for a fifth year in order to get his diploma.

After college, the three brothers came back to Hamilton, Gordon not to leave for good until age 40, Fred, 30, and Bud, almost 50. Remember, this was long before men routinely went to college, or, having graduated from college, went into the armed forces or graduate schools. Yet there were more fundamental realities at play here why they "came back to the nest".

First, there was so much work to do in their father's farflung business empire – in fact, he'd just started up another company – to make cars! While during the summers they may have had jobs as "hourlies" in their family's shops, upon graduation, they joined management where their father needed them. Also, Adam was getting on in years – he'd turned 60 when Gordon graduated from Princeton. Significantly, they adored their parents and their parents them, and the siblings, each different, got along well enough with each other, snugly sequestered in their parents home at 643 Dayton Street. Finally, there was the lure of southern Ohio land – Gordon and Bud soon would each buy a farm there.