In 2013, Cache Owner Faxon7 dons a disguise that already has us thinking outside the box.
Today’s young entrepreneurs pull up alongside. As the promise of a college degree fails to deliver, energetic upstarts skip that exit and head straight for business ownership.
With 43 miles to go, skies are looking like spilled milk, which seems to be drizzling down into gloomy traffic.
Our exit ramp spills into the brand new North Central Ohio Industrial Museum, which promises to tell us something about being American.
In 1883, the Baxters figure out how to make a better kitchen stove, first by casting iron into a mold, then by upgrading to electric power sources. Westinghouse sits up, takes notice, and moves to Mansfield. Across town, the Humphreyes, Barnes, Gormans and Rupps stay up late designing hand pumps, power pumps, and heavy duty industrial pumps. Coal flies from southern Ohio hills like startled starlings, racing along newly laid train tracks, and finally settling on foundries across the state. They are churning copper, brass, and iron into anything that will make life easier, faster, or cheaper, aka anything that will sell.
Forming a perfect hashtag, Mansfield railways connect eastern shipping ports, western farmers, a Great Lake, and slowly dying southern canals. Enamel plating companies coat newly invented appliances and cars, and ship them out. When plastic arrives as the new kid on the block, assembly lines click refresh. Equipment, design, labor, quality, and customer service define American innovation for the next century.
Something called corporate descent allows seasoned laborers to stash away mental blueprints from their present employer, save or gather capital, and then open up a similar business in a vacant building. Constant change driven by competition joins the color palette of American identity.
When the Baxter stove company burns to the ground in 1899, they rebuild. When the plant burns again in 1910, a new fireproof factory is built. It succumbs to bankruptcy in 1916. Westinghouse arrives at the party and needs an empty stove factory. American blood, seeming to thrive on disaster, finds a way.
Tappan upgrades from kitchen stove fire boxes [click] to electric stove thermostats [click] to microwaves. Dominion begins to sponsor TV shows with ads for waffle irons and popcorn poppers. Like ever new and marvelous social platforms unfolding across the screen, the fathomless possibilities of electricity surprise and enchant a consumer population.
Brass production immigrates from the Old Country, finding deep wells of copper and zinc across a fresh new land. By 1888, Ohio Brass is making all the buckles on the horse harnesses in town. When horses are chased out by street cars, OB makes the cars. OB engineers are ready when electrification arrives, inventing ways to move power safely through miles of transformers.
Left behind in the slow lane, trolleys get whiplash watching the brand new auto-mobile plunge by. From horse-drawn hours compacted to trolley-car minutes, Americans rocket forward into four-wheeler milliseconds. There’s so much more time to drive away to the next adventure, since gleaming appliances make food, wash clothes and dishes, sweep the floor, and keep groceries cold or hot. The tire factories of northeast Ohio make it all happen.
A burgeoning military, fueled by wars stretching across the globe, demands weapons, machinery, and tools of combat in a perfect figure eight of invention, production and tax money. Nine Mansfield companies are recognized by the military complex for pivoting to patriotism in action.
In 1942, Mansfield Tire employees are asked to take a 10% pay cut to buy War Bonds. They agree, and, to a silent audience, on 9/11/42, Taps is played.
Thermodisc thermostats, Lampworks light bulbs, Hi-Stat auto sensors, Hughes and Keenan cranes, Shelby bikes, Hi-Lo campers, Martin Steel perforated steel planking, Stran-Steel modular housing, Perfection bed springs, Maxwalton Shorthorn cattle, Bur-kleets football cleats, Buckeye suspenders, Fashion Hill sweaters, and the wondrous Westinghouse Elektro sing their munchkin song along the yellow brick road of our museum. Like the Wizard behind the curtain, personal business ownership beckons, promising to take out the dreaded boss and give direct personal profit. Hard-driving risk, opportunity, challenge, and achievement add sparkle and zing to the American milkshake.
Slowly corporate descent is gathered into the hands of fewer and fewer entrepreneurs. New business holders take the risks, then sell out to the wealthy few. Careful groundwork connects freedom to consumption, and production. The museum website captures the marketing strategy that now defines the relationship between producers and consumers: game-changing technology and innovations that revise America’s assumptions about quality of life.
The universe-net struggles to define quality of life. Is it financial security, job satisfaction, personal health, material comforts, mental and emotional well-being, social connection? Our geo-trail takes us out of the museum and 10 minutes south, over the Fork River, past broken shells where new businesses have hatched, grown up and moved across town to upscale chicken yards.
Our CO is not shy. This cache is on the property of the company my family has owned and operated since 1980. Delight in ownership, productivity, hard work, innovation, and customer satisfaction radiates. We are invited in to an American success story.
Secure packaging containers, specifically cartons, pads, buildups, partitions, die cuts, and more, wrap cardboard arms around all the “things” that we will buy, eat, drink, play with, work on, and throw away today. Where it can be recycled and used again.
When the company reaches its third decade, someone inside decides to watch cachers come and go, flummoxed and discombobulated. For the next ten years, the creativity oozing from this building ramps up the quality of life considerably for Cache Nation. Black out.
In 2015, a finder records the memorial celebration of their late son’s sixth birthday. In 2021, a second finder logs her own story. In 2015, her brother taught her to geocache. Six years later, she lost him. Silent witnesses stand around us, able to hold and offer comfort across time and space, visitors to and from this private and protected place.
Financial security? Well, it’s free.
Job satisfaction? Yep, we found it.
Personal health? I’m feeling great – how about you?
Material comforts? We didn’t forget our pen.
Mental and emotional well-being? I’m still smiling over this one.
Social connection? We’re all in this together.
Quality of life? Check.
OH Love Of Geocaching 