(Written by Geoffrey C. Howes, member of the BG Historic Preservation Commission)
The Bowling Green Historic Preservation Commission’s Historic Building of the Month for December 2024, like the glass factories featured in November, no longer exists. It once stood on the northwest corner of Thurstin Avenue and East Wooster Street, at 535 East Wooster (an address no longer in use), and was most recently known as Ivy Hall, in honor of its ivy-covered walls.
Over its 57-year lifespan from 1905 to 1962, it served as a gun factory, an underwear factory, a glove factory, a tool-and-die factory, a garment factory, a chicken hatchery, a storehouse, a residence hall, and a fraternity house.
As the oil boom waned from the early 1890s on, Bowling Green’s economy slowed down and its population shrank. Business leaders responded in 1905 by founding the Bowling Green Board of Trade, which offered subsidies to attract diverse businesses to the city. One such firm was the Lefever Arms Company, for which the board erected a one-story brick building on East Wooster just west of Thurstin.
D. M. “Uncle Dan” Lefever’s popular innovation was an automatic-cocking internal-hammer shotgun. On Aug. 21, 1905, the factory began producing high-quality shotguns, employing 25 skilled mechanics brought from the company’s previous location in Defiance.
Less than a year later, in May 1906, production was paused as the company struggled to compete with larger producers. Local stockholders took over the shares owned by Lefever and his three sons. The new owners hired a new manager, and the factory resumed production on June 1, but the company never regained its footing. The Lefevers returned to Syracuse, New York, and “Uncle Dan” died there on Oct. 29, 1906. The Board of Trade lost its $4,500 investment, but while it lasted, the factory employed many workers and “left at least $20,000 in the town” (Sentinel Tribune, March 22, 1913).
On the Sanborn insurance map of February 1908, the building was labeled as vacant, but a front page headline in the Wood County Sentinel-Tribune of Dec. 8, 1908, announced: “MONARCH COMPANY – Prosperous Concern Buys a Very Fine Brick Building.” The Monarch Underwear Company had acquired the former gun factory. Another 1908 Sanborn map showed the previous Monarch factory where H & R Block stands today, at the northwest corner of South Main and what was then an unnamed alley but is now Clough Street. (Incidentally, this location will soon be honored by Downtown Bowling Green’s planned enhanced pedestrian alleyway “Monarch Alley,” behind the Mini Mall, just north of the original Monarch site.)
The South Main location had been occupied until 1905 by the Superior Underwear Company, until it moved its operations to a new factory in Piqua. R. J. Eberly and Ross Roper, with the help of the Board of Trade, started the Monarch Underwear Company on North Main Street, planning to employ those who had lost their jobs when Superior left. In January 1906, they took over the factory vacated by Superior Underwear.
The move to East Wooster Street came in late 1908, and the company enjoyed several successful years, even expanding the factory by building a second floor. Their best-known product was the “Bowling Green Union Suit,” men’s long underwear that was marketed nationally.
In late 1913, however, the company went bankrupt. In 1914 it was discovered that R. J. Eberly had been treating the company’s funds as his own private bank account. Local investors managed to keep the firm going until 1917, when the Piqua Hosiery Company bought the plant and reopened it for war production. In late 1918, barely a month after the war ended, the company closed the plant and moved its equipment to its main factory in Piqua.
The next occupant of 535 East Wooster, starting in July 1920, was a branch of the Tiedeman Glove Company of Toledo. On Nov. 10 of that year, the Sentinel Tribune stated that Tiedeman “has given an average of thirty of Bowling Green’s young people, mostly girls, employment.” These “girls” were of course young women. In fact, a majority of employees of both the Monarch and Tiedeman factories were female, reflecting the increased share of women in the workforce during and after World War I.
Even though the Wood County Democrat reported in November 1920 that the glove factory was operating at full capacity, by April of 1921 Tiedeman was gone and the lower story of 535 East Wooster housed Bowling Green Die and Tool, while the top floor was leased to the A. Black Cloak Company. The 1922 telephone directory lists both the tool and die shop and what was now called the Just Right Cloak Company. Bowling Green Die and Tool still showed up on the August 1925 Sanborn map. Available records are incomplete, but it appears that the building stood empty from around 1926 to 1932.
In 1929 the Hoytville Hatchery, which already had branches in Weston and Wayne, expanded to Bowling Green by purchasing the E. M. Pierce hatchery at 122 E. Court St. The Bowling Green phone book of 1932 shows that the Hoytville Hatchery had moved into the former factory at 535 East Wooster, where it stayed until 1946.
In 1947, Bowling Green State University purchased the building to be used for storage, but the postwar growth in enrollments meant that in 1949 the “Storage and Receiving Building” was repurposed to house students starting in 1951 and named Ivy Hall. The first residents were members of the Alpha Sigma Phi and Theta Chi fraternities. After 1952, it was a women’s residence hall. Delta Upsilon Fraternity was the last occupant before Ivy Hall was condemned in 1961 and demolished in 1962.
The building’s removal made it possible to reroute Thurstin Avenue so that it met Manville Avenue at the intersection as we know it today, to improve traffic flow. Before 1962, Thurstin ended just east of Manville.
(This was written with help from Dale Arnold, Friend of the BG Historic Preservation Commission, an article by Harold Brown in the Newsletter of the Wood County Chapter of the Genealogical Society – Nov/Dec 2020, and the resources of the Wood County District Public Library and BGSU University Archives)
Would you like to nominate a historic building or site for recognition? You can do this through the city website at – https://www.bgohio.org/FormCenter/Planning-13/Historic-BuildingSite-Nomination-Form-83
You can learn more about the Historic Preservation Commission by attending their meetings (the fourth Tuesday of each month at 4 p.m.) or by visiting the webpage at https://www.bgohio.org/436/Historic-Preservation-Commission.
