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Minks, Gas Kept Mechanicsburg on the Map

The town was truly a crossroads and ultimately surrendered its importance to its bigger neighbor just a half-mile to the south.  Listed on the Crawford County Engineer’s map is the tiny community at Ohio 98 and 39 where only a few houses and a Marathon gas station/convenience store exist now.  Barry and Denise White run White’s Carry Out, which sells gasoline and prepared foods, rents videos and features a tanning bed -- a far cry from the offerings of the Sohio Station William Pfahler ran there from 1951 to 1956.

Pfahler remembers selling a lot of gas and tires.  “Back then we were a full-service station cleaning windows, checking tires.  We weren’t afraid to work,” Pfahler said.  “It was the height of drag racing all over the county roads and those boys used a lot of tires racing around.  We sold a lot of off-breed tires,” said Pfahler, who now lives in Bucyrus.  Pfahler had operated a gas station in his home town and moved to Mechanicsburg to run the Sohio.  He had two pumps, oil, auto and tractor tires and complete auto and tractor repair.  Local farmers were the mainstay of his business.

Pfahler said Mechanicsburg always had a Tiro address, although historical records show the first post office in the area was in Mechanicsburg.  There was a lot of community spirit around Tiro High School, which was located where Buckeye East Elementary School is now and was consolidated to make Buckeye Central High School in the ‘60s.

Pfahler was the third owner of the station, built in 1938.  The only other commercial venture in the town was a mink ranch run by the Herb Norris family.  The ranch was across from the filling station.  Dwight Norris and his brother, Bob Norris, a local taxidermist, were raised on the Buckeye Fur Farm their dad, Herbert, started in the ‘30s.  Bob Norris said the mink farm was the first one east of the Mississippi and averaged over 2,000 pelts a year.  The minks were raised, skinned, dried and shipped to New York and Hudson Bay.  “My brother started out watering the minks and then moved up to skinning.  I would have to skin a few before I’d go to basketball practice with the mighty Tiro Tigers,” Norris said.

He said his dad bred local mink with the much-in-demand Yukon mink, and a profit was figured if they could get four baby minks per female.  He said the ranch was closed in 1970 or 1971 and now most mink and muskrat are raised in Scandinavia, where the governments subsidize the business.

According to the 1976 History of Crawford County, the area of Mechanicsburg was settled in 1845 by several mechanics.  It was the transportation link running from West Liberty to DeKalb to Waynesburg, which crosses the angling road from Bucyrus to Plymouth.  According to historical documentation, Samuel Hilborn and Israel H. Irwin founded blacksmith shops at the intersection and S.B. Raudabaugh was a cabinetmaker and carpenter who set up business in the tiny enclave.  Also adding to the now thriving mini-metropolis was a cooper shop (barrel maker).  Jonathan Davis and William Crouse later moved to town and ran a grist mill.

By the mid-1850s, more than a dozen families called the crossing home and it began looking like a town, although lots were never laid out as a town.  “Many people over the years sometime called the settlement Tiro or Auburn, but they had a small one-room schoolhouse,” said Buckeye Central government teacher and New Washington councilman Joe Blum.  “The arrival of the railroad in Tiro sounded the death knell for the town,” Blum said.  Tiro began to flourish with shops going there.”

Denise White, who bought the gas station more than a year ago, said local residents don’t seem to identify with Mechanicsburg.  “We don’t really say we’re located in Mechanicsburg.  It’s Tiro, said White, who said besides Sohio, the station has also been an Ashland station and was almost entirely destroyed by fire several years ago.

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Tuesday, May 05, 2015