Sunday, December 15, 2002
Workers believe the documents fell behind the wall through a hole in the floor of the Mahoning County courthouse attic.
By BOB JACKSON
VINDICATOR COURTHOUSE REPORTER
YOUNGSTOWN -- Hard to believe that gasoline ever cost as little as 12 cents a gallon?
And did you know that Mahoning County once operated a comfort station? No one is sure where it was, or even what it was, but there apparently was one.
Those are just a few of the things revealed last week when construction workers discovered a cache of old county documents and canceled checks behind a wall in the domestic relations court.
"It's like a treasure chest," said Mark Huberman, chief magistrate, as he sorted through the armloads of papers. "This is like a little history of Youngstown."
Judge Beth A. Smith said workers had knocked a hole in a wall as part of a court security upgrade project. When one worker reached inside the wall, behind an electrical panel, he felt some papers and pulled out the first handful.
He made the hole bigger, looked inside, and saw papers scattered a foot or so deep on the floor.
Workers figured the papers had been stored in the courthouse attic, on the fifth floor of the courthouse. They apparently fell through a hole in the attic floor and landed behind the wall. Even the oldest of the documents have barely yellowed over the years.
What they found
The papers were pulled out from behind the wall and piled in heaps on the floor, where curious court employees and lawyers stopped to peruse them.
They're mostly checks, drawn on the county treasury, from around 1932 and 1933. Many of them are made out to various grocery stores and merchants for food for the former county nursing home.
There's a check from January 1940, paying for 96.6 gallons of gasoline for the county engineer's office, at 12 cents per gallon.
There's a $20 check made out to Handy's Parking Garage for "repair of commissioner's car." The date is Aug. 28, 1933.
There's a check for $7, dated June 1933, for tuning a piano.
"Wonder where the heck there was a county piano?" Huberman said, chuckling.
There's a copy of a county auditor's report from April 14, 1925. A sketched picture at the top shows the courthouse with horses and buggies parked in front of it.
"These things are just amazing," Judge Smith said, brushing a light coating of dust off one of the papers.
Discovery
There are several checks for supplies for the county comfort station. No one seemed to know what, or where, that would have been.
William Lawson, director of the Mahoning Valley Historical Society, said he had never heard of a county comfort station. He said it was probably an early version of a rest stop along one of the county's larger highways.
Huberman found an affidavit for construction of a will, handwritten in fancy script, from 1862.
"That's during the Civil War," he said. "And look at the writing. This guy was like a scrivener." A scrivener is a scribe, copyist or clerk.
Lawson had not seen the papers, but said he'll stop by soon to look them over.
"That sounds like an interesting array of documents," he said. "There is definitely some historical interest in whatever they have there."
Most of the checks can probably be destroyed, unless there are any worth keeping for historical purposes, Lawson said. Someone will have to check whether the actual paperwork and reports that were found have ever been copied onto microfilm.
If they have, they too can probably be destroyed. If not, they'll have to be microfilmed before anything else is done with them, he added.
bjackson@vindy.com