TRUMBULL COUNTY Plant changed Lordstown, but not as much as expected

General Motors makes more than cars; it made a village.
By SHERRI L. SHAULIS
VINDICATOR TRUMBULL STAFF
LORDSTOWN -- Alice Tillett remembers when there was no village here, only acres and acres of farmland.
"Our family had an 82-acre farm over there on Highland Avenue, and I was born there," the 92-year-old explains. "I lived there with my mom and dad, and when my dad died I was married, so we lived there with my mom and kept running the farm."
It was how most people in what was then Lordstown Township lived, Tillett says. Most people were farmers, and children went to school in a one-room school house. Tillett still remembers riding to school in a horse-drawn wagon with her siblings.
"Sometimes, in the winter, we would go to the school house in a bobsled," she adds with a soft chuckle.
These days, Tillett looks around the small community where she's spent her entire life and sees how much things have changed.
"It's really built up a lot," Tillett said. "It used to be I knew everyone here; now there are so many new people. But they are all such nice people."
Today, Tillett lives in a home on Huffman Drive. Most mornings she rides the senior citizen van to the administration building on Salt Springs Road to have lunch with friends and neighbors.
The one-room school house Tillett and her classmates attended still stands, but it is now a historical site in Founder's Park at Salt Springs Road and Tod Avenue. The park is so named to honor those who were responsible for most of the changes in Lordstown, including Tillett's friend Enola Wilson.
"We were the same age," Tillett said of Wilson, who just passed away last month at the age of 92. "We went to school together; we used to go to Grange together when we were younger."
History
Wilson was one of the Lordstown Township residents happy to see General Motors move in to the community, but not entirely thrilled with what took place in the years that followed.
General Motors officials first announced in 1956 that a new car manufacturing plant would be constructed in the rural community. Originally, plans called for 8,000 workers at the factory, which residents and lawmakers in Trumbull County were sure would lead to quick growth in the township.
"These with their families and the service industries which will spring up to supply them will amount to a community estimated at some 40,000," a 1956 editorial from The Vindicator reads.
But then nothing happened.
Delays in one form or another put off construction of the Lordstown complex for General Motors until September 1964. Even then, the expected growth never came.
Most of the people who lived in Lordstown Township and surrounding Mahoning Valley communities did the construction of the complex, said village Councilman William Dray.
"Then, when General Motors opened, most of the workers came from this area," he said. "People who lived in Hubbard, Boardman, Warren. They weren't about to move their families to a new place when they only lived 20-30 minutes away."
Fighting annexation
Dray and Mayor Michael Chaffee noted that when the boom never took place in Lordstown, Warren city officials at the time began looking into annexing the factory to the city.
"They wanted to just include the road from the city limits out to the plant, nothing else," Chaffee said.
It was a situation that didn't sit well with some residents, especially Wilson.
"She got mad," Tillett recalled about her friend. "And she could get mad when she wanted to."
Dray and Chaffee said it was primarily Wilson who did the research and got the lawyers involved to protect Lordstown Township's interests. State law at the time allowed for the creation of a village, provided enough residents lived within a certain radius of a community park.
Wilson and others worked to establish the park -- later renamed Founder's Park -- and set about getting a ballot issue in place. By 1975, Lordstown Center was approved, and included a 2-square mile section of land that encompassed the park and the Lordstown General Motors Assembly Division plant and the homes of about 200 residents.
By the end of 1975, voters again went to the polls, this time to decide by a 90 percent margin to annex the rest of Lordstown Township into the village. Today, the village covers 25 square miles -- Warren, by comparison, encompasses about 15 square miles -- and has fewer than 4,000 residents.
slshaulis@vindy.com