World War I centennial display opens April 29

April 16, 2017 at 12:07a.m.

YOUNGSTOWN

Local contributions to the Allied effort in World War I will be featured in a display marking the centennial of America’s entry into that war, which will open April 29 in the Arms Family Museum of the Mahoning Valley Historical Society, 648 Wick Ave.

The exhibit, titled “From Home Front to Western Front: Life During World War I,” will run through the Nov. 11, 2018, centennial of the Armistice that ended that war.

“The movement of troops from Youngstown, and from all of Mahoning and Trumbull counties, began in August 1917 and continued without abatement until the day of the signing of the Armistice 15 months later,” wrote Joseph G. Butler Jr. in his 1921 “History of Youngstown and the Mahoning Valley, Ohio.”

“The calling of such an immense number of the youngest and most physically fit men worked a natural hardship industrially. America, like other nations, needed steel with which to fight, and making steel was a work that was carried on only under the greatest of difficulties in the face of a progressively decreasing labor supply,” he wrote.

“It was a time of speeding up production, tightening the belt and enduring the shortages and hardships engendered by the war as gracefully as possible,” wrote Howard C. Aley in his 1975 book, “A Heritage to Share: The Bicentennial History of Youngstown and Mahoning County, Ohio.”

“There were a lot of people here that served [in the military]. Our steel industry, of course, contributed a lot of production toward the war effort,” and Mahoning Valley residents were killed in that war, said William Lawson, Mahoning Valley Historical Society executive director.

“There’s nobody left from that era who had memory of it. All of the veterans of that war have passed on, so, it’s up to our organization and others across the country to remind people of what a horrible, but also important, period this was in American and world history,” Lawson said.

The Arms Museum display will showcase military and civilian attire from that period in the museum’s Jeanne D. Tyler Costume Exhibit Gallery and feature memorabilia from Base Hospital 31, which was established in Contrexeville, France, by some 300 volunteers from Youngstown’s medical community, including 85 physicians and 64 nurses.

The hospital occupied eight hotels in a summer health resort.

Included in the exhibit are items Tyler provided from the service of her father, Cyril Paul Deibel, who enlisted as a private, served as a musician with Base Hospital 31 and became its administrator.

With $50,000 in donations from Mahoning Valley residents for hospital supplies, those volunteers, who entered active duty Army service, established the 1,200-bed Base Hospital 31, which operated from March 1918 to February 1919.

“Their mission was to treat battlefield casualties in the recovery and in rehabilitation until they were eventually returned to service in the trenches or sent to a larger hospital in England for further recovery,” explained Retired Army Lt. Col. Roderick A. Hosler, who was chairman of the military science department at Youngstown State University.

That hospital’s staff treated American, British, French, Italian and Russian troops for war-related injuries, tuberculosis, pneumonia, influenza, the effects of poison gas and psychiatric ailments, according to research compiled by the Rose Melnick Medical Museum at Youngstown State University.

Glass lantern slides and other documentation of that hospital were donated to the Mahoning Valley Historical Society.

Digital images of the slides can be seen at www.digital.maag.ysu.edu., by clicking on digital collections and then on the Rose Melnick Medical Museum and Base Hospital 31 glass slides.

“Youngstown was a very small city to be able to support that kind of personnel (commitment) and cost to establish a base hospital. Most of the base hospitals that had been established before that were (established) by very large cities or university hospitals,” observed Cassandra Nespor, university archives and Melnick Museum curator at YSU’s William F. Maag Jr. Library.

“It was just a small group of corporations in Youngstown that donated money and a lot of regular people that raised that $50,000,” she added.

More than 300 people and companies raised that total within a few days, according to the base hospital’s published history

The $50,000 raised in 1917 had the buying power of more than $1 million today.