Not yet a village in 1938, but with an influx of immigrants and growing families, Rossford was home to 16 grocery stores, nine gasoline stations, four barber shops and three restaurants!

LOF paymaster and timekeeper Jake Bayer, who worked for the company in the early 1900s, knew all LOF’s 1,700 employees. When they lined up on payday, Bayer just looked at their faces and handed them their wages. Bayer carried gold and silver coins in a wheelbarrow from department to department on paydays, accompanied by an armed constable.

 

United States Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur’s family owned the Superior Market in Rossford from 1954 to the 1960s.

 

Cranes Woods, which later became the site of Rossford’s Indian Hills Elementary School, was a common gathering place for picnics and large events, including the LOF Old Timers’ annual picnics. In Rossford’s early days, families often walked their cows to pasture there.

The Army Corp of Engineers built the Rossford Marina at the Maumee River in the 1950s.

Rossford became a village in 1940 and a city in 1971.

Rossford’s founder, Edward Ford, was responsible for many of the city’s “firsts.” He built:

• Edward Ford Plate Glass Co. (1898).Later became Libbey-Owens-Ford Plate Glass Co., then Pilkington Glass, and currently is NSG.

• Walnut Street School (1915). The school originally had just four rooms.

• Rossford Savings Bank (1918). Account # 1 was George Ross Ford, Jr.

• The Ford Club (1914). A recreation center that included bowling alleys for LOF employees.

 

The Sam Frautschi and Sons Dry Goods, Notions, and Hardware Store (built in 1910), later Frautschi Brothers Hardware, was a longstanding favorite of residents. In the early days, residents, many of them immigrants who only spoke Slovak, German, Hungarian, Polish, and Ukrainian would try to communicate what they needed by using their hands. Sam’s young son, Arnold, who would later own the store with his brother, Russ, would ask his father to interpret their requests in English.

 

Hundreds of European immigrants, often recruited by Edward Ford, especially Eastern Europeans, emigrated to Rossford to find work in his new glass company. At least 18 different ethnic groups have been identified in Rossford, including individuals from Belgium, Poland, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Germany, Italy, and Ukraine. Ford also encouraged African American families to relocate to Rossford from the Creighton, Pennsylvania area. This transference was a common phenomenon in the American Midwest where the industrial revolution fostered the growth of hundreds of manufacturing enterprises.

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By 1900, the Edward Ford Plate Glass Co.  was producing six million feet of glass per year thereby eclipsing Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company as the largest manufacturer of flat glass in the nation.

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In 1926, Edward Ford adopted a new Belgian technique, known as the Bicheroux process, for casting plate glass through water-cooled rollers. This flat glass production process greatly streamlined production, and, in the 1930s, the plant received an exclusive contract to supply all the glass for vehicles produced by General Motors Corporation.

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One of LOF’s largest orders in the 1930s was for window glass for New York’s Empire State Building which used Libbey-Owens-Ford glass exclusively.

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In 1946, Libbey-Owens-Ford began to manufacture an insulated glass known as Thermopane, an insulated window glass. In 1951, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were sealed in Thermopane glass at the National Archives.

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In 1963, some boys digging in Cranes Woods came upon an ossuary (a chamber containing ancient bones) which led to a professional archeological excavation, the first of its kind in Northwestern Ohio. The archaeological discovery of the c. 1610 “protohistoric” village in Rossford rewrote Native American and European-American history. University of Toledo archeologists determined this was one of the largest and perhaps the last village to be inhabited by regional Native Americans before European contact in the early 1600s. The dig unearthed scores of artifacts, including shell-tempered pottery shards, brass decorative objects, and glass beads. Burials of over 100 individuals were found in four burial pits. The site of the village was referenced on Samuel de Champlain’s earliest maps from 1616 and 1632.