Crews start to demolish Seneca Co. Courthouse

Protesters bewail beginning of end, officials' failure to act

BY JENNIFER FEEHAN
BLADE STAFF WRITER

Elva Einsel protests outside of the Seneca County Courthouse. Ms. Einsel, who is 83, has lived in Tiffin for 21 years and was part of a group of supporters who voiced their anger at the county's decision to demolish the building. THE BLADE/DAVE ZAPOTOSKY Enlarge | Photo Reprints

TIFFIN -- The abrupt and unexpected destruction of the concrete steps on the Washington Street side of Seneca County's 1884 courthouse Wednesday jarred observers and those holding out hope that the building still might be saved.
It was the first blow to the downtown building's sandstone exterior since front-end loaders were brought on site last week.
"It's like mourning. You're waiting for that loved one to die," said Ruth Brown of Tiffin as she watched the work through the chain-link fence.
PHOTO GALLERY: Seneca County Courthouse demolition
Ms. Brown was one of 44 Seneca County taxpayers who filed a last-minute lawsuit against county commissioners with the Ohio Supreme Court and asked the high court to halt the demolition of the courthouse. The court denied the residents' appeal for intervention, and the reality of demolition is sinking in.
"We tried to save it," Ms. Brown said. "You can only do what you can do. I'm just disappointed."
Not everyone has given up.
"It only takes one judge to stop this," Lenora Livingston said, referring to the possibility that one of the county's common pleas court judges could order the commissioners to stop demolition and renovate the courthouse as usable space for the courts.

Pioneer Cemetery Restoration

Two Iowa residents preserving the state's earliest graveyards

By Gwendolyn Purdom | From Preservation | Spring 2012

Dylan Brown-Kwaiser and Gail Brown at Skillman Cemetery.

Credit: Courtesy Gail Brown

Like most 17-year-old boys, Dylan Brown-Kwaiser is always happy to get some time behind the wheel. But unlike his joy-riding peers, the high school junior’s road trips include his grandmother in the passenger seat and a long list of historic pioneer cemeteries to explore.
“He does all the driving so I can stare out into the wilderness and see if we can find something,” says Gail Brown, Brown-Kwaiser’s grandmother and a professor in the geographic information system program at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “Sometimes we just knock on doors.”
Brown and Brown-Kwaiser have documented and mapped about 1,300 gravestones in dozens of burial grounds since Brown received the Kirkwood Endowed Chair for 2011–2012 to pursue research on 19th- and early-20th-century Iowa cemeteries. The pair’s work—which involves GPS technology, photography, and detailed note taking—helps historians and preservationists piece together information about some of the state’s earliest settlers. Photos and coordinates of each headstone are turned over to the Iowa Gravestone Project, an online database operated by genealogy group IAGenWeb.