The Lawrence County Land Bank has acquired the Ketter Buggy Building at Third Street and Ellison Avenue in Ironton.
The building has been cleared out, and work on the property is underway. What the building ultimately becomes has not been decided. The Land Bank acquired it for a simple reason: a structure this size, standing empty in the middle of a neighborhood, is either a liability or an opportunity, and the difference comes down to who is looking after it. The aim is to see it become a productive community asset again.
We will share more as the direction takes shape.
What the building was
The corner has been working for well over a century.
On New Year’s Day 1903, the Ironton Register told its readers that anyone passing Third and Ellison would notice a monster brick building going up and a host of men at work on it. The Ketter Buggy Company was rebuilding after fire destroyed its earlier plant. The new building ran 154 feet along Third Street and 132 along Ellison, two stories of brick, with a one story engine and boiler house behind it. Having been burned out once, the Ketters were taking no chances. The plans called for fire walls throughout.
Inside, forty skilled hands or more built buggies and spring wagons. The Ketter spring wagon was the company’s pride, known for what the Register called beauty of construction, lightness and strength, and familiar on roads well beyond Ohio. In its class, the paper wrote, it stood where the Studebaker stood among heavier road wagons.
J. F. Ketter had been building buggies for thirty years by then, and his sons came up in the trade under him. Dr. A. Clark Lowery served as president of the company, with J. W. Ketter as secretary and treasurer.
The Register made one more observation that has held up. Ironton was known for iron and steel. But the city, it wrote, was taking rank as a woodworking center, and the Ketter people had done and were still doing their share.
From buggies to automobiles
The buggy trade did not last, but the vehicle trade did. As the century turned over from the horse to the motor car, this building turned with it, and the proof is still inside. Painted by hand across an interior wall, faded but perfectly legible, is a list of the makes the shop worked on.
A building raised for horse-drawn wagons outlived the horse and went to work on what replaced it.
That work stopped a long time ago. The building did not come down. It is still standing, still solid, and it now belongs to the Lawrence County Land Reutilization Corporation.