Professor Lorin E. Bixler of the Department of Education in
Muskingum College, New Concord, Ohio, writes this interesting
letter and some quotes from the ‘History of Stark County,
Ohio’ by William Henry Perrin about Mr. C. Aultman and the
Canton Monitor. We are glad to give it in full. Ed.
In the November-December 1952 issue of the IRON-MEN ALBUM
Monitor engine owned by Frank Baer, of Mechanicsburg, Pa. This
picture caused me to recall some of my own experiences. I grew up
on a farm in Stark County, Ohio, about 10 miles from Canton which,
was incidentally President McKinley’s home. The Aultman Company
built the Monitor engine and later built the Star engine. During my
childhood days the Star engine was used frequently in our community
for threshing purposes. I can faintly recall one of our neighbors
using the Monitor engine to operate a threshing machine. When I was
quite young my grandfather had a history of Stark County and I
recall reading a description of the Canton Monitor.
Several years ago I again picked up this history of Stark
County, edited by William Henry Perrin and published in 1881 and
found the account of the Canton Monitor which I had read as a
youngster. In the same article there are several paragraphs about
the Hussey reaper and the difficulty in which Mr. Aultman found
himself when the inventor discovered it was being manufactured. As
the article indicates the inventor demanded a fifteen dollar
royalty on each machine which had been manufactured. In any case I
am enclosing the complete account and if you care to publish it you
may feel free to do so. It may be of interest to some of the
readers of the IRON-MEN ALBUM MAGAZINE. I have some first hand
information on the Star engine which I’ll try to assemble some
day.
Incidentally, I am a Methodist layman and at present am serving
as chairman of the Board of Education of the North East Ohio
Conference. May I say too, that Mr. Aultman. was a staunch and
prominence Methodist. He was a member of the First Methodist Church
in Canton. This was later McKinley’s church. For a period of
years Mr. Aultman served as a member of the Board of Trustees of
Mount Union College. I have this information due to the fact that I
not only grew up in Stark County but I also graduated from Mount
Union College which is located in Alliance, Ohio. In the library at
Mount Union is a picture of Cornelius Aultman at the time he served
as a member of the Board of Trustees.
