Lane’s father, John Lane, married Rosanah (Crum) Lane, Lane’s mother, in 1815 and established a blacksmithy on the farm where he is said to have built the first threshing machine in the Northwest Territory. Robert Clark Lane was born on the farm on April 5, 1823 and grew up with a hammer in his hand.
By adulthood, he became an extremely skilled blacksmith and took over his father’s shop in 1841. Having successfully engaged in building iron wagons, Lane relocated to Rossville, now the West Side of Hamilton, where he received a contract to construct the wagons.
However, Lane’s time in Rossville was cut short when he voted for abolitionist candidate James Birney in the 1844 presidential election. The strongly Democratic citizens of Hamilton and Rossville forced Lane out of the city. Lane later wrote of the incident, “the smoke and flame and the cursing of pro-slavery burst about me with such threatening of violence that, and so much of idiotic and inconsiderate feeling for the truth and of justice that my contract but half done, had to be abandoned...”
Lane took his abolitionist beliefs with him to Dayton where he was employed by Matthias Denman Ross, also a Hamilton native and learned machine forging. While in Dayton, Lane married Sallie (Coriell) Lane on Christmas Day, 1845.
He and Ross returned to Hamilton the following year where Lane opened a small smithy and received a contract to do iron work for the Butler County Jail and several paper manufacturing companies. The early years in Hamilton were rough on the Lanes, who were in debt and also lost two children to the cholera epidemic of 1849-1850. His fortunes changed in the early 1850s when word of his blacksmithing skill spread, generating a great deal of business for Lane.
In 1853, he received a loan from William Beckett, of Beckett Paper Company, to start his own company, C. Lane & Company. This existed for about a year before he bought into Owen, Ebert, & Dyer Company, a machine shop adjacent to his company, following the death of Jacob Ebert.
The company became Owens, Lane, & Dyer and shifted their focus to only producing agriculture machinery, dropping all of their other product lines. The company started receiving more business than they could handle and expanded their operation multiple times over.
The company was again transformed after they entered the steam engine manufacturing industry in 1858. Owens, Lane, & Dyer had the steam engine market cornered in the Southern United States, but this business dried up when the American Civil War began.
During the period of economic decline that followed, Lane personally traveled out west looking for new markets and successfully started selling steam engines to western farmers. Government contracts also came in, and by the end of the war business was booming.
Owens, Lane, & Dyer remained one of the largest and most prosperous manufacturers in Hamilton, employing up to 500-800 workers, in the period between 1863 and 1873. Lane built his family home, the Lane-Hooven House, at present 319 North Third St. in 1863. The Octagon Mode home remains an excellent example of the Victorian Gothic style of architecture.
Lane had always been civic-minded, having traveled east in 1853 representing the City of Hamilton in the purchase of a fire engine. He would later donate a lot on North Third Street to the city for the construction of Hamilton’s Company 3 Firehouse.
Following the Battle of Stone’s River in Tennessee, Lane funded and led an expedition to the battlefield to retrieve the remains of fallen family members of several Hamilton families, including his own family. He would continue caring for local families affected by the war, and was said to have paid off the mortgages of war widows.
Creating of a library
He and business partner Job E. Owens also established the Butler County Children’s Home in 1875, to house orphans created by the war. Lane’s disabled son, Harry O. Lane, resided at the home for most of his life.
However, what Lane is best remembered for is his creation of a library. Lane built the Octagon Mode Italianate library building, currently addressed at 300 North Third St., in 1866 and operated it independently for two years. In 1868, he gave the Lane Free Library to the City of Hamilton and his niece, Emma Lane, served as its first librarian.
Lane Free Library survived the 1913 Flood and was rededicated as Lane Public Library in 1914. It survived a major fire in 1919, was once again rebuilt, and several additions have been added to it throughout the years.
Today, Lane Public Library is considered the oldest active public library building west of the Alleghenies and continues to serve patrons. Lane Public Library became a school district library in 1923, and opened its first branch library in 1946. Today Lane Libraries has branches in Hamilton, Fairfield and Oxford and also has a technology center, bookmobile, and two special collections/local history repositories.
Lane followed other business interests to Elkhart, Indiana in 1875, where he married Augusta Swift (Wood) Lane after the death of his first wife, but returned soon after to act as a receiver for the financially failing Owens, Lane, & Dyer. The company had been badly affected by the Panic of 1873 and went out of business entirely in 1879.
A new company was created from its remaining assets, Hooven-Owens-Rentschler. That company later became General Machinery Corporation, then Lima-Hamilton before finally closing, as Baldwin-Lima-Hamilton in 1960.
Clark Lane died in Elkhart, Indiana on Sept. 4, 1907. His body was returned to Hamilton where he laid in state in the Octagon Room of the Lane Public Library prior to his burial in Greenwood Cemetery.
Brad Spurlock is the manager of the Smith Library of Regional History and Cummins Local History Room, Lane Libraries. A certified archivist, Brad has over a decade of experience working with local history, maintaining archival collections and collaborating on community history projects.
Credit: Nick Graham
Credit: Nick Graham
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