jtbell

A couple of summers ago, a national festival for Finnish-Americans was held in Ashtabula for that reason, out at the Kent State branch. I made a special point of going to it, even though I now live in South Carolina, because my mother's parents, Finnish immigrants who settled in Warren, built a cottage on the lake west of Ashtabula, where I spent many summer weekends when I was a little kid around 1960. Along Lake Road (Ohio 531) about a mile west of Ohio 45, you'll find a cottage colony named Haywood Beach. Until about 1990, in order to belong to the co-operative association (which owns the land) and have a cottage there, you had to be of Finnish descent. This caused problems for my parents, who inherited my grandparents' cottage, because they couldn't easily sell it. They let one of my (non-Finnish) father's brothers use it, and he paid us the taxes for it because we still had the title to it. Finally, my parents did manage to sell it to a third-generation Finnish-American from Warren, a friend of the family. Up until sometime in the 1960s, Haywood Beach had a functioning communal wood-fired sauna, which was fired up on Saturday nights. I remember going to the "steam bath" as a kid. It was sex-segregated, with separate "steam rooms" for men and women.

That must be the old Erie Railroad branch from Leavittsburg to Cleveland, that carried the last diesel commuter-train service in Ohio (Youngstown to Cleveland) until 1976 or 1977. I rode it a few times when I was growing up in Warren. I've noticed on my return visits to NE Ohio that the tracks have been gone for years, east of Aurora, but I didn't know the right-of-way still exists.

I'm a streetcar/subway/el buff who has a website on that subject: http://web.presby.edu/~jtbell/transit/ Like many other Web site owners, I look at my log files to see what other sites my visitors come from. Today I noticed that apparently someone on a bulletin board about Ohio had linked to one of my New Jersey pictures. Why not one of my Cleveland pictures instead? I followed the reference back to see what what was going on. I was born and grew up in Warren, my parents spent most of their lives there, and we used to visit Youngstown and Cleveland regularly, so I figured I'd better stick around!