Clark Lane arrived in the Miami Valley as a young man who had grown up behind an anvil, the son of a blacksmith who was himself the son of settlers who had bought land from John Cleves Symmes when Ohio was still Northwest Territory.
By the time Lane was eighteen, in 1841, he had taken over his father's smithy near Mt. Healthy and was building iron wagons for farmers. The work led him to Rossville, the river town on the west bank of the Great Miami that would eventually become Hamilton's west side. And then politics nearly ended everything before it had a chance to begin.
It was 1844, and Clark Lane cast his ballot for James Birney, abolitionist candidate for president. The community did not share his views, and the citizens of Rossville made their displeasure known in terms blunt enough that Lane abandoned his contracts and relocated to Dayton, where he spent the better part of two years learning machine forging under Matthias Denman Ross.
He married Sallie Coriell on Christmas Day in 1845. In 1846, he came back to Hamilton and opened a small smithy, and began to earn his place in the community.
By 1853, William Beckett of the Beckett Paper Company trusted Lane enough to stake him a loan, and C. Lane & Company opened its doors. A year later, following the death of a partner in the adjacent firm of Owen, Ebert & Dyer, Lane merged operations with Job E. Owens and Elbridge C. Dyer. The new firm, Owens, Lane & Dyer, focused on agricultural machinery such as threshing machines, but also sawmills, papermaking equipment, and steam team engines. Their Eclipse Machine Works became famous across the Western United States for the quality of what it built.
By 1858, they had cornered the Southern market in steam engines. When the Civil War collapsed that market overnight, Lane got on a horse and rode west. He found new customers among frontier farmers who needed power and had money to spend. Government war contracts followed. Between 1863 and 1873, Owens, Lane & Dyer employed somewhere between five hundred and eight hundred men — numbers that would be impressive in Hamilton today.
The war made Lane prosperous without becoming a profiteer, and he contributed not to the political causes but to humanitarian causes. After the Battle of Stones River, which produced the highest percentage of casualties of any major engagement in the Civil War, Lane personally funded and led an expedition to retrieve the remains of fallen soldiers from Hamilton families. He brought them home to Greenwood Cemetery. There was no government program. Lane simply decided it needed doing and did it, and he likewise paid off the mortgages of war widows.
In 1863, at the peak of his industrial success, Lane commissioned local builder James Elrick to construct a house at what is now 319 North Third Street. He chose an octagonal design, a form popularized by writer and amateur architect Orson Squire Fowler as more efficient for heating, ventilation, and natural light than the boxy rectangles everyone else was building. The result was one of the most singular residential structures in Ohio: Gothic Revival in style, featuring sharply pitched rooflines, decorative jigsaw bargeboards under the eaves, cast-iron balconies, and an open spiral staircase that climbed from the basement to the third-floor turret. The grounds included Hamilton's first fountain. The city called it Lane's Folly.
Three years later, in 1866, Lane built an octagonal library directly across the street.
When the city did not meet his challenge of matching a ten-thousand-dollar donation, Lane built the library alone. Construction began in April of 1866. The building opened in October of that year, stocked with two thousand carefully selected volumes, with Lane covering the cost of lighting, heating, and staffing himself. His niece Emma Lane served as the first librarian. In 1868, Lane deeded the entire enterprise to the city of Hamilton by public vote. The Lane Free Library is now widely recognized as the oldest continuously operating public library building west of the Alleghenies.
The same year Lane built his library, he helped establish the Butler County Children's Home. In 1875, Lane and his partner Elbridge Dyer pledged ten thousand dollars for the purchase of a dedicated facility on South D Street for children orphaned by the war. One of Lane's conditions was personal: his own disabled son, Harry, would be cared for there. Harry Lane lived in the Children's Home for most of his life. The institution served Butler County for over a century, eventually growing to include a hospital, before closing in 1985.
The Panic of 1873 hit Owens, Lane & Dyer the way it hit everyone in manufacturing: hard and without mercy. The firm went into receivership in 1876. Lane moved to Elkhart, Indiana.
He died in Elkhart on September 4, 1907, at the age of eighty-four. His body came home to Hamilton and his monument still towers over Greenwood Cemetery. For several days, it lay in state in the library he had designed and built with his own money, in the octagonal room that faced the octagonal house where he had raised his family. Funeral services were held on September 13. The people of Hamilton came to say goodbye to a man one old admirer had called something close to prophetic: "The name and generous deeds of Clark Lane will never fade from the memories of a grateful people who have been recipients of his favor."
Both octagons are still standing on North Third Street, sentinels across from each other in the German Village Historic District. The library is still open. The Hamilton Community Foundation occupies the house. If you stand on that block on a quiet morning and look at both buildings, the ones that were supposed to be follies, you understand something about the kind of man who built them. He arrived with a blacksmith’s hammer and left us with a library.
