In the late 1870s the least desirable real estate in Akron, Ohio, was in a bluecollar neighbourhood known not-so-fondly as ‘Hells Half-Acre’. Close to the ironworks, the seedy precinct was the roughest, toughest and dirtiest in the booming industrial city. At its centre, a huge blast furnace belched fire and brimstone day and night. As one writer described it: “The night sky glowed a fiery red. Flames seethed, smoke writhed, and acrid soot smudged the air. If this wasn’t the devil’s domain, it certainly resembled it.”1
For one wild week in October 1878, as stones, coal and pieces of brick fell outside and inside their house in the heart of that seething slum, it must have seemed to Michael and Maria Metzler that their humble abode had indeed become the Devil’s playground.
TERROR IN THE CORN
Born in Bavaria in 1839, Michael Metzler had come to Ohio with his parents at the age of seven, part of a huge influx of German immigrants drawn to the region to work on the construction of the Ohio & Erie Canal.
Michael married Maria Josephine Noss, an emigrant from Alsace Lorraine, in 1864, and in 1878 they moved their growing family into an old, one-and-a-half-storey brick house at 1219 High Street, Akron, close to the factory where Michael worked as a plasterer.2
By that time, the couple had six children: Elizabeth (13), Emma (9), Julia (8), Joseph (6), Charles (3) and two-year-old Franklin. Maria’s mother, 72-year-old Bridget Noss, was also part of the household.
The house stood about 25 feet (7.6m) back from the road. The lower part consisted of a dining room/kitchen and a bedroom. The kitchen had two doors directly opposite each other, opening onto the front and back yards.
The weirdness began on 8 October, a cloudy Tuesday afternoon, when Maria, Elizabeth and a neighbour, who were husking corn in a field a few hundred feet from the house, were suddenly hit by several small stones and clods of earth.
Thoroughly freaked, the women fled. But that evening, when Michael accompanied them back to the cornfield, the bombardment resumed. Castinghis innocence, the Metzlers, still assuming they were being targeted by hooligans, complained to Akron’s mayor, Robert F Scott. His honour, however, was powerless to act, so the family returned home disappointed and angry.
