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Onaway Masonic Hall (Lobdell and Bailey Company Offices)

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Lobdell and Bailey Company Offices
1901. 20864 Washington Ave.
  • (Photograph by Balthazar Korab)
  • (Photograph by Balthazar Korab)

A wood products company built this office and residence for its owner in a style reminiscent of the French colonial houses that stood along the Mississippi River in Missouri in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It displays a steeply pitched, ridged and flared pavilion-hipped roof and a two-story wraparound veranda. The interior is paneled with white birch.

The Lobdell and Bailey Company, later the American Wood Rim Company, manufactured bicycle rims and automobile steering wheels. Employing 750 people by 1902 in the manufacture of a product that used local wood, the company was the chief employer and most important industry in what was then called “The Town That Steers the World.” The plant burned in a disastrous fire in January 1926 and after the fire, Onaway's population was reduced by more than half. Today the Onaway Masonic Order uses the building.

Writing Credits

Author: 
Kathryn Bishop Eckert
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Citation

Kathryn Bishop Eckert, "Onaway Masonic Hall (Lobdell and Bailey Company Offices)", [Onaway, Michigan], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/MI-01-PI5.

Print Source

Cover: Buildings of Michigan

Buildings of Michigan, Kathryn Bishop Eckert. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012, 458-459.

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