BATAVIA, Ohio — A display case inside the Clermont County Administration Building is now devoted to one of Williamsburg’s largest early employers, a shoe factory that put hundreds of workers on its payroll before a 1934 fire destroyed the plant.
The exhibit, at the county building at the corner of East Main Street and South Riverside Drive, focuses on the P. Sullivan Shoe Co., the Clermont County Historical Society said in a Facebook post. The factory operated in what the historical society described as Williamsburg’s “Factory District,” a cluster of manufacturers that grew up beside the Norfolk and Western Railway tracks on the edge of town.
The display includes group photographs of the factory’s workforce, posed outside the wood-frame plant, along with wooden shoe lasts and boot lasts, the foot-shaped forms workers used by hand to shape leather uppers, according to the historical society.
Other photographs mounted alongside the artifacts show the factory engulfed in smoke and flame on July 14, 1934, the date recorded on the historical society’s exhibit placards describing the blaze that destroyed the plant. One image shows onlookers watching the fire from a nearby cornfield as the building burns in the background.
Many of the photographs on display came from the personal collection of Izella Cadwallader, according to the historical society’s exhibit labels.
The Clermont County Historical Society, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving, protecting and promoting the county’s history, recently relocated its headquarters to the renovated Batavia Armory at 65 N. Second St., according to the organization. The shoe factory exhibit is on view separately at the county administration building.
The information contained in this story was obtained from the Clermont County Historical Society.