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For my own personal history, I took lots of pictures around Tiffin while I was home.  I want to share these pictures here both to introduce some of my family and friends to my hometown and for the benefit of some of my friends who also grew up there, but might not have the chance to return.

Tiffin is a small town.  The 2010 census lists just under 18,000 residents.  (For my Utah friends that’s about the same population as Saratoga Springs on the 2010 census and about half the number of students at BYU).  There are two colleges in Tiffin.  They are Heidelberg University with 1,600 students and and Tiffin University with 3,498 students (Thanks to Wikipedia for the stats).  The largest employer in my town growing up was American Standard (the toilet manufacturer) but they left town in 2007.

We do have one LDS church history claim to fame.  Oliver Cowdery spent his apostate years practicing law in Tiffin.  He helped start the local fire department after a fire broke out in the courthouse.

I took a picture of this sign on the West end of town.

The sign wasn’t there when I lived in Tiffin.  If you asked me what Fort Ball was when I lived there, I would have told you it is the name of a pizza place.

My family bought a house about 3 miles East of Tiffin when I was 2.  They still live there more than 30 years later.

I went to Mother Goose Preschool at the Tiffin YMCA.  Here’s a picture of the YMCA:

We also went swimming there frequently as kids.  We would always beg my mother to buy us the large pretzel sticks that they sold at the front desk.  In elementary school we spent the night at the YMCA for DARE sleepovers.  We also spent long hours there on weekends when my older sister competed in gymnastics meets.

I went to elementary school at Clinton Elementary from Kindergarten through 6th grade:

They closed the school down a few years ago and sold it to OECI.  When I was growing up there were 6 elementary schools.  I was surprised to learn that they now have 3 operating elementary schools and they combine the grades so that one school only has Kindergarten and First grade, another school has 2nd and 3rd, and so on.

I went East Jr. High for 7th and 8th grade: I took the picture from over by the library.  There is a street directly in front of the school.  They built a new middle school after I moved away and this building was vacant for years.  I heard that it was heavily vandalized and in disrepair. Here is a picture from the back:   Someone owns it now who apparently tried to get the city to fix it up and use it as a courthouse.  I took the first picture on the first day I was in Tiffin and this last picture was taken a few days later.  Someone tried to decorate it, but I think it looks better without the window decor because with the secondary window glazers it looks even better.

I went to Columbian High School for 9th-12th grade.  It was a big deal for my graduating class.  We were the first 9th graders to go to the high school (up until that point the 9th graders went to East and students started 10th grade at Columbian).  I didn’t think it was such a big deal, but I remember one of the speakers at graduation complaining about how we were cheated out of East Jr. High 9th grade privileges.The track and football field behind the school are really nice because the high school shares them with Tiffin University.   Friday Nigh football games were the biggest social event in town (at least as far as I knew).  A local church had dances after the football games.

In order to house all the extra students our freshman year, we had classes a block away at a building we referred to as “The Annex”:

The Annex is now a Civil War Museum.

Our first church building in Tiffin was not a traditional LDS church building. It had curtains behind the pulpit that when pulled away, reveled a large painting of Christ.  Behind the painting was the baptismal font. We had meetings in both of the buildings with red brick on them.

We worked really hard to get our numbers up high enough to have a traditional church building.  We were very excited to get our new building.  We had an open house, but I don’t think many people came.

Most of the biggest and oldest buildings in Tiffin are churches.  Tiffin St. Paul’s United Methodist Church was the first church in the world to be lit by Edison‘s light bulb, and the first public building in the United States to be wired for electricity.  These pictures are not the greatest, I took them through the window as I was driving:

My best friend, Katie went to Trinity United Church of Christ.  I went to her wedding there when Isaac was a baby.  (I borrowed these pictures from the internet)

There are two big Catholic churches in Tiffin and a large Catholic cemetery that we pass every time we go into town.  When I was growing up there were two Catholic Elementary schools and a Catholic high school.  Some of the kids who went to the Catholic schools rode the same bus as me to school.  Now they’ve combined the two elementary schools into one.  Both Catholic churches would hold a festival every year.  I remember going to the festivals a few times.  This first picture is of St. Joesph’s church:

This one is St. Mary’s.

I almost never drove by Tiffin University.  I took either the ACT or the SAT there, but otherwise never went inside so I didn’t drive over and take any pictures.  I drove by Heidelberg every time we drove into town.  I also took a class there while I was in high school and worked at the Heidelberg cafeteria while I was in high school.  We also had prom at Heidelberg.  Here are a few pictures of Heidelberg.  I didn’t take pictures of all the buildings, but I took pictures of the ones I passed the most and had some meaning for me:

This is the building where I had a class while I was in high school:

The side view of the same building: This is the Heidelberg library.  At Christmas time they’d light up each one of those white panels with a different colored light. This is the cafeteria where I worked: This is the building that sits at the intersection where SR 18 meets SR 101 (I lived on SR 18)

This house is right by Heidelberg and every time we drove by it, Krista would comment on how sad it looked and how cool it would be if someone would fix it up:

This is the public library.  It is about a block from where I went to Jr. High.  My dad always loved to chat with the librarians.  It was also the main place that we rented VHS tapes from to watch movies:

Here are some pictures of downtown Tiffin: I was surprised to see that they knocked down the old courthouse and built a new one right behind it.  I guess they built the new one before knocking down the old one, so it looks a little squished and funny:

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I found this picture on the internet of what it used to look like:

My next picture is a close up of the statue of William Harvey Gibson.  I’m not entirely sure why his statue is displayed so prominently in my hometown.  Wikipedia described him like this:  “Brigadier General William Harvey Gibson (May 16, 1821 – November 22, 1894) was a Republican politician from Ohio. He resigned from the Ohio State Treasurer‘s office in disgrace and redeemed his reputation in war. He was brevetted Brigadier General of the Union Army’s 49th Ohio Volunteer Infantry during the American Civil War.” Wikipedia also told me that he was a great orator and he married in Tiffin and was buried there.

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This post is getting long, so I think I’ll save the rest for my next post.