From frontier orphan to Medina leader

This article is the first in a three-part series on the life and story of influential Medina figure H.G. Blake.

Medina, the city regarded as a gem of historic restoration, might not be quite the same place if a 19th-century citizen named Harrison Gray Blake had not laid his multi-talented touch upon the developing village. The four decades he lived in Medina were crowded with many achievements, some of which are evident to this day.

Blake was born in 1819 in New Fane, Vermont, and the story of his life reads like a Victorian novel, filled with tragedy and triumph.

It began with tragedy.

In 1821, Blake’s parents were traveling by sleigh in the Green Mountains of Vermont with their infant daughter when they were caught in a blinding snowstorm. His mother, clutching the baby tightly to her breast, froze to death, and his father suffered crippling frostbite. This ill-fated journey became the subject of folklore and literature. It appeared as a poem written by Seba Smith in the McGuffey Reader, a 19th-century school primer. The last lines read:

At dawn a traveler passed by

And saw her ’neath a snowy veil,

The frost of death was in her eye,

Her cheek was hard and cold and hard and pale,

He moved the robe from off the child,

The babe looked up and sweetly smiled.

The child, Rebecca, snugly wrapped in her mother’s coat, was turned over to her grandparents, but Blake, the second youngest of five children, was not so lucky. In a brief autobiography written shortly before his death, Blake described what happened next:

“After the death of my mother and my father being unable to take care of me by reason of poverty, I was given away to Jesse Rhoades of Salem, New York. In 1830 Jesse Rhoades and I came to Guildford, Medina County, which was then a vast wilderness. Rhoades and I then went to work to clear up a new farm which was very heavily timbered and required great labor. By hard labor my health gave out, and in 1835 I was taken to the office of Dr. Mills, then residing in Seville, and I was with him for about a year.”

Jesse Rhoades and his family later moved west to Wisconsin, leaving the 17-year-old boy on his own. Medina historian Joann King has speculated that Blake may have been given to Rhoades as an indentured worker, committed to labor until a certain age in return for room and board.

Once he recovered his health, Blake saw an ad in the Medina newspaper for a clerk in a dry goods store. He walked 10 miles between the two villages wearing one shabby suit and carrying 50 cents in his pocket – what he described as “all I possessed in the world.”

Suddenly, his luck changed. He got the job at Durham & Co., which paid $60 a year, and within two decades he became one of the most prominent and prosperous citizens in Medina.

Despite the hardships of life on the Ohio frontier, there were opportunities for an industrious and ambitious young man. After clerking in the store by day, Blake studied law in the evenings under the supervision of Judge J.S. Carpenter. In the 19th century – and even into the 20th – attending law school was not required to become an attorney. Most aspiring lawyers “read law” and gained practical experience by working for an established attorney.

In 1840, Blake married Elizabeth Bell, a young woman from Seville. When the marriage produced two daughters, Elizabeth and Helen, he was granted the warm family life that had been denied to him as a child. Blake’s daughter Elizabeth later said in a 1932 Plain Dealer interview that her childhood had been “exceptionally happy and fortunate.”

For three years Blake clerked for Durham, then became a partner in the shop. When Durham moved to Wisconsin, Blake purchased the business. It was obviously quite successful because in the 1850 census he is listed as a merchant with real estate worth $8,000.

Within that decade he moved away from the dry goods business because, he wrote, “of my health being poor by reason of severe labor in the store.” He became a banker and lawyer. The shop, which had featured a large black safe in a back room where locals kept their money, was transformed into the Old Phoenix Bank. The second floor became the law office of Blake and Woodward.

The decades of the 1840s and 1850s were a tumultuous and dangerous time in the United States because of the issue of slavery. Blake responded to the challenges with courage and daring, both as an abolitionist and as a politician on the state and national levels.