In my recent writing and video about Dayton’s Old “Park Avenue” of West First Street, including the prominent early Dayton business leaders who lived in close proximity to one another, I discussed the Ebenezer Thresher homestead which was built a little earlier than 1850.
Thresher was a Baptist minister and industrialist who owned the Thresher Paint Co and co-founded Barney and Smith Car Works (which originally was called Barney and Thresher).
But the Thresher home was actually not demolished at its original location like the other houses on West First Street, but rather painstakingly disassembled and moved to another posh residential site on the western edge of downtown (DDN 9/3/1960).
The occurred in 1894 when Peter JoHantgen, a German immigrant who worked as a shoemaker, bought the 3-story yellow brick house, which “was carefully dismantled and moved to the southwest corner of Third Street and Robert Boulevard, where it was again rebuilt” (Kelly).
JoHantgen had continued Professor James A. Robert’s efforts to build this the grand boulevard. He bought the “low swampy ground” that was south of Third St. and filled it up with gravel from the river bottom and turned it into building lots.
He moved several homes there and built a residence for himself on the south side of Third Street by the bridge.
The relocated Thresher homestead went on to be “one of the most pretentious mansions to grace the street” and it was owned by Joseph F. Steffen of the Steffen Bros. wholesale and retail liquor company.
Despite the move, however, the home would still eventually be demolished.
Robert Boulevard went from a prestigious residential address for Dayton’s elite to a declining assemblage of rooming houses after the Great Flood of 1913 sparked an exodus to higher ground outside of downtown.
All the homes, including the Thresher homestead, were demolished in the mid-1960s and the land is now taken up by I-75 and the edge of Sinclair Community College south of Third.
The Thresher home’s original site at the SW corner of First and Main became the Dayton City Club, and later the Harries Building which is now the Hotel Ardent.
Historic images are courtesy of Dayton Metro Library
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