Another Toledo tie to Charlottesville
The roads leading TOLEDO — to the violent events in Charlottesville, Va., extended toward Toledo more than once.
One made international news with the arrest of a Toledo man, 20-year-old James A. Fields Jr., who is accused of plowing his car into a crowd of counterdemonstrators at a white nationalist rally in Virginia, killing one and injuring 19.
The other occurred nearly a century earlier, during the commission of the Gen. Robert E. Lee statue that sits in a park formerly named for him. The proposed removal of that statue sparked protests and rallied alt-right, white supremacist, and neoNazi groups to gather in Charlottesville last weekend.
While much focus has been on the 26-foot-tall likeness of the Confederate general and his horse, Traveller, the granite pedestal supporting the statue at the center of the story was made in Washington by the Toledo-based company Lloyd Brothers.
Historian Becky Visser of Perrysburg recognized the Toledo tie over the weekend when she saw the statue on the news.
“I said, ‘Oh my gosh, I wonder if anyone realizes the connection?’” she recalled.
Visser researched the company while writing the book Images of America: Toledo’s Woodlawn Cemetery, which was published in 2014. The monument company made many of the prominent headstones and mausoleums at Historic Woodlawn and other Toledo cemeteries, but she learned their reach extended beyond northwest Ohio.
The firm was founded by Edward Lloyd, a stonecutter who came to the United States from his native Wales and found work building locks along the Miami and Erie Canal.
The job brought Lloyd to northwest Ohio, where he eventually settled in Maumee. Soon after, he went into business for himself carving gravestones and other monuments, and by 1846 had started the company that would become Lloyd Brothers. There’s not a lot of information about the company’s earliest works, beyond the firm’s work at Woodlawn cemetery. His company also built a memorial in 1870 dedicated to local soldiers killed in the Civil War, according to the Woodlawn book by Visser and Renee Ciminillo Jayne.
By the early 1900s, the company’s prominence had grown beyond Toledo. Lloyd Brothers opened offices in Detroit and Washington and received a number of major commissions nationwide.
One of the most noteworthy was the fabrication of a monument to Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee University in Alabama. The monument, called “Lifting the Veil of Ignorance,” was dedicated in 1922.
Lloyd Brothers also had a number of commissions closer to home. The firm built the Gen. George Custer memorial in Monroe and the statue of William McKinley outside the Lucas County Courthouse. Following World War II, the company was selected to build the war memorial at the Lucas County Civic Center Mall.
Lloyd Brothers remained in the owner’s family until 1969, when it was purchased by a longtime employee. A 1974 Blade article noted the company was one of the nation’s 10 largest monument works.
An application for the Lee statue’s consideration on the National Register of Historic Places states that architect Walter Blair designed “ovalshaped pedestal of smooth pink granite” and was executed by “Lloyd Brothers Memorials, of Washington, D.C.,” a reference to the company’s office in the capital.
“On the east face, the rounded front of the pedestal, Blair placed a fighting eagle with wings expanded and almost surrounded by oak leaves, while on the west face, the rounded rear of the pedestal, he balanced the eagle and oak leaves with a wreath of laurel.” The side panels contain Lee’s name and when he lived, 1807-1870.
The statue, which was installed in 1924, was added to the register in 1997. The bronze figure, now green with years of exposure, is the work of New York sculptor Henry Merwin Shrady and Italian Leo Lentelli, who finished it after Shrady’s death.
The statue and the park were paid for and then gifted to the city by Paul Goodloe McIntire, a stockbroker who gave much of his wealth away to the city and the University of Virginia, according to Margaret O’Bryant, librarian for the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society
O’Bryant said she believes McIntire specified in his gift that the park would have a statue of Robert E. Lee.
“As far as it is known, the choice of the monument was McIntire’s choice,” she said.
Most of his personal records are gone, likely destroyed by McIntire, who was intensely private, O’Bryant said, so it’s not clear what drove him to hire Lloyd Brothers.
The 1924 dedication ceremony was held when a reunion between former Confederate soldiers was happening in the town. There was a parade and schools were closed so that students could attend.
“It was quite a public ceremonial,” O’Bryant said.
For decades, the monument stood with little public outcry, though she said resentment likely grew during the civil rights era. It wasn’t until the past 10 to 15 years that public moves have been made to remove the statue.
Charlottesville council this year narrowly voted to remove the statue. Opponents have filed suit to block its removal. In June, the city renamed the park Emancipation Park. Charlottesville Vice Mayor Wes Bellamy said this week “it needs to be removed expeditiously.”
Mary Wittman was owner and president of what later became Lloyd Brothers Walker Co. She was in charge from 2006 until 2012 when she retired and the company closed.
She said the firm grew to be “at one time the most prominent monument builders east of the Mississippi.”
She sharply criticized the violence surrounding the rally, but also said she favors keeping the statue, suggesting an educational marker to better put it in historical context rather than in reverence of Confederate ideals or slavery.
Jack Entertainment CLEVELAND — will pay a $200,000 fine to the Ohio Casino Control Commission for allowing underage patrons into the Cleveland casino and giving unauthorized employees access to the computer management program for the Cleveland and Cincinnati casinos.
The commission approved the settlement agreement with the company Wednesday.
“We acknowledge the significance of the matters identified by the Ohio Casino Control Commission and take our compliance with their important operational policies and procedures seriously,” Matt Cullen, Jack chief executive officer, said in a statement. “We have swiftly taken steps to respond to these issues and will continue to work with the Commission to ensure ongoing compliance.”
Both issues arose last year after Jack Entertainment took over ownership of the casinos from Caesar’s Entertainment Corp., said commission spokeswoman Jessica Franks.
“We found a number of cases where underaged individuals were allowed on the property,” she said.
While the commission understands that the Cleveland casino, located at Public Square and connected to Tower City Center, has a number of entrances and presents opportunities for someone under the age of 21 to enter, it happened multiple times due to lack of security training, she said.
“We get that you will never have 100 percent compliance in keeping out minors and the Cleveland casino has unique features,” she said. “But we found that basically the security personnel were not following procedures that are supposed to be followed to screen out individuals.”
Among other procedures, she said, anyone who looks under the age of 30 is supposed to have their ID checked and the photo compared to the person.
The issue was discovered because the casino is required to tell the commission if underage patrons are discovered.
This generally happens if another patron or casino worker notifies security that someone looked too young to gamble, she said.
There were at least 13 instances from June to November where underage patrons entered, according to the settlement agreement.
In December, the casino hired a security training instructor for all employees, she said.
The second case involved the company allowing too many employees at the Cleveland and Cincinnati casinos access to the computer management program, which allows the casinos to track finances and player activity, she said.
“Following the transition, an audit of ours found the wrong people had access to the program,” she said. “Only certain people should be able to enter and edit data.”
Despite multiple requests to Jack Entertainment to address the issue, nothing was done, she said.
“They kept telling us it was fixed and our auditors found it wasn’t,” she said. “As part of the settlement agreement, Jack is going to hire an independent third party to do a special audit of the computer management program to make sure it is in compliance.”
The total fine was not divided by incident. The money will go into the state’s general fund.