Trilby: The lost village

A cursory glance through any of the telephone directories that clutter my living room yields several dozen listings for businesses containing “Trilby” in their names. From Trilby Animal Hospital to Trilby United Methodist Church, the amorphous locality known as Trilby survives in a number of Toledo businesses, churches, and even an elementary school.

The old Trilby fire station, however, recently fell to the wrecking ball to make room for another drug store.

Location

If a West Toledoan with any significant period of residence is asked about the physical location of Trilby, the usual answer runs along the lines of “the Alexis and Secor area.” Indeed, it is possible to strike several Trilby establishments with a metaphorical thrown stone while standing at this intersection.

The logical questions upon discovering the wealth of Trilby-laden monikers would be: What, exactly, is Trilby, and why does it no longer exist as a political entity? In addition, why are these questions relevant to a twenty-first century Toledoan?

History

The inhabitants of Northwest Ohio at the time of the arrival of white settlers belonged to a wide variety of Amerindian groups; chief among these were the Ottawa, Potawatami, Delaware, and Shawnee. The Treaty of Greenville (1795), orchestrated by General Anthony Wayne, legally cordoned off Northwest Ohio from white settlement, but western migration of settlers eventually resulted in the erosion of Native American presence in the area.

In the nearly bloodless Toledo War of 1835, militia units from Ohio and Michigan tracked each other through the plentiful swamps; the forces were dispatched by the respective governors during a dispute over a 468-acre section of land that was known as the “Toledo Strip.” Inaccurate surveys commissioned during the territorial years of both Ohio and Michigan created ambiguity as to which state owned the marshy terrain. The area later known as Trilby was part of the land upon which this quarrel centered. Ohio finally gained control of the Toledo Strip in a compromise that gave Michigan the mineral-rich Upper Peninsula; modern readers can judge for themselves as to which state “won” the war in the long run.

Trilby Schoolhouse in 1913

Settlement in the Trilby area can be documented as early as 1835, when a 40-acre parcel of land was purchased by an Irish immigrant named Thomas Corlett. The land, located directly northeast of today’s Secor-Alexis intersection, changed hands several times over the course of the next decade. A small schoolhouse was eventually built on the property in the 1840’s, beginning the Trilby tradition of education that continues today.

Local legend holds that Tremainsville Road was once an Indian footpath; the track supposedly picked back up at present-day Whiteford Center Road. Nineteenth-century maps depict a large frog pond just north of the present Alexis-Secor intersection; perhaps the trails that predated Whiteford Center and Tremainsville Roads were one and the same, snaking their way around the pond.

Tremainsville Road was named after a Mr. Calvin Tremain, a businessman who immigrated to the area from Vermont in 1832. Tremainsville was also the name of a small settlement near Ten Mile Creek and present-day Detroit Avenue; Toledo Raceway Park is the current inhabitant of the land where once stood the village of Tremainsville.

References

A Dec 19, 2005 historymike blog posting titled Trilby: The Search For A Vanishing Ohio Village