The Importance of Lima

This week, I had the privilege of visiting Lima, Ohio—a town of 35,000 people located about 90 miles northwest of Columbus, and the hometown of Sam Hughes, the protagonist in my novel, Bit Flip.

The Allen County Courthouse in downtown Lima, OH.

I had not visited Lima prior to writing it into my story, but I researched the town quite extensively. I read about its history, looked at pictures, and virtually walked the streets using Google Street View. I learned about its economic booms and busts, demographic trends, and brief notoriety as the setting for the Fox television series Glee. I discovered that the school Glee is based on, William McKinley High School, doesn’t even exist, but Lima Senior High School does, and locals call it simply “Lima Senior,” and their mascot is the Spartans. I learned the town was founded in 1831, serves as the county seat for Allen County, and is properly pronounced LY-mə, not LEE-mə, the capitol city of Peru, after which the town is named.

After all that research, I chose Lima because I saw it as representative of the challenges many Midwestern towns have gone through over the last several decades. It’s a history that is all-too familiar. One that could be told by many other Rust Belt towns.

A map of Northwest Ohio Reservations in the early 1800s (https://www.shawnee-nsn.gov/history)

Of course, that history starts well before the founding of Lima in 1831. The Shawnee Tribe had lived in northwestern Ohio for centuries. But the land was taken, as it was taken from so many other native populations, to create white settlements in the Midwest—first by treaty in 1817, then through the creation of the Hog Creek Reservation, and ultimately by the Federal Government’s Indian Removal Act of 1830 which resulted in the complete surrender of all their remaining land and forced relocation to Kansas.

The subdividing of that land by “settlers” created the agricultural grid that still surrounds Lima today, and farming drove economic expansion and population growth through the latter half of the 1800s. The value of that land increased dramatically in 1885 with the discovery of massive oil fields near Lima. By the turn of the century, the area was producing over 20 million barrels of oil annually, making it the leading oil producing region in the entire nation. Consequently, Lima’s population surged in the early part of the 20th century, nearly tripling from 1890 to 1920 to a bustling town of over 40,000 residents.

Historical marker for the site where oil was discovered in 1885.

A second engine of economic growth was the railroad industry. Lima served as a critical hub for multiple railroad lines and was the home of the Lima Locomotive Works that produced steam locomotives. From that industrial base, other manufacturing businesses sprouted up. The Gramm-Bernstein Motor Truck Company produced their acclaimed Liberty Truck during World War I. United Motors Services produced tanks for the military beginning in World War II. And the Superior Coach Corporation produced everything from fire trucks to ambulances.

The economic prosperity turned Lima into a cultural center as well, with grand hotels, ornate mansions, an esteemed symphony, and a stately opera house. Despite the economic setbacks of the Great Depression and the post-war downturn in military spending, Lima continued to prosper through the 1950s and 60s, reaching a peak population of 54,734 in 1970.

Perhaps ironically, the industry that built Lima also triggered its demise. In 1969, a massive oil spill forced the evacuation of thousands of residents. Racial unrest erupted in the highly segregated city in 1970 after a black woman was killed by police. A string of plant closings took place over the following decades, costing the area thousands of jobs, depicted in the 1999 PBS documentary “Lost In Middle America and What Happened Next” that profiled the efforts to save the British Petroleum oil refinery which was slated for closure in 1997.

Although the plant was eventually saved, the economic decimation of Lima continued, with one report estimating Lima lost 23 percent of its jobs between 2000 and 2003, followed shortly thereafter by the 2008 financial crisis. With the massive loss of jobs and businesses, Lima’s population steadily declined, reaching just 35,579 in the 2020 census—a contraction of 34 percent from its peak.

As San Francisco is discovering, it is difficult to grow your economy when your population is shrinking. Today, Lima’s unemployment rate is 4.3 percent, well above the national average, while wages in many industries have declined. Median income in Lima is $34,586, far below the national median income of $67,521. The net effect is the poverty rate in Lima is an astonishing 24 percent, more than twice the national rate of 11.4 percent.

Vacant storefronts on Main Street in Lima, Ohio.

The evidence of these economic hardships is readily apparent when you visit Lima. Entire blocks of storefronts on Main Street are vacant. Many commercial buildings in the center of town have long been abandoned. The suburban sprawl of strip malls and big box stores that hastened the decline of Lima’s downtown is faring no better, much of it now empty parking lots overgrown with weeds. The only businesses that seem to be doing well are hospitals, fast food restaurants, and retailers who target underprivileged areas.

It’s hard to know what to do to help a city like Lima. It’s hard to even acknowledge the problem. Although new manufacturing jobs have been created elsewhere in the state, these projects often come with steep tax breaks and taxpayer investment—only to create a new economic dependence. Investment by businesses can feel like extortion. Empathy from outsiders can feel like pity. Compassion can feel like condescension. Most remaining residents just want their jobs back, to regain the sense of pride and livelihood for what the city once was. But many others have accepted the fate, and left Lima to pursue economic opportunity elsewhere—as Sam does in the book.

The answer to what to do about the fate of a city like Lima often comes down to financial means, creating a dynamic that can hollow out of a community. A division between “haves” and “have-nots,” where the haves leave, and the have nots stay—fostering guilt and resentment on both sides. The undeniable reality when one visits a town like Lima is that the economic prosperity of the last two-plus decades have not been shared equally. If you’ve lived in California or New York or other prosperous areas during that time, you’ve been living in a bubble. Your income has been rising, while incomes in less fortunate regions have been declining. If you can’t understand the populist movement that has upended American politics, visit Lima. As they say, “It’s the economy, stupid.” The first step to rectifying that economic inequity is understanding it.

I’m glad I picked Lima. Although I worry my depiction of it is insufficient, I believe it captures what I wanted to represent—a town that is understandably pissed off but where there are no right, or easy, answers.