Everyone has a boiling point. After years of simmering, Elizabeth Sheehan finally blew up.
The 74-year-old woman hadn’t planned on committing an act of civil disobedience when she woke up on a chilly spring morning in April 1936.
Then she heard the violent rattle of heavy machinery, the rasp of metal scraping dirt outside her home on West Bowery Street in Akron. She peeked out a window and flew into a rage.
Throwing on a wool cloche hat and fur-trimmed coat, Sheehan pushed open her back door, hunched over the grass, picked up a big rock and prepared for battle.
City worker Jack Durbin was driving a Galion street scraper and had just turned the corner from Bowery to Harbor Street, a sloppy dirt alley that ran alongside Sheehan’s yard at 414 W. Bowery St., when he saw a woman approaching. His assignment April 24 was to “scrape out the ruts” to make Harbor passable to traffic.
He couldn’t believe it when Sheehan ran into the alley and began waving a rock at him. Eyes blazing with anger, she stepped in front of the machine and refused to let it pass.
Durbin slammed on the brake, switched off the engine and sat there in bewilderment.
“Now you take that thing back where you got it,” Sheehan told him.
Neighbors heard the commotion and came outside to watch. The city worker pleaded with the woman to move, but she stared him down and made menacing gestures with the rock. She seemed intent on conking him a good one.
Durbin called the police.
Two Akron patrolmen, a police lieutenant, two Ohio Highway Department officials and a handful of newspaper reporters and photographers made a beeline to the bizarre standoff.
Sheehan explained to the newcomers that she was merely protecting her property. She claimed that the city had been illegally widening Harbor Street for years, slowing eating away at her yard.
Furthermore, the frequent scraping allowed rainwater to collect on her lawn and trickle into her kitchen, she said. She constantly poured stove ashes on her yard in an effort to dam the water.
“They tried to grade over a corner of those ashes and that belongs to me,” Sheehan told officials. “If they grade it, it will ruin my lawn. They can’t do it.”
Family background
Born in 1861, Bessie Sheehan had lived in the house for most of her life. Her Irish immigrant parents, Daniel and Mary Sheehan, built the home about 1863 near the intersection where Bowery and Water streets formed a point south of West Cedar Street near the upper basin of the Ohio & Erie Canal.
She and her older brothers Dennis and Timothy grew up watching the canalboats pass.
“This once was a spot of beauty,” Sheehan mused.
On the other side of the canal, the Diamond Match Co., Chevrier Chain Works and B.F. Goodrich Co. hummed with activity.
As a young woman, Bessie worked in the match shop, working 11-hour days for 7 cents an hour. Later, she assisted her mother, who was employed as a housekeeper.
Sheehan and her brothers lived in the home throughout adulthood. None married.
The parents died, the brothers died and eventually Sheehan lived alone with a pet dog.
Newspaper accounts of the “aged spinster” who “got her Irish up” turned Sheehan into an Akron folk hero in 1936. Here was someone who had the gumption to fight City Hall during the Great Depression.
“I don’t see how I can lose my property if there’s any government,” Sheehan insisted. “But I’ve got a good bulldog and I’m a mind to turn him loose sometime.”
After sizing up the situation, highway engineer Gunnar Soderberg ordered Durbin to back up his machine and find some other street to scrape. Police quietly backed away, too.
Declaring victory, Sheehan dropped the rock and went back inside her home.
Soderberg hadn’t taken pity on the feisty woman.
“She may be right,” he confided to the Akron Times-Press.
He and engineer Raymond H. Wise promised to go to the Summit County Courthouse to double-check the boundary lines.
“Anyway, we’re going to send out a survey party next week to find out,” Soderberg said. “No more scrapers will be sent out there until we see where we stand.”
Fearing another standoff, he politely asked Sheehan not to interfere with surveyors if she happened to see any.
Total vindication
A crew took careful measurements at Bowery and Harbor and reported its findings to Soderberg.
The results were a total vindication for Sheehan. Half of the alley was actually her yard.
Workers returned to pound a stake in the middle of Harbor Street to mark the southwest corner of Sheehan’s property. The city admitted May 1, 1936, that it had been wrong to widen the dirt road.
“It will take more than just a stake to repay me for all the years I have suffered and been laughed at,” Sheehan told a reporter after the surveyors left.
Now that she didn’t have to worry about street scrapers, she made plans to improve the lawn.
“I can’t afford a fence, but I’ll show them whose lot it is,” she said.
Having won the battle, Sheehan lived in relative peace for three more years.
She was 78 — the last in her family’s line — when she died Nov. 7, 1939. The funeral was at St. Mary’s Catholic Church and burial was at Holy Cross Cemetery.
The Sheehan family house was torn down.
Today, it looks like a giant street scraper has plowed through the isolated neighborhood. No one was there to wave a rock.
Some streets have been closed. Some have been renamed or redirected.
Harbor Street no longer exists except for a barely noticeable nub that dead-ends into the canal.
The former Sheehan homestead, once a spot of beauty, is occupied by the back section of Visiting Nurse Service Equipment & Supplies, which stands on Opportunity Parkway.
Let it be known that long ago on this spot, a brave woman fought City Hall and won — if only temporarily.
Beacon Journal copy editor Mark J. Price is the author of The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past from the University of Akron Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or send email to mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.
