The Great Bear Fight
May 20 04
It’s hard to imagine now, but, they say that once, long ago, millionaires lived in the northern panhandle of West Virginia. You can go there now and see the remnants of their mansions. There’somone just past a trailer park above the town of Newell. It’s a huge place, the last standing memory of a time when honest-to-goodness rich people lived near where I grew up.
Newell no longer has millionaire residents. There aren’t many people there of any income. You’d be hard pressed to find it on a map at all. It’s one of those towns that’s most often described in terms of what used to be there, as in, “That’s where the high school used to be”, “That’s where the mill used to be”, and “used to be, you could come to downtown on a Saturday morning and there would be people four deep on the sidewalk,
shopping”.
Perhaps, like me, you’re from a town like this.
Seeing the town now, it’s hard to fathom that once, long ago, Newell was a place
where millionaires lived. Newell Heights, to be exact. Industrialists, who made their
fortunes from the pottery industry, built the town of Newell. They built the world’s largest
pottery. They built roads leading to the pottery. They built houses, laid train tracks,
strung electric lines and dug sewers. They even built a bridge over the Ohio River so that
people in East Liverpool, Ohio could come to work at their pottery.
52 – Cow Tipping
And just like in Homestead and Monongahela and lots of little towns around here,
there were parks and libraries and schools, all built by the millionaires who owned the
company. Nobody waited for the state to build these things. The company took care of it.
The company, in this case, was Homer Laughlin China. They’re still there, in
Newell. But, like most of our large industries, they’ve survived by downsizing and
specializing. They used to make thousands of different products. Now they make
Fiestaware. If you’ve not heard of Fiestaware, you will, someday. Your grandmother will
die and your mother and her sister will fight over it. Trust me.
The pottery they built is still there.
The bridge they built is still there.
The millionaires, however, are long gone.
I’m not here to talk about the millionaires, though. I’m here to talk about the Great
Bear Fight. But, as I mentioned, in order to understand the Great Bear Fight, you have to
understand that once, long ago, there were millionaires in West Virginia.
The pottery not only built homes for workers. They also supplied the town of
Newell with its police force, fire company and all maintenance of public projects. Other
than the occasional visit from the state police, West Virginia had very little to do with
Newell.
To show the workers how much they loved them, the millionaires who owned the
pottery also built a huge park in the middle of town. As was the custom of the time, in the
park they placed a zoo.
Nobody knows where the Kodiak bear came from, originally. Some say the
massive animal was brought back by one of the millionaires from a steamship adventure
to Canada. Certainly, no one realized at the time that the bear’s arrival signaled the end of
Newell. They only knew that, on Sundays, they could take their families to the park, and
in the zoo, the kids could sit by the cage and watch the Kodiak bear, the biggest animal
anyone had ever seen.
In the 1920’s, when this story takes place, there was no such person as a zoologist.
They certainly existed, to be sure. But in Newell, at the zoo built by the pottery barons, the
man in charge of the zoo, like the man in charge of the police, the man in charge of the fire
company and the man in charge of the train station, was an untrained, inexperienced
pottery worker, taken fresh from the factory floor and given new responsibilities.
The Kodiak grew restless.
Someone (no one knows now who) got the idea that the Kodiak needed a mate. A female black bear, captured from the wilds of Hancock County, was brought in. The fact that they were different species was never taken into consideration by the millionaires.
The zoo itself was completely secondary. Something else was occupying the millionaires’
minds.
The stock market was crashing.
Suddenly, their factory, once filling a million orders a month, stopped.
Rapidly, their money dried up.
And soon enough, all the services the pottery provided for the town of Newell ceased. The factory was shutting down. The factory workers were being fired. And that
meant the police force, the fire department, the post office and, yes, the makeshift
zookeeper, were all out of work.
It was then bears began to fight.
Word spread. The horrible news of the town’s only factory going out of business
was replaced by the exciting new story: there was a bear fight in the zoo!
The two bears, occupying the same cage, had not gotten right down to mating, as
the factory worker/zookeeper had hoped. Instead, the Kodiak and the black bear were
fighting.
A huge crowd gathered to watch. People arrived on streetcars from East Liverpool,
drove down in Model A’s from Chester, hooked the horses up to the wagon and plodded up
the riverbank from New Cumberland. Everyone flooded into Newell to watch two bears
fight to the death in a cage match.
And while the bears fought, the millionaires packed.
The factory closed.
The town died.
You can go to Newell now and see the pottery. You can also see the bridge. And you can see where the high school used to be, where the millionaires once lived. And, if you squint just right, you can see where the zoo stood, where, one day, long ago, two bears fought to the death in front of a crowd of pottery workers. It’s doubtful that any of them
realized that day was the high water mark for Newell.
The Kodiak (and the millionaires who brought him to town) would never return !!
