(Editor's Note:The following piece is from the Firestone Park neighborhood blog. You can find more information at firestonepark44301.wordpress.com or by visiting www.firestonepark.com.)
Henry Ford had one thing to say to the clerk at the front counter of Columbus Buggy Works in Detroit: "I'm here to see Harvey Firestone." It was 1895. Ford was using bicycle tires for a car. Not viable, Ford knew at the time. Ford approached Firestone to ask about solid-rubber tires as a substitute. Firestone had a better idea. "They were pneumatic tires," Ford would later remember. Harvey Firestone's career and the path of an industry were forever altered.
Born in 1868 in Columbiana, Ohio, Firestone opened his own shop at age 22. With little money, he created a set of rubber tires for his own buggy. While riding around one day on those new tires, he impressed a friend so much that they began discussing the idea of running their own shop. Henry Ford was his launching point. Firestone would create the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company in Akron, out of nothing but one large contract and 17 employees. Within a decade, Firestone was making tires for the automobile that everyone wanted, the Model T, in a factory that was the envy of the new economy. Firestone Employees received medical and dental services and free life insurance.
In 1915, the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company purchased 1,000 acres of farmland just south and southeast of the factory located near the intersection of South Main Street and Cole Avenue. The purchase was part of a plan by Harvey to provide housing for employees of the rubber factory. The same year, that section of Coventry Township was annexed to Akron. Harvey hired landscape architect Alling DeForest from Rochester, N.Y., who had previously worked on his Harbel Manor estate on West Market Street, to work on the new neighborhood.
DeForest designed the community around a public park shaped like the original Firestone shield emblem. Included in the plans were a community center, churches, schools and businesses. Within a year, 600 homes of 23 designs had been constructed upon the former farmland, with managers and workers alike choosing to build here. Today, the entire neighborhood is considered a historic landmark, along with its Firestone Country Club, Firestone Stadium, Harvey S. Firestone Memorial and Research Center and Bridgestone Firestone Akron Technical Center.
During World War 1, Firestone developed a new tire that made truck transport more efficient and reliable. When it was over, more than 600,000 trucks were in use in the United States, thanks to his "Ship by Truck" campaign that encouraged private industry to take advantage of the efficiency. That led to the "Good Roads Movement" and the beginning of the national highway system.
"Harvey Firestone is Dead in Florida. Rubber Manufacturer Dies in Sleep at His Miami Beach Estate. He Was 69." (New York Times, Feb. 8, 1938, Tuesday.) "Harvey S. Firestone, a farm boy who built one of the largest rubber businesses in the world, died of a coronary thrombosis as he slept early today in the great mansion of Harbel Villa, an ocean-front estate he acquired in 1924. "
Right up until his death in 1938 at age 69, Firestone was constantly in search of better solutions. And he would never forget where he came from or whom he met that day in 1895.
