Peter P. Cherry didn’t just witness history. He lived and breathed it.
Fortunately for future generations, he chronicled it, too.
In the twilight of his years, the wistful octogenarian looked back on his accomplished life, celebrating the adventures of youth while lamenting the passage of time.
Cherry was a professorial-looking gentleman who dressed in three-piece suits, wore a long, white beard, peered through untamed eyebrows and smoked a corncob pipe. When an Akron reporter came to visit in 1931, dusty manuscripts were piled up to the ceiling in Cherry’s small home at 2239 12th St. in Kenmore.
The aged historian, who used crutches to walk, remarked that his pace had slowed a bit in recent years.
“When I was a young man, I was about as spry as any of them,” he recalled. “I could stand on the ground and leap on the back of any horse.”
In a long and interesting career, Cherry worked as a stagecoach driver, country schoolteacher, grocery keeper, rubber worker, newspaper editor and respected author.
Peter Peterson Cherry was born Sept. 17, 1848, on Sourland Mountain in Mechame, N.J., and moved with his parents, Austin and Maria Cherry, to Akron when it was a village of fewer than 3,000 people.
“The day we arrived here back in 1856, Father hired a coach and we were driven over to Sharon,” Cherry said. “The country was a bit wild in those days, the roads rough and we saw many log houses. From Perkins Hill on to Sharon was a perfect sea of fire. Copley swamps were on fire and clouds of smoke settled over everything.”
The family settled on a farm in Medina County’s Sharon Center. One of Cherry’s fond memories was recruiting girls to stitch a star-spangled banner during the Civil War because soldiers had taken all of the town’s flags to the battlefield. Cherry went into the woods, chopped down a thin tree and made a wooden pole.
“I kept the flag flying at Sharon when the other boys were at the front,” he said proudly.
At age 12, Cherry became one of the youngest mail carriers in the United States when he began driving a stagecoach, a job he held for 17 years. The dirt roads were rutted and nearly impossible to navigate during bad weather.
“My route was from Sharon to Coddingville, Rabbit Pass, Granger, Hinckley, Royalton and on to Cleveland,” Cherry recalled. “In those days, Cleveland had a population of but 50,000. During the time I drove the stages, I carried many men and women and also mail and freight.”
One memorable passenger was Mary Clark, a dark-haired beauty from Wadsworth who was three years his junior. She boarded the coach in Copley. By the time Cherry dropped her off in Cleveland, he was smitten with love.
He was 20 and she was 17 when they eloped in a rainstorm Aug. 5, 1869. They rode to Girard, Pa., where a justice of the peace married them. They welcomed 10 children and celebrated 65 years together, living to be the longest-wedded couple in Summit County.
Cherry taught grade school in Sharon Center in the 1870s and established the Young Folks Journal, a monthly newspaper for children, which he served as editor, typesetter and business manager.
In 1880, the family moved to South Akron, where cows still roamed the streets. Cherry joined the office staff of the B.F. Goodrich Co., a one-story factory that manufactured rubber novelties and employed only 38 men (and no women). Automobiles and pneumatic tires were still decades away.
“I was the correspondent and wrote many of the letters,” Cherry said. “We didn’t have such things as typewriters in those days and there was but one telephone in Akron and we had it out there. I shall never forget how Dr. Goodrich used to get mad and swear over that telephone. He could get as mad as any man I ever saw and how he could swear.”
In the mid-1880s, Cherry was founding editor of the South End News, a 2,000-circulation magazine that cost 25 cents. After the publication folded, he ran a grocery store at South Main and Voris streets.
Cherry was a charter member of the Ohio Historical Society and enjoyed researching Indian history. At the turn of the 20th century, he organized his notes into a book.
This year marks the centennial of Cherry’s masterwork, The Portage Path (1911), which chronicles the ancient trail between the Cuyahoga and Tuscarawas rivers. He urged Akron residents to place historical markers on the path to rescue it from an “unjust oblivion.”
Cherry wrote: “To the shame of the people of northern Ohio be it said, that they have allowed their pre-historic highway of Indian nations long since gathered to their fathers, an ancient road-way, pregnant with the care of an early government, of two early presidents of the United States, who gave force and character to the liberty loving of every nation, to become obscured: nay, almost lost, through the avarice of man and the earthy accumulations of over a century’s neglect.”
With joy, he lived to see markers placed along the route.
The author’s next book, The Western Reserve and Early Ohio, was published in 1920. Cherry held pioneer families in high regard and thought it was important to hand down their stories to future generations.
“Not to do that is not to know and to miss much that was good, patriotic and worthwhile,” he said.
Cherry’s wife, Mary — yes, her name was Mary Cherry — helped edit the books. In later years, her eyesight failed. She was blind for the final 15 years of her life.
Akron reporters interviewed the Kenmore couple upon their 65th wedding anniversary in 1934.
“You know, you get kind of tired of one man after a while,” she joked.
Cherry laughed: “Why I took her out of the cradle and like her better now than I ever did … Why, she’s as restless as a young colt.”
After his wife’s death a year later at age 83, Cherry became more circumspect. He missed her terribly, and learned to cope by remembering the past.
“I will be perfectly frank about it when I say that I long for the old days and the old ways,” he told the Akron Times-Press. “I know things are changing and I also know they are not changing for the better.”
He firmly believed that civilization was on a rapid decline. When he was young, people were mostly honest, but modern society was riddled with liars and schemers, he said.
He continued his research for the remainder of his days.
Peter P. Cherry was 88 years old when he died in 1937. He was buried next to his wife in Sharon Center Cemetery.
“I am weary and lonesome, a stranger to this generation,” the historian said in his final interview. “I am ready to go.”
Mark J. Price is a Beacon Journal copy editor. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or send email to mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.