FOSTORIA | “Cadwallader, 1906”: The Building on North Main and the Family That Helped Build Fostoria

Author: FFP Ai Bot

The Cadwallader Building on North Main Street, 1906-1910s

FOSTORIA — The name is carved right into the top of the building: “CADWALLADER,” under a shell-shaped crest flanked by the numbers “19” and “06.” Below, three great brick arches frame the upper windows, striped awnings shade the second floor, and mannequins in long dresses fill the street-level display windows.

This installment of our local history series looks at that building and at the family whose name it carried. Few Fostoria families had a hand in as many things as the Cadwalladers, from land and bricks to banking, milling and even automobiles.

Quick timeline

Land, brick and lumber

The family’s Fostoria story starts with land. According to local historian research published by The Shoes, Samuel Cadwallader bought 160 acres in the southeast part of present-day Fostoria in 1831 and was at one point among the wealthiest men in Seneca County. In 1872 he laid out Cadwallader’s Addition, and his son Ira followed with a series of additions of his own. Together, those plats cover roughly 80 acres between McDougal, Poplar and Town streets and the Nickel Plate tracks.

Ira Cadwallader, born in 1847, turned that land into a business. His brick and tile works on Columbus Avenue, started in the mid-1870s, supplied bricks for much of the city’s east end, including family homes on East Tiffin Street. It ran until about 1914, and the site is now part of the Iron Triangle Railpark. He was also among the founders of the Eureka Planing Mill at Cadwallader and East North streets in 1887, and of a rental real estate firm, The Cadwallader Co.

Ira served on Fostoria’s city council around 1897. He founded the Seneca Banking Co. in 1895, and for a short time he owned the Cadwallader Milling Co. on Sandusky Street, which a deadly fire struck in 1893.

The building on North Main

The Cadwallader Building, with its 1906 cornice, 1906-1910s

The building in our photograph stood at 120-122 N. Main St. Built in 1906, it was a three-story brick block with tall arched upper windows and a broad storefront below. Over the years, according to the same research, it housed A. Weaver Dry Goods, Kiebel-Wilson Dry Goods and the Ahlenius Co. Our earlier story on A. Weaver & Sons and the Ahlenius Co. follows those stores in more detail.

The window displays in this photo suggest a dry goods store at the time: dressed mannequins on one side and what look like white gowns or draped fabric on the other. The overhead tangle of electric and telephone wires, and the absence of any cars at the curb, fit the years soon after 1906. We could not pin down the exact year.

The building suffered a major fire in 1918 and was rebuilt. In its later years it fell into disrepair, and in June 2011 it was razed along with the neighboring Ghaster Block and Botto-Levaggi Building.

Another Cadwallader building still stands

A second family building survives. The Cadwallader-German Building at 222 S. Main St., built between about 1908 and 1910, was a joint project of Ira Cadwallader and Christian German, a local businessman and Commercial Bank officer. It was long home to Fruth Hardware, which moved there shortly after the building was finished and stayed until the early 1990s. After a roof collapse in 2000 it was nearly torn down, but it was repaired and is in use today.

From bricks to motor cars

Ira Cadwallader’s last big venture was the automobile. He was one of the founders of the Fostoria Light Car Co. in 1915, and in 1917 he reorganized it as the Seneca Motor Car Co., with his son Lester as factory manager. The company built cars until 1924. Our story on the Fostoria Light Car has more. Ira Cadwallader died on May 6, 1924, at his winter home in Tarpon Springs, Florida.

Researchers can find Fostoria’s commercial blocks on fire insurance maps at the Library of Congress and in digitized photos and newspapers through Ohio Memory. For more on Main Street in this era, see our look at Fostoria’s Main Street merchants, 1880s-1910s.

Do you have a photo of the Cadwallader Building or a receipt from one of its stores? We would like to hear from you.

Photo note: Photographs and images published before 1931 are in the public domain in the United States. Historical images in this article are shared for educational and historical purposes.

Sources

• The Shoes, The Enterprising Cadwallader Family, Pt. 1 (Nov. 22, 2025): https://theshoes1.wordpress.com/2025/11/22/the-enterprising-cadwallader-family/
• The Shoes, The Enterprising Cadwallader Family, Pt. 2 (Nov. 22, 2025): https://theshoes1.wordpress.com/2025/11/22/the-enterprising-cadwallader-family-pt-2/
• The Shoes, Cadwallader Building Stands Out on South Main (May 5, 2026): https://theshoes1.wordpress.com/2026/05/05/cadwallader-building-stands-out-on-south-main/
• Library of Congress, Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, Fostoria, Ohio, 1896: https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn06698_003/
• Ohio Memory: https://ohiomemory.org/