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EAST LIVERPOOL – Although East Liverpool became the city it did because of immigration in the 19th and 20th century, not all of those immigrants came from Staffordshire, England.
Many of them came from a tiny town in southwestern West Virginia called Hamlin, whose estimated population is 1,200.
Situated in Lincoln County, equidistant from Charleston and Huntington, Hamlin was once the source of a steady migration of people to East Liverpool – many of whose descendants still live in the area.
Their names can be found in both the East Liverpool and Hamlin phone books – Lovejoy, Linville, Stowers, Sias, Hager, Adkins and Yeager, among others.
Frank Dawson first became aware of the East Liverpool-Hamlin connection as an “upstart employee” of the Dawson Funeral Home in the early 1950s.
“I recall the many trips we made returning remains ‘back down home’ to southern Ohio and West Virginia,” he said. “Towns the likes of Stiversville, Portland and Racine in Meigs County, Ohio, along with Hamlin … bring back fond memories.”
Dawson has made so many trips to Hamlin over the years – most recently in late November – that he struck up a friendship with fellow funeral director Shane Koontz of the Koontz Funeral Home, which sits on a curve leading to the town’s main street.
“The firm has been the mainstay of (Hamlin) natives who migrated to East Liverpool but then were taken back down home … at the time of their deaths,” he said.
Dawson enjoys stopping in at the M&R Restaurant and taking pictures of Hamlin landmarks – Hager Supply Hardware, Lovejoy’s House of Furniture – that bear the names of families that migrated to East Liverpool.
Bonnie (Adkins) Hoppel, 74, of St. Clair Township, remembers making the trek from Hamlin to East Liverpool in 1945, when she was only 5.
“You just followed Route 7 all through those little towns on the Ohio River. What takes five hours today took eight hours back then,” she said.
Hoppel’s family moved north in the waning days of World War II because of the abundance of jobs in the steel mills and potteries of the upper Ohio River valley. Her uncle, Haskell Adkins, had come here to work at Crucible Steel in Midland, Pa., and her father, Hallie Adkins, soon followed.
“There was no work in that part of West Virginia,” she said, “but the mill was booming and the potteries were booming at that time also, so there was plenty of work.”
The tobacco industry in Lincoln County faltered during the Great Depression, Dawson explained, and people were desperate for work.
After Hoppel’s father found a job, he returned to Hamlin to get his family – his wife, the former Mabel Adkins, and their four children, Bonnie, Danny, Larry and Lyle – and brought them back in a dump truck, she said.
Eleven members of her father’s family and 15 members of her mother’s family eventually moved to the East Liverpool area. “None of them stayed as long as me,” she said, although her brothers Larry and Lyle still live in the area.
Hoppel graduated from East Liverpool High School in 1958, worked a series of jobs and married David Hoppel. She and the other East Liverpool Adkinses still make a point of going back to Hamlin every year for a family reunion on “Decoration Day” (Memorial Day).
“It’s an interesting place,” she said.
Notable among the Adkinses was Hoppel’s older brother, Dan, who made a name for himself as a comic book artist and who died at age 76 in 2013.
Dan Adkins attended East Liverpool High School but never graduated, his sister said. While there, though, he worked for the high school yearbook and as an illustrator for the Keramos Echo school newspaper, she said.
“He was just a natural-born artist. … I really did not know he was so good until I read an article about him in the Hamlin paper,” Hoppel said. “It was something to go as far as he did without schooling.”
Adkins left East Liverpool to join the U.S. Air Force and, while stationed at Luke Field outside Phoenix, Ariz., made a connection that would prove instrumental in his career. While living in New York City, Adkins met comic book artist and publisher Wally Wood and began working on Tower Comics’ “T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents” series.
Adkins went on to work for Marvel Comics, DC Comics and other publishers, doing pencil and ink drawings for “Superman,” “Spider-Man,” “X-Men,” “Conan the Barbarian,” “Green Lantern,” “Captain America” and a host of other titles.
The Adkinses are related to another favorite son of Hamlin, aviation pioneer Charles “Chuck” Yeager. Hoppel said her mother was Yeager’s second cousin, and her aunt is buried next to his mother and father.
Although plenty of Yeagers from Hamlin settled in East Liverpool, Chuck Yeager never did. A 1941 graduate of Hamlin High School, Yeager joined the Air Force and became the first pilot to travel faster than the speed of sound.
(Huba can be contacted at shuba@reviewonline.com)