The Lamb and Zinn facility, erected in 1851, passed through several ownerships and names, including "The Sidney Steam Elevator," until 1907 when it was incorporated as the Miami Valley Grain Company.
Officers were E.T. Custenborder, W.H. Persinger, J.W. Allinger, and George Allinger. "The Allingers are a family well known in the annals of the county as prominent in the grain and milling line, at Port Jefferson, as well as at Quincy...where Ben Allinger of the Quincy mill is a brother" (Memoirs).
The Allingers’ father was at one time in charge of the old Maxwell Mill. In the 1920’s, George Allinger recalled that..."Farmers at a distance would spend a whole day coming to mill and at the old Maxwell mill east of Sidney quarters were provided so the customers could put up their teams and had rooms provided in which they could cook their meals and stay over night if necessary until they secured their grist" (Sidney Daily News, Aug. 1927). The newspaper said "the name Allinger was synonymous with good flour."
Emory C. Nutt in 1896 built another Sidney grain facility, once known as the Jones Grain Company and later as the Sidney Grain Company. The building operates today as the Ginn Grain Company at 132 W. North Street, the only such structure surviving in downtown Sidney. Nutt should not be confused with Edmund E. Nutt, the Union officer hero of the Civil War who also engaged in Sidney’s grain business as the owner of the Stone Bridge Warehouse, later Sidney Grain and Milling Company.
The Sidney Grain and Milling Company, later the Farmers Grain and Milling Co., was a major grain handling establishment in Sidney and perhaps the oldest milling business there. The company proudly advertised its "Triumph" flour made from Shelby County wheat, "which is widely and favorably known and sold in northern and western Ohio, being sold by nearly every grocer and flour man in this territory" (Industrial & Commercial Sidney, Ohio, 1914).
| Warehouse Steam Elevator and Feed Mill, E.E. Nutt & Bro., Sidney, Ohio The "Stone Bridge Warehouse," later acquired by Farmers Grain and Milling. The new Sidney Fire Department occupies this approximate site. Illustration from the New Historical Atlas of Shelby County, Ohio, Page & Smith, 1875. |
The story of Sidney Grain and Milling was chronicled in a "civic pride" booklet published in 1910 by the Amos printingcompany: Sixty years have witnessed great changes in Sidney and no spot more than Poplar street at the old stone bridge. There for 50 years stood the old stone bridge warehouse. Company after company owned and occupied it and grand fathers and fathers of the present farmers delivered their grain.