By 1812Blockhouse
It’s not unusual for the most successful merchant in one of Ohio’s numerous small cities and villages to have built the most architecturally sophisticated house in town.
Such was the case in Shiloh, where the owner of the general store, who also owned an agricultural equipment factory and grain elevator, built a wonderful house on East Main Street about 1880.
It is also not unusual for these types of properties to be used in subsequent decades as funeral homes. In the case of the Silas Ferrell House, it became the location for the McQuate Funeral Home.
The house sits at 25 East Main Street.
Silas Ferrell was born in 1839 in Richland County to parents who had come here from Pennsylvania. He was married in 1861 to Druzilla Chew; the Ferrells would have one child, a son named Arthur.
Silas’s business, eventually called Silas Ferrell & Son, was very successful. It did have its share of troubles, including an 1890 burglary for which four men were brought to justice, with newspapers from as far away as Lima covering the crime.
Ferrell also co-founded the Shiloh Savings Bank in 1901, and was its first Vice President.
The Silas Ferrell House was built in the Italianate Style of architecture, which was in latest in fashion in the 1870s and 1880s across north central Ohio. The frame, two-story house has a limestone foundation, a symmetrical three bay facade, decorative wood trim on the windows and cornice, and hoodmolds over the round windows.
The house also features a two story carriage house.
Silas Ferrell died in 1906 and was buried in Shiloh’s Mount Hope Cemetery. The house was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on December 14, 1987.
Sources: Wikipedia, Find-a-Grave, Ancestry.com; Photo: Creative Commons License
