Merchants and Manufacturers Club

      The Merchants and Manufacturers Club was the original Chamber of Commerence with almost all the area’s businesses belonging to the organization. The M.&M. Clubhouse was located beside the Baltimore & Ohio railroad at 236 4th St (currently home to the Veterans of Foreign Wars post 252).
      In the year 1900, Lyman DeHaven & A.C. Frey held a banquet in Hotel Oliver’s 40 foot by 50 foot dining room with hopes to form a club. The heads of the manufactures and local business’ were all in attendance and the Merchants and Manufacturers Club was born. The Club was so large that in the Ellwood Citizen (printed August 11, 1911) was an advertisement for the Merchants and Manufacturers Outing reporting that “Rock Point will see the largest crowd of happy people ever gathered at that popular resort.”
      A man who attended this event and watched the St. Clair Girls balloon ascension is quoted in the Ellwood City Ledger as saying “a man holding one of the ropes on the balloon was lifted 60 feet before he let loose and broke a leg in his fall. One girl jumped with a parachute while over the park & the other stayed with the balloon which landed a few miles away.” After Rock Point Park closed for good after the 1911 Labor Day Weekend, the 1912 Merchants and Manufacturers outing was held at the Country Club grounds in now what is the borough of Ellport.

Organizations ledger, railroad