Chase House

The Chase House with Pluchel's Lunch Rooms was located at the corner of East Main Street and Webb Avenue. If the Union Depot and The Crossing were Alliance’s Gateway to the World, then the Chase House and the surrounding businesses were the world’s gateway to Alliance. The Chase House maintained one of the longest tenures in the block between The Crossing/Webb Avenue and Liberty Avenue—thru seven decades—largely run by a German immigrant family who became well-regarded members of the Alliance community. Businesses on the block were focused on hospitality, recreational interests, and the immediate needs of the newly mobile local and American public.

Bavarian John Pluchel was part of the mass exodus of Germans to America in the 1850s, settling first in New Brighton, PA in 1851 where he married a young fellow German immigrant—a widow named Amelia Hopf, with a son—and moved to the new railroad town of Alliance up the line on the Ohio & Pennsylvania Rail Road. Here John established a bakery that prospered at a location near Alliance Street and Fifth (now Main and Seneca) and by the early 1870s he purchased property on the west side of The Crossing to expand his business with a combined bakery and lunch room. By the time of the United States Bicentennial in 1876, he built a three-story hotel with separate dining room and lunch room with his bakery in the basement to service the busiest railroad center in Stark County. It was a tremendous success—and was the focus of the family’s energies and wealth well into the 20th century.

The block between the Union Station and Liberty Ave included numerous businesses of note including barber shops, two hotels on either side of Liberty, a number of pool halls, restaurants and saloons, cigar shops, groceries and confectionery stores. It was also home to George Judd's Tailors Shop and beginning near the turn of the 20th century, the offices and station of the Stark Electric Railroad, which operated interurban trolley service between Salem and Canton through Alliance.

Items of Note

• Karl Fiegenschuh, Sr., who in 1919 founded a Main Street jewelry store that was a fixture for over 60 years, recalls the nature of the railroad and hospitality business at The Crossing:

The railroads centered here. We had a roundhouse here and quite a railroad center. The old railroad station was a hotel at one time. Sourbeck ran that. That was years ago. They served very good meals there. The elite of the city went down there for Sunday meals after church years ago .. And across the track there on the same side of the street was the Chase House, a very old hotel, the Pleutchels ran that , but this also was a hotel. The old station was a hotel. And all the main line trains, the blue ribbon trains all stopped here when .they had the steam engines to take water. And all those trains stopped here and this was the destination from Chicago - Chicago, Fort Wayne , Crestline to Alliance.

• Frank Tanner, an athlete and young newspaper boy in the early 20^th century and later general superintendent of the Alliance Machine Company, remembered patronizing the Pluchel Lunch Room when he and his twin brother picked up there copies of the Cleveland Press to deliver from the wooden platform that served the dual purpose of eastern sidewalk of the Chase House and platform for the southbound Cleveland & Pittsburgh trains:

They had this lunch counter there. . . I can remember the boys that carried the Press routes, pretty near everyone of them kids would go get a penny bun and put mustard on it. And you could buy I think for 2 cents extra something like a wiener to put on it. But most of the kids just bought the buns and didn't get the wieners for them.

• Sidney Hartenstein, who had a long career with Reeves Boiler Co, Taylorcraft and B&W Research, and then helped create Alliance Civil Defense agency after retirement recollected during a 1976 interview that the Chase House had a very good reputation, but also had occasionally unusual events occur in their front windows:

See we had no hospital here and Dr. Tressell was the railroad doctor. And this was funny. People would, maybe a man would get hurt on the railroad, get his leg crushed. Old Doc Tressell would come down to the Chase House, he'd push a table up in front of the window, put the man up on there and amputate his leg right there in the window; do the job, fix him up and send him home. Because there was no hospital. Right in the window there. People would stand out on the street there that could take it. Some of them couldn't take it. But who could, would stand there and watch him. Right there in the window.

Alliance Review, Review Publishing Co, Alliance Ohio – 1901-11-13, 1908-02-14 & 1908-10-12

"Reminiscences of Sidney Hartenstein," Alliance Oral Histories, Alliance Memory. Accessed May 25, 2024. https://www.alliancememory.org/digital/collection/voices/id/893/rec/2

"Reminiscences of Frank Tanner," Alliance Oral Histories, Alliance Memory. Accessed May 25, 2024. https://www.alliancememory.org/digital/collection/voices/id/165/rec/2

"Reminiscences of Karl Fiegenschuh, Sr.," Alliance Oral Histories, Alliance Memory. Accessed May 25, 2024. https://www.alliancememory.org/digital/collection/voices/id/631/rec/2